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Biggest biological plot twist
Topic Started: Nov 6 2016, 12:28 PM (19,628 Views)
Dakka!
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Mammals are actually dinosaurs, dinosaurs didn't die when the meteor struck, the ornithschians evolved into basal mammals. In effect, humans are actually ornithschian dinosauroids.
"I was a Psychiatrist in Florida! For 3 weeks! Have you ever been to Florida?"




Some project ideas
The Future is Right
Ediacaran Explosion
Great Old Ones
Skinkworld


Unrelated:The Final Spec:What Could Have Been, And Still Can
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Dakka!
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In the Ediacaran period there was already sapient life, what you think animals can remain stagnant for so long? nope. Then they got carried away in a massive war which wiped out almost everything on earth. Due to them being soft bodied, many of the animals were vaporised when their weapons were used thus resulting in such a small amount of fossils from that period. Realizing the error of their ways, they took to the stars, never to return, or so they thought. Now, they are coming, they have returned to take back what is rightfully theirs as the previous rulers of earth.
"I was a Psychiatrist in Florida! For 3 weeks! Have you ever been to Florida?"




Some project ideas
The Future is Right
Ediacaran Explosion
Great Old Ones
Skinkworld


Unrelated:The Final Spec:What Could Have Been, And Still Can
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Sphenodon
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He's very prolific, very vocal, and very arrogant. While he only has a small pool of dedicated followers who are "on his side", his work has been used and trusted by people naive to how unscientific it is, including artists and just curious people who find his stuff on google. Someone at this year's SVP even used one of his diagrams in a presentation uncritically, and apparently hadn't realised there was any issue.

He's very prolific, very vocal, and very arrogant. While he only has a small pool of dedicated followers who are "on his side", his work has been used and trusted by people naive to how unscientific it is, including artists and just curious people who find his stuff on google. Someone at this year's SVP even used one of his diagrams in a presentation uncritically, and apparently hadn't realised there was any issue.

Seems legit. I guess I tend to underestimate this kind of paleontological drama and file it in the "irrelevant" folder; polarized fights are a very effective repellent for me.

Anyway, for some more BS conspiriacy theories quality speculation:

-Prior to the Great Oxygenation Crisis, anaerobic life produced several primitive multicellular forms.

-Horseshoe crabs are actually derived descendants of the first few species of eurypterids - an early species adopted a benthic lifestyle and grew heavily armored.
Edited by Sphenodon, Nov 6 2016, 10:30 PM.

We have a Discord server! If you would like to join, simply message myself, Flisch, or Icthyander.
Some of my ideas (nothing real yet, but soon):
Refugium: A last chance for collapsing ecosystems and their inhabitants.
Pansauria: A terraforming project featuring the evolution of exactly one animal - the marine iguana.
Mars Renewed: An insight into the life of Mars thirty million years after its terraforming by humankind.
Microcosm: An exceedingly small environment.
Alcyon: A planet colonized by species remodeled into new niches by genetic engineering.
Oddballs: Aberrant representatives of various biological groups compete and coexist.

..and probably some other stuff at some point (perhaps a no K-T project). Stay tuned!
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Tartarus
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Early humans such as Homo habilis and H. rudolfensis were not descended from Australopithecus but from an unknown type of even earlier humans who didn't end up in the fossil record, which doesn't preserved everything anyway. These earlier humans were fully sapient beings who developed a technological society even more advanced that our present day one, but a huge war destroyed it all. On Earth, these people produced less intelligent descendants similar to what happened in Man After Man but less weird, and our sapience is a re-evolved trait rather than something new. Before the ancient war though, some of the earlier people went to space. Maybe they shall some day return...
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Velociraptor
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Nanotyrannus is not a juvenile T. rex.

The Triassic Kraken is real.

Pterosaurs are actually a group of derived saurischian dinosaurs.

Non-avian dinosaurs survived past the K-Pg event on Zealandia before it sank.
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Unnamed No K-Pg project: coming whenever, maybe never. I got ideas tho.
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Dakka!
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Greatest Biological Plot Twist Ever:All animals are sapient. They just don't show it because they are smarter than us. And want us to learn from our own mistakes dammit and to heck if they all die while we're learning.
"I was a Psychiatrist in Florida! For 3 weeks! Have you ever been to Florida?"




Some project ideas
The Future is Right
Ediacaran Explosion
Great Old Ones
Skinkworld


Unrelated:The Final Spec:What Could Have Been, And Still Can
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Velociraptor
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Megaraptorans are neither coelurosaurs nor allosauroids, but fully carnivorous sauropodomorphs that have convergently evolved with theropods.
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Unnamed No K-Pg project: coming whenever, maybe never. I got ideas tho.
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Sphenodon
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Calcareous

-Birds are polyphyletic, with paleognaths and neognaths independently originating from two highly-convergent groups of maniraptorans.
-Utterly indisputable fossil evidence emerges that amniota as a whole is ancestrally warm-blooded and covered in filamentous integument; other groups are revealed to have independently lost one or both traits, such as the dinosaurs (who are revealed to have been ancestrally secondarily scaly, only redeveloping fibrous integument in the tetanurans and ornithischians - interestingly, it is discovered that ornithischians developed their integument before the theropods did).
-A single species of pleurosaurid is discovered to have survived up to the present in the pelagic waters of the Indian Ocean; having developed an even more extremely elongated form than its ancestors, lost its hind limbs entirely, and become endothermic, it is revealed to have been the basis of several myths about sea serpents in the region (still exaggerated reports, though - the surviving species is only about five feet long).
Edited by Sphenodon, Nov 7 2016, 03:35 AM.

We have a Discord server! If you would like to join, simply message myself, Flisch, or Icthyander.
Some of my ideas (nothing real yet, but soon):
Refugium: A last chance for collapsing ecosystems and their inhabitants.
Pansauria: A terraforming project featuring the evolution of exactly one animal - the marine iguana.
Mars Renewed: An insight into the life of Mars thirty million years after its terraforming by humankind.
Microcosm: An exceedingly small environment.
Alcyon: A planet colonized by species remodeled into new niches by genetic engineering.
Oddballs: Aberrant representatives of various biological groups compete and coexist.

..and probably some other stuff at some point (perhaps a no K-T project). Stay tuned!
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Flisch
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No life ever goes extinct, its information is saved in other organisms via retro viruses.
We have a discord. If you want to join, simply message me, Icthyander or Sphenodon.
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IIGSY
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A huntsman spider that wastes time on the internet because it has nothing better to do
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Varanids are actually derived pelycosaur synapsids.
Projects
Punga: A terraformed world with no vertebrates
Last one crawling: The last arthropod

ARTH-6810: A world without vertebrates (It's ded, but you can still read I guess)

Potential ideas-
Swamp world: A world covered in lakes, with the largest being caspian sized.
Nematozoic: After a mass extinction of ultimate proportions, a single species of nematode is the only surviving animal.
Tri-devonian: A devonian like ecosystem with holocene species on three different continents.

Quotes


Phylogeny of the arthropods and some related groups


In honor of the greatest clade of all time


More pictures


Other cool things


All African countries can fit into Brazil
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Finncredibad
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Seals are actually dragons, driven to the sea by the hedgehog, which now keeps humans as pets.
Favorite quotes

Spoiler: click to toggle

Projects and stuff
Spoiler: click to toggle
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IIGSY
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A huntsman spider that wastes time on the internet because it has nothing better to do
 *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Hippos are cetaceans that have reverted back to land

Vertebrates are polyphyletic
Projects
Punga: A terraformed world with no vertebrates
Last one crawling: The last arthropod

ARTH-6810: A world without vertebrates (It's ded, but you can still read I guess)

Potential ideas-
Swamp world: A world covered in lakes, with the largest being caspian sized.
Nematozoic: After a mass extinction of ultimate proportions, a single species of nematode is the only surviving animal.
Tri-devonian: A devonian like ecosystem with holocene species on three different continents.

Quotes


Phylogeny of the arthropods and some related groups


In honor of the greatest clade of all time


More pictures


Other cool things


All African countries can fit into Brazil
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Thylacine
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Velociraptor
Nov 7 2016, 02:18 AM
Non-avian dinosaurs survived past the K-Pg event on Zealandia before it sank.

Take this shit the Project Ideas thread now, that is an awesome idea.
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HangingThief
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Cnidarians and echinoderms are actually descended from Martian extremophiles that arrived around 650 mya. Competition between these advanced Martian organisms and native Earth life fueled the Cambrian Explosion.
Hey.


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Sphenodon
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Calcareous

Thylacine
 
Velociraptor
 
Non-avian dinosaurs survived past the K-Pg event on Zealandia before it sank.
Take this shit the Project Ideas thread now, that is an awesome idea.

Agreed - there's a significant lack of these kind of projects on the board. Perhaps I could do the same with my Antarctic idea, if requested (I have too many ideas).

-Spinosaurs lived on until the end of the Cretaceous by adopting a near-fully aquatic lifestyle and extreme dimorphism; females resembled titanic, trunkless elephant seals while males came to resemble metriorhynchid crocodiles and were completely aquatic.
-Pterosaurs only became extinct during the K-Pg extinction by blind chance - a species of tiny relict anurognathids in South America would have managed to survive into the Paleocene in significant numbers, but were wiped out by a localized disaster before they managed to diversify.
-Late Cretaceous notosuchian species had a competitive edge on their dinosaurian counterparts; had the K-Pg extinction not occurred, notosuchian invaders from South America would have gradually outcompeted dinosaurs as they came into contact with them (as happened in far South America).
-The first sapient species on Earth was a species of orthocerid cephalopod during the Ordivocian Period; they became widespread, but never attained any notable success due to their complete reliance on water (and inability to use fire as a result).
Edited by Sphenodon, Nov 7 2016, 05:18 PM.

We have a Discord server! If you would like to join, simply message myself, Flisch, or Icthyander.
Some of my ideas (nothing real yet, but soon):
Refugium: A last chance for collapsing ecosystems and their inhabitants.
Pansauria: A terraforming project featuring the evolution of exactly one animal - the marine iguana.
Mars Renewed: An insight into the life of Mars thirty million years after its terraforming by humankind.
Microcosm: An exceedingly small environment.
Alcyon: A planet colonized by species remodeled into new niches by genetic engineering.
Oddballs: Aberrant representatives of various biological groups compete and coexist.

..and probably some other stuff at some point (perhaps a no K-T project). Stay tuned!
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