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Rainforest Earth; Warm, wet, and weird
Topic Started: Nov 25 2016, 08:47 AM (2,689 Views)
Beetleboy Nov 25 2016, 08:47 AM Post #1
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neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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Rainforest Earth
Warm, wet, and weird

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Author's Note:
I've always loved the idea of a hothouse Earth, and well before I joined the forum I would imagine the organisms inhabiting a world covered in rainforests and swamps. Finally, I've decided to incorporate this into a future evo project, which I hope will allow me to excercise myself in some non-mammalian spec, with focus on amphibians, birds, and invertebrates. I also hope to cover plant life and some fungi, too.



It has been 150 million years since the end of the Holocene, and the horror of the great war that was to be the end of humanity. In the end, humans became too clever – too clever for their own good, and the bombs and the fighting and the diseases snuffed them out slowly, individual by individual. Humanity's final stand was not glorious, but a lone old man fighting for each breath, hidden amongst the rubble of an abandoned city, as the disease that humans had engineered to win the war, slowly took his life, and thus ended the last human on Earth. Homo sapiens dragged with them into the evolutionary graveyard countless other species, the victims of hunting, habitat loss, fragmentation, climate change, pollution . . . elephants, rhinos, great apes, countless deaths. Those that did make it through the Holocene were outcompeted or wiped out in the upcoming extinction events, like the cetaceans.
But life goes on: extinction events are a violent reality of living on Earth, although the Holocene Extinction Event was the first one to be created by another species. Earth recovered, and life continued as if nothing had ever happened.

But before we visit Rainforest Earth, we must first go back several million years before it occurs to fully understand it. At this point, around 110 million years from now, mammals aren't doing so well. Ripples of extinction events quickly drive down their numbers, but notably, rodent, shrew, and pig descendants are still going strong. Birds, meanwhile, have been refining their reproduction, and some gull descendants have developed a pouch on their underside, in which they can keep their egg warm, while not being bound to a nest. The next major event is an ice age that grips Earth in a freezing grip, but while the mammals and other animals struggle to adapt, the marsupial birds take off. Having a warm pouch in which to rear your egg and afterwards, your chick, is very useful in the cold conditions. Parents no longer have to sit on the nest to stop their young from freezing to death, they can now wander about freely, feeding as they normally would, while their baby is safe in the pouch.
As the ice age continues, the mammals lumbering through the tundra are joined by large, flightless birds, 3 metres tall and like a very well insulated emu. Their chick is safe in a pouch, and it is becoming increasingly clear that the birds are diversifying.

As we near the time period that we will look at in depth, the continental movement and the high amounts of geological activity have caused large amounts of volcanic eruptions across the world. This causes a minor extinction event that knocks back the mammals yet further, but also releases immense amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The result is a natural global warming, and bit by bit the Earth warms up . . .

By 150 million years hence, the world is in the height of a greenhouse effect, sometimes known as the hothouse Earth. There are no polar ice caps, and the only place snow and ice can be found are at the very poles and on mountains. Rainforests cover much of the world except where it is too arid, and sea levels rise, flooding the land. This is a hot, damp world of extremes: jungle and desert living side-by-side, and covering the globe. If we were to visit this Rainforest Earth, it would seem primordial to us, like we'd travelled backwards in time, not forwards. This garden of Eden, a gem of natural beauty, would actually be pretty inhospitable to humans. The rainforests are dense and swelteringly hot and humid, biting insects plague the swamps, and invertebrates can be unusually large thanks to the large amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere. Life here is usually venomous, poisonous, or pretending to be something else. Rainforest Earth is a world of mimicry and deception, and it belongs to the invertebrates, the amphibians, the reptiles, and the birds. There are mammals here, but they are reduced to mostly small forms, most of which are either aquatic or arboreal. It is the other animals which rule this forest world.

This seemingly beautiful paradise may be inhospitable to us, but it is also one of the most notable time periods that Earth has experienced for a long time. Earth is rarely as diverse as it is now – just imagine the Amazon Rainforest, the amount of creatures living there, then imagine that covering much of the globe. It is easy to see why there is around double the amount of species living on Rainforest Earth than there was during the Holocene. The oceans are tropical and filled with vibrant reefs, scattered with sandy, pristine islands inhabited by unique fauna and flora. The forests are huge and home to countless species, and the arid deserts are home to strange, spiny forests and hardy organisms surviving against the odds. The swamps are biodiverse and some of them are home to entirely new habitats unlike anything seen during the Holocene, and at the poles, temperate forests grow and spread towards the equator where they are overtaken by tropical forest.

This is Rainforest Earth, tropical, wet, strange, and biodiverse.



*geography and overviews of organisms will be in seperate updates rather than being with the project introduction here*

Contents
Geography
Organism Overviews - Animals
Weeping Bog-Forests
Golden Lakes
Whirlybirds
Edited by Beetleboy, Nov 28 2016, 12:17 PM.
~ The Age of Forests ~
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Beetleboy Nov 26 2016, 08:21 AM Post #16
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neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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Organism Overviews
Part I - Animals

Mammals:

Around 10 million years after the Holocene, there was a great explosion of mammal diversity, and it became the golden age of mammals. There were immense herbivores like sauropods striding across the African savannah; primates, bears, and moles took to the seas; some primates seemed poised to become the next sapient species. However, this age of mammals was not to last, and extinction event after extinction event wiled down their numbers. Each time they tried to clamber back, they were knocked down again by asteroids, volcanos, and later, competition from the ever-adaptable marsupial avians. No sooner had they coped with the ice age, they were dealing with wave after wave of volcanic eruptions, then the rapid global warming, which wiped out the polar species that couldn't adapt fast enough.

In Rainforest Earth, most mammals are small creatures, descendants of pigs, rodents, and shrews and their kin. The majority of rainforest mammals are arboreal creatures, most growing no longer than 1 metre in length. There are thousands of species of frugivorous, insectivorous, nectarivorous, granivorous, and fungivorous small mammals descended from shrews and rodents.
Small herbivores forage upon the forest floor, descendants of rodents and pigs, most of them no more than a metre or so in height. The dense forests do not encourage large sizes, but small, slinking creatures that come out during the cover of darkness. Mammalian predators are mostly civet-like or badger-like animals, and are usually nocturnal or crepuscular.

Small marsupials are common in Austraysia and Irctica; but it is perhaps bats that are one of the most widespread and diverse of the mammals. They are found on every continent, and range from small insectivores which look identical to those you might see fluttering through your garden on a warm summer evening during the Holocene, to bizarre arboreal forms which have entirely lost the power of flight.

Marine mammals are not very diverse, although aquatic and semi-aquatic forms are very common in swamps and rivers.

Birds:

Many of the birds on Rainforest Earth are distant descendants of gulls, but they are no longer recognisable as such, having diversified to fill a variety of avian niches. These are marsupial birds, known as sacculumavids, and they evolved around 100 million years after the Holocene, just before the ice age. Now around 90% of all birds on Rainforest Earth are sacculumavids, and they fill a variety of niches, both those of Holocene birds and ones which would otherwise be filled by mammals. There are small finch-like forms which feed on nectar, seeds, and insects, and there are predatory species which can only be compared to Holocene birds of prey. Sacculumavids have also produced a great variety of waterfowl-like species, which have done very well, and have even diversified into penguin-like creatures. Perhaps the most interesting of the pouched birds are the flightless species, some of which resemble emus or pheasants, while others are far stranger. They forage and hunt amongst the trees, on the forest floor, or wading through swamps, and they would dominate the ecosystems, if it weren't for the reptiles.

Non-sacculamavid birds are widespread but not as diverse. Some are descendants of pigeons, others passerines, but they all lack pouches and they all make nests in which to rear their young.

Reptiles:

Warm temperatures and a tropical climate has done reptiles plenty of favours in Rainforest Earth. It's the perfect conditions for growing to large sizes, and so they haved done, all over the world.

Testudines are doing better than ever, growing to huge sizes both on land and in the water. The swamps and flooded forests suit turtles well, but it is the sea that they have really taken off. Before the ice age, some species of marine turtles developed oxygen-absorbing skin around their cloaca, and they have now become the diverse branchiatestids, fully aquatic gilled turtles. They give birth to live young, and so need never come onto land, or even visit the surface. Their gills have allowed them to diversify, and they can be found across the world in the warm seas, filling a variety of niches.
Meanwhile, on land, large herbivorous tortoises lumber across the forest floor, some of them several metres long and with long, giraffe-like necks. Arboreal testudines can be found in Denaska's forests, with a thin, light shell covered in skin, and sharp claws for gripping the branches. These animals are mostly slow-moving frugivores and folivores.

Crocodilians are also doing very well in Rainforest Earth. A diversity comparable to that seen during the Mesozoic has reappeared, adapting to marine and terrestrial habitats. A greater variety of specialized species can be seen, creatures which are not so generalistic, and rely mostly on single foodsources, such as ants, molluscs, etc.

Snakes have not diversified a great deal, but there are some unusual forms, such as specialized ant-eaters, large aquatic species, and giant marine snakes. The variety of small lizards, mammals, and birds make for good food for arboreal ambush predators, many of which are exquisitly camouflaged.
Lizards can be found in a dazzling array of forms across the globe. In Austraysia and Rindia, large varanids have become the top predators in the rainforests, growing to several metres in length, and eating anything that they come across. In Amoguay, large, lumbering herbivores bask in the swamps, feeding upon waterplants, while in Vleiland geckos and agamids have done well. Geckos are also doing particularly well in the rainforests of Rindia, the most unusual of which have developed lengthened, colourful scales for display.

Amphibians:

As can be expected, the humid, tropical conditions of Rainforest Earth are perfect for amphibians, and their numbers have exploded. They can be found everywhere from Atlantica to Denaska, even inhabiting the deserts where specialized frogs can be found, well adapted to conserving moisture.

The basic frog form is very adaptable, and so Rainforest Earth frogs mostly look superficially similar to Holocene species. Arboreal species number thousands, and giant ambush predators big enough to swallow a dog whole can be found well-camouflaged on the forest floor. Some species have unusual new characteristics, such as bioluminescence or neotony.

Salamanders can be found crawling through the rainforests, and in the waterways, diversifying into arboreal and giant forms.
Caecilians, meanwhile, have not had the opportunity to diversify, but are still abundant, the damp rainforests being the perfect habitat for them.

Fish:

Sharks are doing as well as ever, found throughout the oceans, the most notable forms being giant predators and filter feeders, large molluscivores, and slender freshwater species adapted for swimming through the tangled flooded forests. Rays, meanwhile, have not diversified a great deal, apart from giant filter-feeding species and a few other oddities.

Fish are doing as well as ever, both in the seas and in freshwater, blennies and eels doing particularly well, amongst others.

Invertebrates:

These are too diverse to give a completely accurate overview, as they are doing incredibly well in Rainforest Earth. Higher oxygen levels has allowed unusually large invertebrates to evolve, and many prey upon small birds, lizards, and mammals. Beetles, centipedes, and crickets have been doing particularly well, and amongst the flying insects, lepidopterans, hymenopterans, and dipterans have been doing very well.

Terrestrial crustaceans can be found in many rainforests, and land crabs have been diversifying. Meanwhile, in the water, crustaceans and molluscs are doing very well, filling a wide variety of niches.
~ The Age of Forests ~
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DroidSyber Nov 26 2016, 10:25 AM Post #17
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I'll cut ya swear on me mum
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I'm excited to see some the odder creatures! Also, anteater crocodile.
Non Enim Cadunt!

No idea how to actually hold down a project.
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Beetleboy Nov 26 2016, 10:30 AM Post #18
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neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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NinjaSquirrel
Nov 26 2016, 10:25 AM
I'm excited to see some the odder creatures! Also, anteater crocodile.
Thanks, since this is far in the future, there's plenty of really odd animals. And anteater snakes, too.

I will post some stuff on plants and fungi next, then probably do some habitat overviews, before we got onto the really fun stuff. :evilsmile:
Edited by Beetleboy, Nov 26 2016, 10:36 AM.
~ The Age of Forests ~
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trex841 Nov 26 2016, 12:09 PM Post #19
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Feel like the phrase Very Well was used a little too often in that last update, but other then that little nitpick, this is looking exquisite.
F.I.N.D.R Field Incident Logs
A comprehensive list of all organisms, artifacts, and alternative worlds encountered by the foundation team.

At the present time, concepts within are inconsistent and ever shifting.

(And this is just the spec related stuff)
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Beetleboy Nov 26 2016, 12:29 PM Post #20
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neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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trex841
Nov 26 2016, 12:09 PM
Feel like the phrase Very Well was used a little too often in that last update, but other then that little nitpick, this is looking exquisite.
Okay, I will look through it at some point and change them for something else. Thanks for the compliment!
~ The Age of Forests ~
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Beetleboy Nov 27 2016, 06:28 AM Post #21
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neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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Illustration added to the introduction, and picture-heavy update coming soon.
~ The Age of Forests ~
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Monster Nov 27 2016, 07:01 AM Post #22
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Space Oddity

 *rainforest world fistbump*
Flashlights, nightmares, sudden explosions.

'active'
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{10 Million Years of Rain]

Commissions: Open.



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Beetleboy Nov 27 2016, 07:07 AM Post #23
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neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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Monster
Nov 27 2016, 07:01 AM
*rainforest world fistbump*
Thanks! Your project has always been a great inspiration for me.
~ The Age of Forests ~
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Beetleboy Nov 27 2016, 12:54 PM Post #24
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neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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Weeping Bog Forests - Benthook Rainforests - South Denaska
 


In the tropical marshes of the Benthook rainforests, a very unusual ecosystem can be found. Each area has its own complex web of life, each species depending on each other, but one of the best and most unusual examples of this are the weeping bog-forests.
These can be found in the wide expanses of marsh where Mexico once was, but is now known as Benthook. The soil here is very acidic and poor in nutrients, which makes this a hostile envioroment for your average plant – but thankfully nature has evolution on its side, so instead of being a barren, lifeless wasteland, the marshes have become a cooking-pot for a wide variety of strange organisms.

Some of the most common low-growing plants here are bogwitch flowers, of which there are several species, but all of them have blooms which are eerily reminiscent of a twisted face. They have symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi which help them to extract as much nutrients as possible from the soil.

Some cacti have adapted to the conditions of the bog forests. Some are parasitic, such as the vampire hedgehog, a spherical, spiny species which lives for only a week or so. They grow fast, spreading strong, speedily-growing roots over the surface, before wrapping around nearby plants in slow-motion, sucking the nutrients from them, gaining just enough from the small amount of flora in the vicinity of the cactus to produce several large, vibrant flowers.
Another cactus, the cheerily-named thumb-lopper, is an insectivore with a tubular, smooth stem, at the top of which is a pit which releases scents irresistable to insects. The only spines on the thumb-lopper are long ones encircling the rim of the pit, so that when an insect wanders into it, the trap is triggered, and the rim of the pit contracts, closing the spines over the top, creating a door that will stop all but the very small insects, which would give little nutrients anyway, from escaping.

Posted Image
A stand of weeps with a group of white-backed dabblings snatching insects out of the air, while a small flock of daggerbills fly past. The tree on the right demonstrates particularly well the 'golden stalactites' that can develop on weeps, made up of dripping sap that has hardened.

For many, the most fascinating plant of the bog forests is the one that turned this habitat into what it is today in the first play: a bizarre, unique tree known as the weep. It grows to around 12 metres tall, and most of its branches are centered at the very crown of the tree, leaving around 10 metres of smooth trunk below it. The bark is papery and dotted here and there with what look like cuts. These gashes are actually natural structures, and vital to the tree. From these gashes, it produces copious amounts of sap – this is produced specially by the tree purely for the purpose of being ejected through these exits. It is sticky, thick, golden, and importantly, full of sugar and smelling sweetly: irresistable to any insects in the area. And if there's one thing that these bogs don't need any more of, it's insects. Flies and midges number in their thousands, and they are the perfect prey for the weep.
As sap drips down the trunk of the tree from the gashes, it attracts large amounts of insects, which quickly become trapped in the sticky substance. Many drown it, but others are still struggling as it drips in slow-motion down the bark, until it reaches another gash, at which point the sap will run into the 'cut', taking with it the trapped insects, where they can be digested deep within the trunk, giving the tree added nutrients as well as that which it can find by boring its roots deep into the acidic soil.
The sheer amount and the nature of the sap produced has lead to an odd, unintentional effect upon the weep trees. Over the years, layers of sap will harden over the trunk as it drips down, and bit by bit, it will be built up until the bark will take on a shining, golden sheen. If explorers were to stumble upon weep trees for the first time, they may well think that they have stepped out of this reality and into another, in which trees are made of solid gold.

It is only thanks to the bog habitat, that allows insects to breed in such huge numbers, that these trees can exist at all, gaining part of their nutrients by eating meat. This fascinating series of events has made South Denaska the only place in the world where predatory trees can be found.

Many animals are attracted to the insects which are in turn attracted to the weeps. Small lizards and birds often use these trees as a valuable food source, but they must be careful, because the sap is more than capable of trapping them, too. It is not unusual for a bird to be caught off guard, and for its legs to become hopelessly trapped in the dripping sap.

Posted Image
An adult male gobbling bird.

One species of bird doesn't seem to mind the risk, however, and has become quite specialized on feeding on the weeps. The gobbling birds, so named for their call, are social birds which move around in small groups through the weeping bog-forests, crawling up the trunks and across the branches, hooking insects out of the sap, while carefully avoiding getting trapped themselves. They communicate using throaty 'gob-gob-gob' calls, and have black plumage. Their heads and necks are bald, save for a few tufts of down, as when flicking an insect out of the sap, often the head and neck area can become slightly messy, so it is easier to lose the feathers, rather than having them clogged up and sticky. They often groom each other, carefully combing through each other's plumage using their bills, and they will frequently wash themselves in pools in the marshes.

The weeping bog-forests are a fragile but oddly beautiful ecosystem, with the bog, trees, insects, and birds all relying on each other.
~ The Age of Forests ~
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TerrificTyler Nov 27 2016, 01:06 PM Post #25
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Nice job on this! That's some great plant evolution.

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Beetleboy Nov 27 2016, 01:08 PM Post #26
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neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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TerrificTyler20
Nov 27 2016, 01:06 PM
Nice job on this! That's some great plant evolution.
Thank you. I hope to give neglected groups such as invertebrates, flora, and fungi a bit more attention in Rainforest Earth.
~ The Age of Forests ~
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DroidSyber Nov 27 2016, 01:32 PM Post #27
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I'll cut ya swear on me mum
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Those are some weird trees! Great work!
Non Enim Cadunt!

No idea how to actually hold down a project.
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trex841 Nov 27 2016, 01:41 PM Post #28
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Now that is an awesome plant concept.
F.I.N.D.R Field Incident Logs
A comprehensive list of all organisms, artifacts, and alternative worlds encountered by the foundation team.

At the present time, concepts within are inconsistent and ever shifting.

(And this is just the spec related stuff)
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Beetleboy Nov 27 2016, 01:44 PM Post #29
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neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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Quote:
 
Those are some weird trees! Great work!

Thank you!

Quote:
 
Now that is an awesome plant concept.

Thanks, I'm glad you like it.
~ The Age of Forests ~
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CaledonianWarrior96 Nov 27 2016, 02:02 PM Post #30
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An Awesome Reptile
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Predatory Trees; that is some ingenious imagination, and made beautifully plausible
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