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Obscure Taxa; For interesting or obscure organisms you'd like to share.
Topic Started: Dec 14 2016, 09:46 PM (48,953 Views)
Rodlox
Superhuman
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Insect Illuminati Get Shrekt
Jan 29 2017, 03:17 PM
Arixenia esau is a strange, viviparous earwig, parasitic on bats. I guess earwigs aren't as conservative as I thought.
to me, that still looks like an earwig.

granted, it borrowed body paint from a cricket, but still
.---------------------------------------------.
Parts of the Cluster Worlds:
"Marsupialless Australia" (what-if) & "Out on a Branch" (future evolution) & "The Earth under a still sun" (WIP)
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peashyjah
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Bydo
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Insect Illuminati Get Shrekt
Jan 28 2017, 03:47 PM
Enteroxenos is a small parasite of sea cucumbers.
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It looks like a nematode, but it's actually a snail. Yes, it's a snail. We know this, not only because of genetic testing, but also because of their veliger larvae. But early on, they metamorphose, loosing their shell, muscular foot, tentacles and all other recognizable features of snail anatomy. Most of their body is filled with reproductive organs, so they absorb nutrients through their skin.



What kinds of pressures would push a snail to such extremes?
What a strange mollusk it is.
Discontinued projects:
The New Ostracoderms (i might continue with this project again someday)
The Americas (where in 58 million years from now in the future North and South America has both become isolated island continents)



All Expansions (my attempt at expanding the universe of All Tomorrows by Nemo Ramjet aka C.M. Kosemen, started June 6, 2018)
Anthropozoic (my attempt at expanding the universe of Man After Man and also a re-imagining of it, coming 2019 or 2020)
New Cenozoica (my attempt at expanding the universe of The New Dinosaurs and also a re-imagining of it, also coming 2019 or 2020)
All Alternatives or All Changes (a re-telling of All Tomorrows but with some minor and major "changes", coming June 10, 2018)
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Yiqi15
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Prime Specimen
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Insect Illuminati Get Shrekt
Jan 29 2017, 03:17 PM
Arixenia esau is a strange, viviparous earwig, parasitic on bats.
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Phantamanta's Belfry Earwig is Real and it's already Evolved!
Current/Completed Projects
- After the Holocene: Your run-of-the-mill future evolution project.
- A History of the Odessa Rhinoceros: What happens when you ship 28 southern white rhinoceri to Texas and try and farm them? Quite a lot, actually.

Future Projects
- XenoSphere: The greatest zoo in the galaxy.
- The Curious Case of the Woolly Giraffe: A case study of an eocene relic.
- Untittled Asylum Studios-Based Project: The truth behind all the CGI schlock
- Riggslandia V.II: A World 150 million years in the making

Potential Projects
- Klowns: The biology and culture of a creepy-yet-fascinating being

My Zoochat and Fadom Accounts
- Zoochat
- Fandom
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Beetleboy
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neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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It's about time I contributed to this. Have some weird animals from my database of zoological oddities . . .

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This is a painted bat, Kerivoula picta, which can be found in Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam. It's a species of vesper bat, and their bright colouration is actually camouflage. Their roosting sights are quite unusual: suspended weaver finch nests, sunbird nests, banana tree leaves, and under the eaves of huts. It's thought that their colouration might offer some kind of camouflage in the broken light under one of these roosting sights. The males are particularly brightly coloured. However, other than this, they're a pretty normal microbat.

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This is the hairless bat, also known as the naked bulldog bat. Its scientific name is Cheiromeles torquatus, and it is almost completely hairless, except for short bristly hairs on its neck, throat sack, and front toes, which according to one book that I have, are used to comb giant parasitic earwigs off of its skin. They are migratory, colonial, and nocturnal. They prey on quite large insects compared to other bats in its range.
Also, it isn't pretty. Well, I think it's beautiful, anyway:

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This is a Lake Patzcuaro salamander. They are one of several lesser known axolotl look-alikes, and like its better known relative, it is neotonic. It can be found in a high altitude lake in Mexico, and it is fully aquatic. They feed mostly on invertebrates, sucking their prey up. They can be hybridised with axolotls, apparently, and it is critically endangered, mostly due to pollution and the introduction of invasive predatory fish.

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This is the proboscis bat, one of my favourite animals. It can be found in South and Central America, and it is mostly a riparian species, nearly always found near water. It is a fairly typical microbat, except for its unusual proboscis, and its habit of sleeping in perfectly straight lines going up tree trunks.

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This is Synalpheus regalis, a EUSOCIAL pistol shrimp found in the tropical West Atlantic. They live in sponges, using it as a food source and as a shelter. A single colony can have as many as 300 individuals in it, with only one reproductive female - a queen, if you like. Large colony members - soldiers, if you will - defend the sponge from intruders and potential dangers. They are considered the first known case of eusocial marine animals.
And yes, I'll speccing on these shrimps at some point in the future. It would be awesome to see them become the ants of the sea.

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Above you can see a beetle fly, also known as beetle-backed flies. If you want to google them, then I would recommend doing so by their scientific name, Celyphidae. There are about 90 species known. They have an enlarged scutellum, giving them an often shiny or metallic covering over their abdomen, like a beetle. The reason for this is unknown, to my knowledge, but my personal theory is that it helps them to be camouflaged as a poisonous or unpalatable creature such as an oil beetle. They can be found alongside rivers and streams, and other damp areas.

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This beautiful beast is the blanket octopus. Here's some more pics of it:

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This, my friends, is one of my favourite creatures: the blanket octopus, Tremoctopus. The females have those amazing mebranes between their dorsal and dorsolateral tentacles, which is probably used to make herself look bigger when threatened. One species of Tremoctopus has the greatest degree of sexual dimorphism known in any non-microscopic animal. The females are 2 metres long, the males (which were first discovered in 2002), just 2.4 cm. The males have a specialized tentacle, known as a hectocotylus, which can dettach during mating to slither up the female's mantle until fertilization is neccasary.
~ The Age of Forests ~
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LittleLazyLass
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Proud quilt in a bag

Quote:
 
It is a fairly typical microbat, except for its unusual proboscis, and its habit of sleeping in perfectly straight lines going up tree trunks.
Huh, that's interesting. I suppose "Just a normal x, but have weird coloration and [weird behaviour]." is actually a justifiable difference for a species. Something I generally frown upon in spec, but might have Library potential...
totally not British, b-baka!
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I don't even really like this song that much but the title is pretty relatable sometimes, I guess.
Me
What, you want me to tell you what these mean?
Read First
Words Maybe
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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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I like the beetle flies.
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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trex841
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Entity
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I have never heard of the Blanket Octopus. That is amazing.
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
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neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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Quote:
 
Huh, that's interesting. I suppose "Just a normal x, but have weird coloration and [weird behaviour]." is actually a justifiable difference for a species. Something I generally frown upon in spec, but might have Library potential...
Why? I'm curious. There are many such species in the natural world, I see no reason why it can't be explored in spec.
~ The Age of Forests ~
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LittleLazyLass
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Proud quilt in a bag

It just feels lazy saying "This, but with x minor difference".
totally not British, b-baka!
Posted Image You like me (Unlike)
I don't even really like this song that much but the title is pretty relatable sometimes, I guess.
Me
What, you want me to tell you what these mean?
Read First
Words Maybe
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Zorcuspine
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Enjoying our azure blue world

Little
Feb 2 2017, 03:10 PM
It just feels lazy saying "This, but with x minor difference".
Also known as the reason my projects update slower than a sloth on antidepressants.
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peashyjah
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Bydo
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I used to heard of the blanket octopus before.
Discontinued projects:
The New Ostracoderms (i might continue with this project again someday)
The Americas (where in 58 million years from now in the future North and South America has both become isolated island continents)



All Expansions (my attempt at expanding the universe of All Tomorrows by Nemo Ramjet aka C.M. Kosemen, started June 6, 2018)
Anthropozoic (my attempt at expanding the universe of Man After Man and also a re-imagining of it, coming 2019 or 2020)
New Cenozoica (my attempt at expanding the universe of The New Dinosaurs and also a re-imagining of it, also coming 2019 or 2020)
All Alternatives or All Changes (a re-telling of All Tomorrows but with some minor and major "changes", coming June 10, 2018)
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HangingThief
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ghoulish
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You forgot to mention one of the neatest bits of trivia about the blanket octopus: smaller individuals are immune to man o' war stings, sometimes tearing off man o' war tentacles and carry them around for defense or possibly to facilitate prey capture.
Hey.


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kopout
Adolescent
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Insect Illuminati Get Shrekt
Dec 25 2016, 02:50 PM
Dromaeosaurus
Dec 25 2016, 07:07 AM
Stretching the boundaries of what counts as a "taxon"...

The 8th February 1951, the hospital of Baltimore took cervical cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman who would die because of that cancer in October. Despite the death of their original host, the cancer cells survived well enough in the lab, because of a genetical mutation that allowed them to replicate indefinitely. They're hypertriploid, reaching 76-80 chromosomes per cells, and they have absorbed viral genes from the papillomavirus. They were successfully cloned in 1955. Six decades later, those cells are still growing and reproducing. Known as HeLa cells, they're shipped around the world to be used in all kinds of experiments - cancer research, resistence to toxins and viruses, sensitivity to drugs or cosmetics, and so on. If you still count them as parts of Henrietta Lack's body, Mrs. Lacks weighs around 20 tons at 96 years.
Because of their inhuman genome, Leigh Van Valen, whom you might remember for the Red Queen Hypothesis, proposed to classify HeLa cells in the new species Helacyton gartleri, named after Stanley Gartler, who had worked on their clonation and issues with contamination of other cultures. An alternative proposal would classify them as Homo sapiens gartleri. So here you have it - the first (kinda) official posthuman!

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I am left absolutely dumbfounded. Someone should make a spec project about this.
I almost used it in the At The End competition, for the irony of an endolithic microbe being not only the last vertebrate but the last animal period and one of the last Eukaryotas.
Flisch approves!
Spoiler: click to toggle

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Beetleboy
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neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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HangingThief
Feb 2 2017, 06:53 PM
You forgot to mention one of the neatest bits of trivia about the blanket octopus: smaller individuals are immune to man o' war stings, sometimes tearing off man o' war tentacles and carry them around for defense or possibly to facilitate prey capture.
Oh yeah I was gonna add that but was running out of time.
~ The Age of Forests ~
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Dromaeosaurus
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Haemothermic orthostatic matrotrophic lexiphanic deuterostome
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A few nice creatures from my university's course on animal reproductive strategies:

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Here's Trichophrya, the marsupial protozoan - that's right, this ciliate reproduces by gemmation, but every gem develops an invagination that forms a ciliate pouch. Buds develop within this pouch for several hours, only leaving the parent's body once they have fully developed cilia and tentacles, at which point its given birth through a pore. (see here)


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And this is Gyrodactytlus, a swimming flatworm that resorts to nested generations. This plathyhelminth generates asexually a female embryo, which produces another one without leaving hte parent's body, and the second embryo produces a third, and so on, until you have five generations nested inside each other, like a horrifying living matrioshka.


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No discussioon of weird life cycles is complete without Turritopsis, the immortal jellyfish. You may know that jellyfish start their life as a ciliate larva (planula), which settles on the seafloor to grow into a polyp, which branches out and multiplies asexually like a plant, and finally fragments in a number of free-swimming medusae. That's pretty weird in its own right... but Turritopsis takes the prize because it reaches the medusa stage, it reproduces, it becomes old and frail... and then says "nah", and reverts back to polyp, starting all over again. There is no theoretical maximum lifespan for this jellyfish. It just goes on.


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Mammals have placentas and reptiles don't, right? Unless you're Trachylepis ivensi, the placentate lizard. Apparently being live-bearing wasn't quite fancy enoughh for this skink, so it eliminated any trace of eggshell and developed a true placenta, all but indistinguishable from that of mammals, from a fusion of corion and allantois that invades the oviduct walls, the mother's capillaries running against the fetus' to directly exchange food. (see here)

- - -

As a bonus, I want to point out that the division of embryos that results in identical twin, so common even among mammals, is technically a form of prenatal asexual reproduction - so if you're reading this and you have a twin, congratulations, you managed to reproduce by mitosis before even being born!

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Armadillo embryos connected to a single placenta. Armadilloes always reproduce both
sexually and asexually, as each pregnancy has the embryo splitting into 4-12 clones.
My deviantART page - My other extra-project work - Natural History of Horus and its flora and fauna - A graphic history of life (also here) - AuxLang Project: a worldwide language - Behold THE MEGACLADOGRAM - World Without West: an alternate history

SpecEvo Tutorials: Habitable Solar Systems (galaxies, stars and moons); Planets (geology, oceans and atmosphere); Ecology (energy, biomes and relationships); Alternative Biochemistry (basic elements, solvents, pigments); Biomechanics (body structure, skeletons, locomotion); Bioenergetics (photosynthesis, digestion, respiration); Perception (sense organs and nervous system); Reproduction (from genetics to childbirth); Offense and Defense (camouflage, poisons and weapons); Intelligence (EQ, consciousness and smartest animals); Civilizations (technology, domestication and culture); Exotic Life (living crystals, nuclear life, 2D biology); Evolution (genetics, selection and speed); Phylogeny (trees of life); Guide to Naming (how to name your creations) (and more!)

My projects here:

Natural History of Horus (19th century naturalists... in space)
Galactic Anthropology (intelligence takes many forms around the Milky Way)
Settlers from the Deep (a tour in a blind and slimy future)
Coming soon: A Matter of Time (a history of the future... all of it)
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