Speculative biology is simultaneously a science and form of art in which one speculates on the possibilities of life and evolution. What could the world look like if dinosaurs had never gone extinct? What could alien lifeforms look like? What kinds of plants and animals might exist in the far future? These questions and more are tackled by speculative biologists, and the Speculative Evolution welcomes all relevant ideas, inquiries, and world-building projects alike. With a member base comprising users from across the world, our community is the largest and longest-running place of gathering for speculative biologists on the web.
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Is Fistularia somehow within Syngnathiformes or is that a ridiculous convergence? Post-quick-search edit: whoa, those are some huge pipefishes...
As for my first contribution here... Enneacampus ansorgii aka the African freshwater pipefish. One of the little number of pipefish species which can be properly kept in an aquarium. Weirdness factor for how pretty it is (Ain't that a different colour scheme?) + how interesting it is that these guys must've been adapted to freshwater for some millions of years
Currently a part of Specworld's revival and The Dark Phoenix's Dinosaur Spec... Still open for idea exchanges and commentaries
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social experiment.
My Pets
All of His creations under my responsibility: Planted Tank #1 0.0.5 Corydoras sterbai 0.0.2 Jordanella floridae 0.0.2 Ctenolucius hujeta 0.0.3 Gasteropelecus maculatus 0.0.2 Thorichthys meeki 0.0.2 Mikrogeophagus altispinosus 0.0.3 Rineloricaria spp. L010A 0.0.2 Ctenopoma acutirostre 0.0.2 Uaru ampliacanthoides 0.0.2 Tetraodon nigroviridis 0.0.2 Doryichthys cf. martensii 0.0.2 Agamyxis pectinifrons Countless Melanoides tuberculata currently tipping off the bioload Comment: Cichlid craze! Will have some fishes moved away in the near future, or add some more molluscivores (hoping the puffers work as control)
Turtle Cage #1 0.0.1 Trachemys scripta elegans 0.0.1 Unidentified turtle
Turtle Cage #2 0.0.1 Chelydra serpentina
Apartment Tank 0.0.5 Brachydanio rerio 0.0.5 Tannichthys albonubes 0.0.5 Nannostomus eques 0.0.3 Pseudomugil gertrudae 0.0.1 Carinotetraodon travancoricus 0.0.2 Acantopsis octoactinotos 0.0.3 Corydoras paleatus 0.0.3 Corydoras panda slayer fin 0.0.4 Fundulopanchax gardneri 0.0.1 Gyrinocheilus aymoneri 0.0.2 Hyalobagrus flavus 0.0.1 Dermogenys sp. (hoping to find more) 0.0.4 Neocardina sp. local Amano 0.0.3 Neritina natalensis Comment: This is full-booked, hopefully
Known as turtle ants, these ants are particularly weird due to their unusual soldier caste. Numerous species have a soldier caste with large heads that match the size and shape of their nest entrances. These soldiers serve as living doors that open to admit incoming foragers and effectively exclude potential intruders.
Worker castes typically include two forms, a worker and soldier, but there are a few species that are monomorphic. The larger soldier caste typically has an enlarged head disk. In some species the head of the soldier is very different from the worker while in others these differences are less pronounced. Queens and soldiers tend to share similar head morphology. Soldiers use their heads to plug the nest entrance. This can be very effective in excluding potential intruders. Other morphological differences between the worker castes are present but these differences have not been studied as well as head morphology.
Native to tropical regions, there are 119 known extant species and 16 fossil species. These ants can also 'glide', parachuting between trees to avoid landing on the ground. Weirdly though, they appear to be primarily wingless. I guess they extend their legs to parachute?
"you are about to try that on a species that clawed its way to the top of a 4 billion year deep corpse pile of evolution. one that has committed the genocide you are contemplating several times already. they are the pinnacle of intelligence-based survival techniques and outnumber you 7 billion to 1" - humans vs machine
Forum user Uncanny Gemstar drew what is supposed to be a me. Thanks!
Spoiler: click to toggle
As they walk in, they're greeted by a small, poorly kept pathway leading to a poorly constructed Japanese-style gate. Behind this, a small field made up of corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, among other plants is contrasted by large piles of books, as well as a few rather out of place looking laptops. Off in the corner, a small woman, with long, striped, and strikingly colorful socks, no shoes, unremarkable denim shorts, a large, fancy black coat, arm warmers, glasses, a tuque, and somewhat unkempt, mid-length blue-and-pink-streaked red hair, is rummaging through a trash bin, located behind a sign saying "employees only". She continues this for a while (walking behind a wall to change her outfit now and then), until one of her visitors coughs. Startled, she looks up, apologizes, and grabs a handful of textbooks and novels before daintily running off to join them.
What, you want me to tell you what these mean?
Predenterra The (Lost) Lost World The Standing World
Read First
Clarifications on my sex and gender Sorry if I come off as rude, I don't put much thought into word choice sometimes. I'm also super prone to editing my posts, sometimes multiple times, in the minutes following posting. For the love of god, take my posts from my earlier days on the forum with a grain of salt. I was not particularly knowledgeable or mature back then. Some of them are so cringe-worthy I can't even bring myself to look at them.
Words Maybe
Great Words
Words To Spec By
It would have to be something extremely alien, pushing the limits of our imagination. But those are always my favorite kinds of life. ~~The Words of The Xenologist
Words To Live By
Ignorance is never insulting if you're willing to learn, we're all ignorant about most things. ~~The Words of Lamna
Words I Live By
Yeah, and even if you don't agree with creationists on that concept, that doesn't mean they can't be decent people. I have friends who are creationist (possibly even young earth) that I get along with fine in general life. I don't think they're right of course, but that doesn't make them intellectual degenerates. ~~The Words of forbidden3
Member Quotes
jman123
Ass-breathing fish-lizards? Sounds like a punk rock band
Sheather
"Holy fucking shit a toilet paper roll! Our favorite thing!"
Urufumarukai
Tyrannosaurus aquastronka
Kamineigh
Myo, if you don't stop reading the YouTube comments...
Lamna
Are you saying what I think you're saying?
Sheather bathes in cum?
Cephylus
And last night I dreamed I was blowing up a Kindergarten with a grenade launcher for no particular reason...
revin
Oh, and of course more people get killed by selfies than by sharks. Of course.
The smell of rotting flesh really kills my appetite, surprising, but the visual appearance of corpses makes me hungry. Is that weird?
Ebervalius
I mean, let us say I'm a genderfluid blurflux demi-romantic woman who is sexually attracted to men, but only if they are Melanesian and have a voice like that of Nicholas Cage. Okay, so what?
trex841
When I first saw that picture, I thought you were dissecting a condom.
Mr Mysterio
All hail Robo-Stalin.
Peashyjah
Seems like everything in this project is now dead.
Stealth Rock
Seagulls are pretty much trees, right?
Watcher
We all must finish chapters of our lives to go on to the next. Sometime this means leaving behind versions of ourselves that don't want to die.
Yiqi15
For April fool's, we had to make an orgasm that resembled a human foot.
Flisch
im the black market
CaledonianWarrior96
He was a skater birb, she said tweet you later birb
Most People at Some Point
Quotes
Some dude called plucas1 from Youtube comments
Funny, isn't it, that our world needs Clark Kent a lot more than Superman.
Xenoblade Chronicles
Even though he is our creator, that does not afford him the right to take our lives on a whim. But that is the thinking of a homs. He is a god. Such morals cannot apply to gods. So you think we should just shut up and die?! If that is the fate decided by a god. You are mistaken if you think we will simply accept such a fate and wait to die. We'll never stop fighting. Not till the end. To Zanza, the outcome is the same. Thus your logic is flawed.
Hades - Kid Icarus Uprising
When freaky aliens give you lemons, make freaky alien lemonade.
Kid Icarus Uprising
But Souls are delicious. They're like bacon - they taste good on anything. But if you eat them, you completely remove them from existence! They can't move on or... or be reincarnated! Huh. I never really gave it much thought. Besides, what do you mean by reincarnation anyway? You know, being reborn as someone or something else. Which means different body, different memories, different experiences, yes? So isn't being reborn as "something else" the same as being "removed from existence"? I... I... eating souls isn't right! That depends on your definition of "right". All living things survive by eating other living things. So what? You're a god. You should be above all that! Gods are above living things, which doesn't necessarily mean we care about them.
This is the Peppermint basslet (Liopropoma rubre), a charming (and sought-after) little predator that hails from the deeper reefs in the general vicinity of the Caribbean. But we're not here to talk about the adult, no, we're here to talk about babies.
The eggs produced by a spawning session are rather typical:
As are the things that hatch from them:
But give the little guys a couple weeks:
No one actually knows why. The theories include siphonophore mimicry and simple distraction. But the plot thickens after their 50th day:
The mysterious sacs get proportionally larger, and it's been suggested that each one mimics an entire larval fish, complete with a yellowish gut-patch and black eye-spots, probably in order to fool them into making off with their dorsal stringer and not their body. The structure is actually rather variable, possessing up to eleven sacs. That second, newer filament, while usually bare, can also, rarely, develop enigmatic doohickeys of it's own.
Keep in mind, that up until now, these larvae have been unidentifiable due to all reef basslets' similarity when very young.
Here we have one who's already settled into a miniature version of his adult lifestyle, having retired from the plankton at around seventy days old, soon to shed his now apparently useless baubles, and already working on replacing them with colorful big-boy stripes.
But don't we all come to miss our childhoods, even if we were completely ridiculous?
A noxious pest of livestock and stored grain products.
Gender:
Chitinous
Tartarus
Apr 8 2017, 06:23 PM
Those plug-headed ants look really interesting. Don't some termites also have something similar?
I don't think so, unless you just mean soldiers/major workers using their enlarged heads to block tunnels which is very commonly seen in both ants and termites. How could you bring up Cephalotes, without including a picture of the fabulous door- head in action?
Spoiler: click to toggle
There's also ants in the genus Colobopsis (formerly included with other carpenter ants in Camponotus) that also has majors with heads flattened into doors, but in a more comical fashion.
Blame is the playing of children and is given to many like a gift that cannot be returned. Acceptance is the tool of the mature that is rarely loaned out.
Polyglyphanotids (or, as Darren Niah refered to them recently, boreoteiioids). A group of extinct squamates from the Cretaceous that could masticate.
"god knows you will finally see,scars will heal but were meant to bleed
Also known as:
Archeo or that guy who misspells
didn´t those squamates survive into the cenozoic or I´m confusing them with another group
Astarte an alt eocene world,now on long hiatus but you never know Fanauraa; The rebirth of Aotearoa future evo set in new zealand after a mass extinction coming soon......a world that was seeded with earth´s weridest and who knows what is coming next...........
" I have to know what the world will be looking throw a future beyond us I have to know what could have been if fate acted in another way I have to know what lies on the unknown universe I have to know that the laws of thee universe can be broken throw The Spec I gain strength to the inner peace the is not good of evil only nature and change,the evolution of all livings beings" "
Spoiler: click to toggle
coming soon......a world seeded by outcast clades and some important easily forgotten ones.the world of the caecilians and company and who knows what is coming next...........[comming soon/spoiler]
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Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Lyvatan The Wise? I thought not. It’s not a story the newbies would tell you. It’s a forum legend. Lyvatan was an admin of the forum, so powerful and so wise he could use science to influence the human imagination to create life… He had such a knowledge of the forum that he could even keep the ones he cared about from leaving.Speculative Evolution is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural. He became so powerful… the only thing he was afraid of was losing his admin power, which eventually, of course, he did. Unfortunately, he taught his apprentice everything he knew, then his apprentice banned him while he was offline. Ironic. He could save others from leaving the community, but not himself.
Speccer´s Quotes "The moral of the story: never trust a catfish"-Bettleboy
A huntsman spider that wastes time on the internet because it has nothing better to do
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DINOCARID
Apr 8 2017, 09:18 AM
The mysterious sacs get proportionally larger, and it's been suggested that each one mimics an entire larval fish, complete with a yellowish gut-patch and black eye-spots, probably in order to fool them into making off with their dorsal stringer and not their body. The structure is actually rather variable, possessing up to eleven sacs. That second, newer filament, while usually bare, can also, rarely, develop enigmatic doohickeys of it's own.
I swear, only ray finned fish are capable of this shit among vertebrates. What other vertebrate does this? What other vertebrate have species where individuals can literally meld together. What other vertebrate lodges itself onto the gills of another animal and stays there for much of it's life? What other vertebrate can swallow animals many times it's size, stretching it's stomach to the point of bursting? What other vertebrate has arthropod-like legs? What other vertebrate has multiple transparent species? What other vertebrate has body that's little more than an amorphous blob? What other vertebrate has multiple species that produce frekin electricity?
Ray fins are clearly the best vertebrates. Suck it amniotes.
Sorry about my burst of excitement. Here's an obscure species.
Similar to the door head ants, the ravine trapdoor spider has a strangely shaped abdomen for closing off it's burrow.
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
"Arthropod respiratory systems aren't really "inefficient", they're just better suited to their body size. It would be quite inefficient for a tiny creature that can easily get all the oxygen it needs through passive diffusion to have a respiratory system that wastes energy on muscles that pump air into sacs. (Hence why lungless salamanders, uniquely miniscule and hyperabundant tetrapods, have ditched their lungs in favor of breathing with their skin and buccal mucous membranes.) But large, active insects already use muscles to pump air in and out of their spiracles, and I don't see why their tracheae couldn't develop pseudo- lungs if other conditions pressured them to grow larger."-HangingTheif
"Considering the lifespans of modern non- insect arthropods (decade-old old millipedes, 50 year old tarantulas, 100+ year old lobsters) I wouldn't be surprised if Arthropleura had a lifespan exceeding that of a large testudine"-HangingTheif
"Humans have a tribal mindset and it's not alien for tribes to war on each other. I mean, look at the atrocities chimpanzee tribes do to each other. Most of people's groupings and big conflicts in history are directly or obliquely manifestations of this tribal mindset."-Sceynyos-yis
"He's the leader of the bunch You know his Coconut Gun is finally back to fire in spurts. His Coconut Gun Can make you smile If he shoots ya it's firing in spurts. His Coconut Gun Is bigger, faster, stronger too! He's the gun member of the Coconut Crew! HUH!
C.G.! Coconut Gun! C.G.! Co-Coconut Gun! Shoot yourself with a Coconut Gun! HUH!"-Kamineigh
"RIP, rest in Peytoia."-Little
"In Summary: Piss on Lovecraft's racist grave by making lewds of Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep.
Then eat arby's and embrace the void."-Kamineigh
"Dougal Dixon rule 34."-Sayornis
Phylogeny of the arthropods and some related groups
Blame is the playing of children and is given to many like a gift that cannot be returned. Acceptance is the tool of the mature that is rarely loaned out.
Archeoraptor
Apr 9 2017, 10:53 AM
didn´t those squamates survive into the cenozoic or I´m confusing them with another group
I swear, only ray finned fish are capable of this shit among vertebrates. What other vertebrate does this? What other vertebrate have species where individuals can literally meld together. What other vertebrate lodges itself onto the gills of another animal and stays there for much of it's life? What other vertebrate can swallow animals many times it's size, stretching it's stomach to the point of bursting? What other vertebrate has arthropod-like legs? What other vertebrate has multiple transparent species? What other vertebrate has body that's little more than an amorphous blob? What other vertebrate has multiple species that produce frekin electricity?
Don't snakes do the stretchy stomach thing? Well, probably not to the same extent. But yes, it's amazing what a few hundred million years of parallel evolution can do.
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.
Protectorates of the Proan Empire
The Sundered Realms - A fantasy realm where the world is divided into different sections. (Following names subject to change)
The Gavell Kingdom
The Everdark Forest
The Lunar Tundra
The Sand Sea
The Asteroid Cloud
The Rotting Shard
The Orbital River
The Outer Shadow
Bottle Beasts - This Universes version of Pokemon.
Worlds Impacted by the Enlightened/Visceral War
The 'Verse Whale - The Homeworld of the two forces, a planet sized organism, and the unique life that has flourished on it.
замороженный конец - An Ice Age world populated by tripodal organisms.
[To Be Named] - A world of creatures with an arm for a head
[To Be Named] - The Homeworld of a species where only the males are sapient.
[To Be Named] - The home of a race of carnivorous, trap building beings.
[To Be Named] - A planet of organisms that can link their minds, where two forms of intelligence have arisen.
Unaffiliated Universes
[To Be Named] - A parallel earth where the Synapsids took over after the Permian Extinction, among other resulting changes.
نيو نيو امستردام - An abandoned Dyson Cylinder containing an Ecumenopolis now catering to our former pets and pests. (A concept developed entirely separate from DroidSyber's Arcology, I swear.)
The Bleed - A vast universe where physics are more a suggestion than a rule.
Parakosmos Minor - Known Earth Pocket Universes, Natural or Artificial.
Island of Marsupials and Armadillos off the coast of South America
A world inhabited by Woodpecker descendants (Again, not meant to be a clone of Serina, I in no way have that much detail ready for this.)
Katiwala - Your typical Lost World...if i decide to go that route...
(And this is just the spec related stuff)
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