| 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. While unregistered users are able to browse the forum on a basic level, registering an account provides additional forum access not visible to guests as well as the ability to join in discussions and contribute yourself! Registration is free and instantaneous. Join our community today! |
| Tim Morris's Timeline | |
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| Topic Started: Feb 17 2017, 11:12 AM (1,269 Views) | |
| Scrublord | Feb 17 2017, 11:12 AM Post #1 |
Father Pellegrini
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So, just today Tim Morris (aka Pristichampsus) put up a new speculative biology project--a timeline of the next 2.8 billion years of life on Earth. Check it out! http://millionsafter.weebly.com |
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My Projects: The Neozoic Redux Valhalla--Take Three! The Big One Deviantart Account: http://elsqiubbonator.deviantart.com In the end, the best advice I could give you would be to do your project in a way that feels natural to you, rather than trying to imitate some geek with a laptop in Colorado. --Heteromorph | |
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| Beetleboy | Feb 17 2017, 11:18 AM Post #2 |
neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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Ah yeah, took a quick look at that earlier. Seems pretty good! |
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| trex841 | Feb 17 2017, 02:59 PM Post #3 |
Entity
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I was trying to remember why that name was so familiar. This should be most interesting 
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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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| peashyjah | Feb 17 2017, 05:53 PM Post #4 |
Bydo
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Sounds so awesome and interesting |
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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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| Dakka! | Feb 17 2017, 06:04 PM Post #5 |
Prime Specimen
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Slightly unrealistic with the tardigrades and antelope rabbits but awesome! |
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"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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| Tartarus | Feb 17 2017, 07:24 PM Post #6 |
Prime Specimen
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Pretty interesting project. I like how it takes speculation on future evolution all the way to the last days of life on Earth.
Edited by Tartarus, Feb 17 2017, 07:24 PM.
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| CaledonianWarrior96 | Feb 17 2017, 08:11 PM Post #7 |
An Awesome Reptile
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I see the common wall lizard does well for a while |
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Come check out and subscribe to my projects on the following subforums; Future Planet (V.2): the Future Evolution of Life on Earth (Evolutionary Continuum) The Meuse Legacy: An Alternative Outcome of the Mosasaur (Alternative Evolution) Terra Cascus: The Last Refuge of the Dinosaurs (Alternative Evolution) - Official Project - Foundation The Beryoni Galaxy: The Biologically Rich and Politically Complex State of our Galaxy (Habitational Zone) - Beryoni Critique Thread (formerly: Aliens of Beryoni) The Ecology of Skull Island: An Open Project for the Home of King Kong (Alternative Universe) The Ecology of Wakanda: An Open Project for the Home of Marvel's Black Panther (Alternative Universe) (Click bold titles to go to page. To subscribe click on a project, scroll to the bottom of the page and click "track topic" on the bottom right corner) And now, for something completely different
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| Dakka! | Feb 17 2017, 09:00 PM Post #8 |
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Prime Specimen
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I'm slightly annoyed by the way he gives the wall lizards pseudofur. |
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"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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| Scrublord | Feb 18 2017, 09:41 AM Post #9 |
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Father Pellegrini
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I don't have a problem with it. If an organism develops an endothermic metabolism (as happened, as far as we know, in mammals and archosaurs) it's probably going to have some sort of integument. |
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My Projects: The Neozoic Redux Valhalla--Take Three! The Big One Deviantart Account: http://elsqiubbonator.deviantart.com In the end, the best advice I could give you would be to do your project in a way that feels natural to you, rather than trying to imitate some geek with a laptop in Colorado. --Heteromorph | |
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| Dragonthunders | Feb 18 2017, 11:06 AM Post #10 |
The ethereal archosaur in blue
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It would be more appropriate to say "filaments", because scales are a type of integument. |
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Projects "Active" projects The Future is Far Welcome to the next chapters of the evolution of life on earth, travel the across the earth on a journey that goes beyond the limits, a billion years of future history in the making. The SE giants project Wonder what is the big of the big on speculative evolution? no problem, here is the answer Coming one day Age of Mankind Humanity fate and its possible finals. The Long Cosmic Journey The history outside our world. The alternative paths The multiverse, the final frontier... Holocene park: Welcome to the biggest adventure of the last 215 million years, where the age of mammals comes to life again! Cambrian mars: An interesting experiment on an unprecedented scale, the life of a particular and important period in the history of our planet, the cambric life, has been transported to a terraformed and habitable mars in an alternative past. Two different paths, two different worlds, but same life and same weirdness. My deviantart | |
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| Hybrid | Feb 18 2017, 09:43 PM Post #11 |
May Specula Grant you Bountiful Spec!
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Reading through this is like going through a time machine and looking at old era type future evolution projects. It suffers from some very similar reasoning, tropes, and other weird things. In order to elaborate, I'll have to go through the project.
Simple enough, but also we know that goats survived from the 90 million year section. Yet, despite having at least a few a few larger herbivores surviving (goats and boars), we see that smaller animals for some reason begin to fill that role. It is expected for that to occur in at least some ways, but here it gets a bit ridiculous. I'll explain this more later. Similar to old future evolution projects, deer and other very adaptable animals don't survive for some reason. I think, just like how older future evolution scenarios play out, this project ignores the strangeness and bizarre nuances of the anthropogenic mass extinction. Humans aren't getting rid of species like how mass extinctions got rid of species before, humans are weirdly selective yet unselective at the same time. Overall sure, large and specialized animals will die out, but relatively large generalists have been able to do fine with us. Deers for the most part are pretty generalistic, and have done pretty well with humans. Their populations boomed from us getting rid of their native predators, and we even brought them all over the world. What about camels, which at least their domestic forms have done well with humans and at least dromedary camels have become invasive in Australia? In desertification of many areas in the future, they'll do fine and nothing is stopping them from radiating into new niches. There's even invasive cows in some areas. Goats are all over the place and are very generalistic, and what about more general species of antelope? Oh and while all those die out, dolphins still survive. Only going with pigs also brings some consequences, like what about pig relatives like the collared peccary. I could list a lot of other examples of both feral and wild animals, but overall it's way too simple to say "all 'large' animals die out, except this tiny group". Let's move on though the project though, I can't just talk about one minor thing in the project. Going back to what I mentioned, a lot of smaller animals tend to get niches that you'd expect the existing larger animals that have more adaptions to those niches get. An example comes 5 million years in the future with the hedgeboar: understandable if it evolved and lived in isolation, but these live in mainland Europe alongside actual boars to which fill that similar niche. Which is faster to appear to fill that niche, a slightly more opportunistic pig or a hedgehog to somehow evolve all the traits needed to not just fill that niche but to successfully compete with pigs (competitive exclusion principle would suggest that the species, the pig, which is more adapted towards the niche would be able to outcompete the lesser adapted protohedgeboar; either preventing them from evolving or pushing them towards a different niche.)? Whatever though, that's just a specific species. We can see through the Lactozoic that rodents grow large and fill many ungulate niches, alongside actual ungulates. Like I said previously, to some extent it makes sense. Rodents grew large in the past alongside a different breed of ungulates in South America, so why not here? The problem is that pigs (and goats) would easily become prevalent in those niches before rodents as it seem dominate them. This gets really weird in the project too. In 5 million years there actually is a large species of pig that fills the large herbivorous niche, yet in 20 million years they're seemingly gone with no explanation; instead there's cowrats which fill the same basic niche as well as large groundhogs in North America. What happened, also what was going on with the pigs in the Americas? At the same time antelope-like swine appear, but later on they disappear and gracile ungulate-rats appear, again with no explanation. The project seems to be either having rodents slowly take over or it's being contradictory with no reasoning. Honestly I feel like if pigs, goats, dolphins, and other creatures like even cats didn't survive, the project would make a bit more sense at least. He wouldn't have to worry about juggling these groups with the new groups that appear from smaller stocks. Speaking of the goats, this leads to my next criticism. Throughout most of the Lactozoic, we see many groups try to become 'gracile-ungulate' type creatures. In 5 million years we see galloping hares, but nothing really happens with them and I guess they disappear, then we see pigs try to do that with the swinelope, then 90 million years we see rodents literally called false antelope. All of a sudden though we see also in the same time that there's this creature called a billgoat; a beaked descendant of goats. Only now, there's an actual antelope-y creature described and all that's said about their evolution is:
Okay but why do they only exist there? Why didn't goats radiate into those niches before? There are no answers and that's a major problem with the project: the lack of explanation. Those gracile hares? Nothing ever mentions them again. Swinelope? Same thing. On the other hand we see the evolution of some groups, with the piggy-dragon to future descendants. Meanwhile, many other creatures are left hanging or appear for no reason. This makes me think this project is more a bunch of unrelated pre-existing concepts put together, with some added creatures made for the scenario. I could be wrong though, I don't know how he thought it up. It doesn't help that a lot of the species are just re-hashed old trope species that used to plague that type of scenario; the galloping hare and the predatory rat later on are just few of many. Some creatures, like the kraken, even look like they're in the wrong project all together. Perhaps the issue comes from format. Morris's style of choosing species is an issue in many of his projects. He doesn't show a wide variety of species, which works for describing the diversity in a specific environment but becomes an issue when he tries to describe entire worlds in a single page. This is one of my major criticisms of his Exobiology 101: he only shows a fraction of the diversity of life on those worlds: maybe a phylum at most. That's like mainly representing Earth with tetrapods and maybe a few fish, and only mentioning all other life in a few paragraphs. This applies to this project, in a slightly different way. He's trying to show the new forms of life that exists in a period of time in one page using a few species as example. Perhaps if he focused more on describing the evolution of groups of animals and used the species as examples that could circumvent a lot of the problems. Instead he's limiting himself to one paragraph for each species, which harms the project and makes it hard to understand what happens. As a whole this is the primary problem with most future evolution projects that show many periods of time (especially the old ones that try to do what that try to do what TFIW did): they don't depict life like it's a moving fluid, always in continuum, and Earth changing. A species isn't a real thing, it's a snapshot of a population through time. Dragonthunder's The Future if Far deals with this by using many types of formats and the describing the evolution of a wide variety of groups, and so far it works. In summary: it's not easy to describe life in one period of time, let alone trying to describe life through the 4th dimension. I'm not saying that Morris should focus on every lineage in the world, but describe the ones he decided to use more. Another issue is how not a lot of groups appear very derived, they don't try "new" things and the ones that do don't really diversify very much. The large mammals that appear in the Mediozoic are hardly different from the previous large mammals of the Lactozoic, which are basically just repeating what mammals did in the Cenozoic; even to the extreme (the ratmen are basically just rat-humans, the dassiephant is just another big trunked afrothere, the false antelope is exactly what the name implies, and so on). Instead of new lineages of mammals becoming the next prevalent group in Mediozoic, it's groups that we have now (rats, squirrels, shrews, etc) that have apparently remained unchanged throughout more than 100 million years. That's what I mean by treating life as a continuum through time: it's not like only a few groups are evolving, everything is! Some evolve slowly, but mammals aren't known for evolving slowly. Why couldn't a new groups of mammal appear, then in the Mediozoic radiate and produce their own forms instead of basically reusing modern lineages. What if a hypothetical group of mammals with beaks evolved and radiated instead, or a group of armless jerboa like creatures? That would lead into 'new' mammals, not just repeating what the Lactozoic did. Other examples of this include the re-lizard, how besides the squat-millipedes there's no new groups of arthropods (they're basically just bigger versions of today arthropods for the most part), and maybe something else I haven't considered. Other then that, there's just general plausibility issues for specific species. One weird thing throughout the project is having exposed teeth. Why do the krono-dolphins have exposed teeth, when most cetaceans don't? I can only think of one species that does (ignoring the tusked beaked whales), the South Asian river dolphin, but they have especially long teeth. The krono-dolphin isn't even specialized to catch fish, it's more like an orca in niche. Why do some many derived lizards have exposed teeth, even though modern lizards don't? We know that it's likely that dinosaurs didn't, why would these just undevelop their lips and make their teeth more brittle? It seems like after they become less 'lizardy', they just resort to exposing their teeth like 90s reconstruction of prehistoric reptiles. Why are the ratmen humanoid? It's not like sapients need to be humanoid, and rodents aren't any different. What humans have comes from specific circumstances, it's unlikely ratmen would evolve parallel to that and produce a similar form. Why not a jerboa or springhare like posture, considering these have tails and digitigrade hindlimbs? How did the vestigial hindlimbs in boas, which have become so reduced they're just spurs used during courtship, become developed flippers in the dire snark (also what's with the "fore-flippers"?)? Why did so many groups of arthropods conveniently develop more advanced respiratory systems at around the similar time at the right time for it to be useful (there would be no reason before, since it wouldn't really benefit them in anyway), and why didn't vertebrates radiate very after the Saurozoic? Those creatures wouldn't really allow the arthropods to get big anyway for the most part. What allowed land arthropods to become big before seems to be to a large part lack of competition and stuff. In the end, this project has that old-age future evolution funk, and for the most part the criticisms What I gave could easily apply to basically all of the old future evo projects in some way, for example the old project Postozoic, only changing it a little. I apologize that this is so disorganized, this isn't supposed to be formal criticism type post. More so just what I thought after reading and digesting it. This has gone on for way too long, so I will end it here. |
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If I sound rude while critiquing, I apologize in hindsight! "To those like the misguided; look at the story of Man, and come to your senses! It is not the destination, but the trip that matters. What you do today influences tomorrow, not the other way around. Love Today, and seize All Tomorrows!" - Nemo Ramjet ﾉ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ヽ 
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| trex841 | Feb 18 2017, 10:32 PM Post #12 |
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Entity
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Really, nothing that I saw there surprised me. I'm familiar with this guys work, and this is right in line with the stuff I've seen on his Deviantart page. I'm pretty sure the prototype of this project was a timeline for different Primeval creatures of his. It even has the same eras; continued mammal, then reptile, then bug. I mean I still like it, but I'm a fan of cheese. |
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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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