Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]
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!

Username:   Password:
Add Reply
Questions that don't need their own topics vol.2; New and fresh
Topic Started: Jan 4 2018, 11:18 AM (26,895 Views)
Chuditch
Member Avatar
Dasyurid
 *  *  *  *  *  *
CaledonianWarrior96
Jan 5 2018, 04:53 PM
If the Eromanga basin was filled in by a sea for millions of years, what would the land surrounding the basin at the coast be? Would it just be desert or could the sea support woodland environments like mangrove forests for example?
Given that the Eromanga Sea existed during the Cretaceous, it would have been surrounded by lush forest. Desert is only a recent phenomena for Australia, appearing in the last 5 million years. Fossils from the Winton Formation of Queensland show ferns, ginkgoes, gymnosperms, and angiosperms. There is evidence of rivers, creeks, forests, swamps and coastal estuaries.
My wildlife YouTube channel
Projects
Online Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Rodlox
Superhuman
 *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Abacaba
Jan 5 2018, 03:10 PM
Actually, that's an interesting idea: What if you had two c-shaped plates that hit each other at the points of the c, so that each was both subducting and being subducted under the other? (And yes, this isn't all that relevant to the specific Africa-Eurasia collision.)
mountains of fun!

(pun intentional)
.---------------------------------------------.
Parts of the Cluster Worlds:
"Marsupialless Australia" (what-if) & "Out on a Branch" (future evolution) & "The Earth under a still sun" (WIP)
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
CaledonianWarrior96
Member Avatar
An Awesome Reptile
 *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Rodlox
Jan 5 2018, 06:31 PM
Abacaba
Jan 5 2018, 03:10 PM
Actually, that's an interesting idea: What if you had two c-shaped plates that hit each other at the points of the c, so that each was both subducting and being subducted under the other? (And yes, this isn't all that relevant to the specific Africa-Eurasia collision.)
mountains of fun!

(pun intentional)
This is the wrong thread but Rodlox is banned for making that pun

couldn't resist
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
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
LλmbdaExplosion
Member Avatar
Vieja Argentea the oscar cichlid
 *  *  *  *  *  *
If the sea level rise,the europe will be become again a string of islands like in the Middle Cretaceous?
Edited by LλmbdaExplosion, Jan 5 2018, 06:53 PM.
When life give you lemons.............Don't make lemonade!Make life to take the lemons back!Get mad and than.........Yell,demand and burn down their homes.




Prepare for unforeseen consequences,Mr. Freeman!
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Dragonthunders
Member Avatar
The ethereal archosaur in blue

It seems that no, much of the region would be flooded and would become shallow seas, with a variety of small and different islands from northern parts, however, it would not be the same as what was once in the Cretaceous.

Posted Image
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


Online Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Zorcuspine
Member Avatar
Enjoying our azure blue world

Dragonthunders
Jan 5 2018, 08:58 PM
It seems that no, much of the region would be flooded and would become shallow seas, with a variety of small and different islands from northern parts, however, it would not be the same as what was once in the Cretaceous.

Spoiler: click to toggle
Interesting. What's the reason that Europe was a group of islands in the past, but wouldn't be now with the same sea level as when it was?
Posted Image

Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
ÐK
Member Avatar
Adult
 *  *  *  *  *  *
I imagine it would be because other factors that led to the very high sea levels of the Cretaceous, primarily those relating to sea floor spreading, just aren't there anymore.

Sea floor spreading rates were on the whole much faster than today, so there was a lot more buoyant young oceanic crust being made, and the crust at the edge of the ocean basins was still young enough to not have sunk much further than their initial depth at the ridge. This means there's less volume in the basins, and so the ocean water is pushed up and floods the continents. Combined with the lack of ice caps, this makes for some very high sea levels.

Compared to now, where spreading rates are a good bit slower, and the ocean basins are older now so that the older crust has gotten denser and sunk, increasing the depth and volume of the ocean basins and so containing more sea water than they did during the Cretaceous.

A map like that only accounts for modern day sea levels with the addition of water from the ice caps. If you want higher sea levels than that, you'll also need to factor in sea floor spreading rates in the future.
~Projects~

Earth Without Earth; Like nothing on Earth...


Quote:
 
In the absence of proper data, speculate wildy.

~Mark Witton, Pterosaurs (Chapter 3, page 18)


Quote:
 
pfft, DK making a project

~Troll Man, Skype (15/2/15)


Quote:
 
I'm sorry but in what alternative universe would thousands of zebras be sent back in time by some sort of illegal time travel group to change history and preparing them by making gigantic working animatronic allosaurs?

~Komodo, Zebra's sent back in time (4/1/13)
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
LλmbdaExplosion
Member Avatar
Vieja Argentea the oscar cichlid
 *  *  *  *  *  *
Thanks for the info!
When life give you lemons.............Don't make lemonade!Make life to take the lemons back!Get mad and than.........Yell,demand and burn down their homes.




Prepare for unforeseen consequences,Mr. Freeman!
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
whachamacallit2
Member Avatar
Guy who yells at squirrels
 *  *  *  *  *  *  *
ÐK
Jan 6 2018, 01:51 AM
I imagine it would be because other factors that led to the very high sea levels of the Cretaceous, primarily those relating to sea floor spreading, just aren't there anymore.

Sea floor spreading rates were on the whole much faster than today, so there was a lot more buoyant young oceanic crust being made, and the crust at the edge of the ocean basins was still young enough to not have sunk much further than their initial depth at the ridge. This means there's less volume in the basins, and so the ocean water is pushed up and floods the continents. Combined with the lack of ice caps, this makes for some very high sea levels.

Compared to now, where spreading rates are a good bit slower, and the ocean basins are older now so that the older crust has gotten denser and sunk, increasing the depth and volume of the ocean basins and so containing more sea water than they did during the Cretaceous.

A map like that only accounts for modern day sea levels with the addition of water from the ice caps. If you want higher sea levels than that, you'll also need to factor in sea floor spreading rates in the future.
To add to this, there's probably been a significant amount of uplift in Europe since the Cretaceous. The Alpine orogeny (Africa kissing Europe) started in the early Cretaceous, but it really turned the mountain building engines on during the Paleocene and the Eocene. The size of this orogeny is so widespread that pretty much all of modern-day central and southern Europe are a lot higher than they likely were in the Cretaceous.
Edited by whachamacallit2, Jan 6 2018, 10:47 AM.
Click for shameless self plug!
Spoiler: click to toggle

Get you one at http://whachamacallit1.deviantart.com/

Learn the life, history, and fate of the tidally locked planet Asteria at: http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/topic/5725927/1
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Inceptis
Member Avatar
In-tro-vertebrate
 *  *  *  *  *
There have already been a fair amount of thought experiments going around about the potential of what could happen if the Earth stopped spinning, my most favorite possibility being the flooding of the poles and the creation of Equatorialis; a new, world-spanning and near-uninhabitable continent that exists solely because the halt of centripetal force would be felt by the oceans and atmosphere before the crust and mantle migrated back to a sphere from an oblate spheroid.

Posted Image

Given that equilibrium would likely be reached within 10,000 years and the continents would re-stabilize, there's virtually no circumstance of tidal force I can think of that could slow the Earth fast enough to cause visible dis-equilibrium. Even Mercury at just one-tenth the mass of Earth and an orbit much further in(both making it more susceptible to tidal force from the sun) is thought to have reached it's 2:3 resonance in 10 million years. That's close to what I want/need, but Mercury is uninhabitable.

To explain a bit more what I'm asking, I'm trying to find a way to cause such visible dis-equilibrium in an alien world so that it would drastically affect the evolution of life on said world. Here's my own thought experiment on how it could be done:

A planet slightly more massive than Earth (1.2 Earth's to have a number) gets flung out of its system during it's Cambrian equivalent due to disturbance caused by a near encounter with a high velocity star. After hundreds of millions of years floating through the cold darkness of interstellar space, its life only just sustained by deep-sea vents, our planet gets caught in a highly eccentric orbit around a binary red dwarf system with a gas giant. Due to even more luck, its 15-hour spin relative to its new orbit is retrograde. Now, I'm not sure if this is how tidal forces works, but because of its very unlikely circumstances, the combined attraction of the three system bodies and our planet's fast retrograde spin, its orbit simultaneously shrinks in distance and eccentricity while its spin slows down. This causes extreme volcanism on our planet, giving it a rude awakening from it's eon-long glaciation. The tidal force present kills the planet's spin fast enough to cause the poles to flood and the reborn atmosphere at the equator to be thin, but slowly enough for it to last for millions of years. To wrap it up, the gas giant and the binary companion act on our planet like Venus and Jupiter act on Mercury, creating a 2:3 resonance.

I'm not asking if it's likely; the scenario's probability is a fraction of a percent compared to the chance Earth will be torn apart by Venus or Mercury before the Sun eats it. What I'm asking is if I don't understand tidal forces and this scenario is 100% impossible.
This was getting fairly big.
Spoiler: click to toggle
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Lycaon
Member Avatar
All hail Odin! All hail the Allfather!
 *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
What if the world's rainforests were decimated because of a meteorite strike a la K-Pg extinction or some other catastrophic event. Would insectivorous birds like tropical swifts and cuckoos go extinct? The reason I'm conflicted about the subject is that, while the majority of their foodsource will probably remain, they'll lose their places to nest and perch. I imagine they're vulnerable on the ground as that is not a place they're adapted to. So will they go extinct because of this? Or will they be able to push through?
Lamna
 
Winners don't do maths.


The true meaning of hypocrisy
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
GreatAuk
Member Avatar
Northern Penguin
 *  *  *  *  *
I have to questions.


How did Birds survive the K-Pg?

Did spinosaurs have feathers?
Let us dance together.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Nyarlathotep
Member Avatar
The Creeping Chaos
 *  *  *  *  *  *  *
GreatAuk
Jan 7 2018, 08:19 AM
I have to questions.


How did Birds survive the K-Pg?

Did spinosaurs have feathers?
It's often believed to be their mating and nesting habits, as well as many living around freshwater, which tends to have the highest survivor rates during extinction events. That plus they took care of their young unlike some other groups.

Impossible to say for certain right now, but probably not. Much more derived (as in closer to modern birds) theropods like Tyrannosaurus seem to have had less feathers than scales, and while it could have been due to how huge Tyrannosaurus was, Spinosaurids weren't exactly small either. We have no evidence for feathers outside of coelurosaurs (with the possible exception of Kulinadromeus, and it's quite likely those filaments are different in structure and are thus independently evolved from similar genes) as what we thought were feather pores on Concavenator turned out to just be muscle grooves, and Scuriamimus is a coelurosaur, not a Megalosaur. So basically, we don't have any evidence for non-coelurosaur theropods having integument of any kind. It's not impossible, but the evidence at the moment seems to suggest otherwise. Oh, and Spinosaurs were aquatic too, too various degrees, with Spinosaurus itself seemingly the most.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Archeoraptor
Member Avatar
"A living paradox"
 *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Lycaon
Jan 6 2018, 06:22 PM
What if the world's rainforests were decimated because of a meteorite strike a la K-Pg extinction or some other catastrophic event. Would insectivorous birds like tropical swifts and cuckoos go extinct? The reason I'm conflicted about the subject is that, while the majority of their foodsource will probably remain, they'll lose their places to nest and perch. I imagine they're vulnerable on the ground as that is not a place they're adapted to. So will they go extinct because of this? Or will they be able to push through?
roadrunner is a uckoo and tehre are probably ground nesting regualr coockos but as nyar answered about birds in the k-pg ground nestign probably gave some birds the upper hand so I would say most arboreal oens would die unelss they are specialy adpatable ones,and those are excepntions afew many generelistics die out in the k-pg
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
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
IIGSY
Member Avatar
A huntsman spider that wastes time on the internet because it has nothing better to do
 *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Nyarlathotep
Jan 7 2018, 08:58 AM
feather pores on Concavenator turned out to just be muscle grooves
Is that confirmed?
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
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
2 users reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous)
Members: Icthyander
Go to Next Page
« Previous Topic · General Spec · Next Topic »
Add Reply