PAART | MESOCAMBRIAN | CAMBRIAN | PART 2.5

PLANETARY MODEL | PART 8 | A MORE DETAILED APPROACH TO PLATE TECTONICS - II

FIGURING OUT A PLANET'S INTERNAL STRUCTURE

Let's first look at what we DO know about the terrestrial planets - with the exception on Earth - all planet's Iron Oxide x Iron Sulfide content seems to follow a power law:

FeO ratio ~ 1,75 * 0,9^(core/planet mass ratio)

And the further you are from the Sun, the more iron oxides you're likely find - the Earth and the Moon are an special case, being outliers to the trend much probably to the Theia Collision event, a planet with different make-up would have mashed against Earth and changed it's composition ever so slightly - giving it a bigger core with more iron oxides.

The default density of Paart as of our Planet Classification Guide points out - would be of 3,06 g/cm³ up to 3,39 g/cm³, Paart is already slightly so heavy with 3,8 g/cm³, a thing we can explain with the Taaf event of birth, when two protoplanets did collide nearby, and Paart accreted their material, mainly metals, accounting for 5% of the planet's current mass (or about 0,04 Me), what did not accrete or was ejected, accreted into the moon Taaf.

The core ratio of a planet in the terrestrial planets seems to follow:

C ratio = 0,28^(AU) * star mass

In a way that,

FeO ratio ~ 1,75 * 0,9^(100 * (star mass * 0,28^(AU)))

We get Paart would have a core that's at least 19% Paart's mass and 26% at most - and iron oxide levels comparable to that of Mars, about 15,7% or twice as Earth's.

Earth's core is about 32,5% of the planet's mass for perspective, the inner core is smaller at about 1,6% of the planet's mass.

Paart's inner core about 1/60th that of it's mass as well, we may have an inner core that's 1274km in radius. While it's outer core would be 3185,5km in radius, with respective densities of 11,47g/cm³ and 9,85g/cm³.

So what do we have? Composition, highlighted green and red what Paart has more or less than Earth.
O 38%; Si 20% ; Bi 14%; Al 9%; Fe 8%; Ti 5%; Ca 3%; 2% K, 0,5% Zn, Na, Mg and other trace elements ~0,5%.

Earth is 46% Oxygen, ~28% silicon, 8% aluminum and 5% iron, mainly. Paart seems to be actually more dense than Earth, for some reason I didn't pay any attention to that.

The composition alone of the elements of Paart sum to a density of about 3,56g/cm³, which is laughable, but remember, we have switched some of the oxygen by bismuth metal, which when combined with sulfur, creates bismuthinite, which has a density of ~7g/cm³.

While on Earth much of it's interior is made of Olivine, which takes up Magnesium and Iron, both less dense than bismuth, but magnesium is rarer on Paart, so we are left with Iron-olivine, and bismuth silicates such as Sillénite, which is monstrously dense with 9,2g/cm³. The most common mineral in the mantle would be bismite, with a density of 8,9g/cm³, along with some small amounts of bismuth and iron sulfides (6,78g/cm³ and 4,84g/cm³).

For the mantle, we have 37% SiO2, 28,7% Fe2SiO4, 15,7% FeO, 5% Bi2O3, 4,5% Al2O3, 2,8% CaO, 2% Bi12SiO20, 2% TiO, 1% Bi2S3, 0,5% FeS, 0,5% ZnS, and 0,3% NiO - with a density of 4,28g/cm³.

The overall density of the planet would then go up to 5,55g/cm³, so...

Correcting for Mass, we would go from 0,798, to 1,167 Earth masses - or for Diameter, from 13.450km to 11.786km. In the first we have a gravity of 10,37m/s², while in the later we have a gravity of 9,14m/s².

FUTURE of PROJECT PAART

The crew has decided to make it smaller - there is three main consequences to that:

1. The Earth-like gravity suggests creatures would be under Earth-like biomechanical constraints, ie, have similar sized animals for certain roles, of course - that depends a lot on other factors too, but it is a big one.
2. The Earth-like gravity also implies a greater atmospheric pressure, initially 2,29atm - now, 2,94atm, that can mess a bit with animal respiration.
   
3. The increased atmospheric pressure does increase the temperatures too, from initially 18,5°C to 30,8°C - which ends up being optimal for bacterial growth, particularly cyanobacteria as we know it.
   

Compared to the terrestrial planets, Paart's structures looks like this:

Besides having lot's of text to correct by next few days regarding these factors - I'm alleviated to have noticed this in it's early phases - otherwise, we would actually have to halt the project right here.

Funfact - is probable that most if not - a good portion - of Paart's bismuth is on the upper mantle, because bismuth is diamagnetic, which means that it wants to flee from magnetic fields, the compounds would have ease arising from the convection currents but resist being dragged back into the planet's core due to the dynamo effect. So, lava flows would also spill out beautiful bismuth crystals, glasses, and metallic daubréeites.

- M.O. Valent, 02/10/2020

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PAART | SO FAR...

The Volar System pretty much formed in about 500 to 600 million years after the collapse of it's molecular cloud.

There are 5 planets in the Vol system, Veek, Hool, Paart, Seey, and Lahaart - plus, 1 T-class brown dwarf, Kaal, in the system's outskirts.

Paart is a Class T3-e world that orbits it's star at a distance of 166 million km. It does have a large moon, which formed by the nearby shock between two of proto-planets - whose the impossible product of vectors put the material into the orbit of Paart, and while Paart's soil is usually dark-red due it's carbides and bismuth rich mantle, Taaf's surface is white from titanium and aluminum rocks mostly.

It's atmosphere is mainly composed of Nitrogen, Oxygen and Carbon Dioxide, with trace quantities of Methane, Sulfur Dioxide, and Ammonia vapor.

This primitive atmospheric composition gives our planet a mean temperature of 40°C.

For comparison, Earth back in the Cambrian period were at about ~29ºC, with around 5~7% CO² in the atmosphere - but Paart has 2,5x the atmospheric mass of Earth.

 

HISTORY TIMELINE

 end of records

 

- M.O. Valent, last updated in, 02/11/2020

FROM FISH TO SALAMANDER | A CLADISTICS EXERCISE | PART 1

FROM EUSTHENOPTERON TO ICHTHYOSTEGA
(A JOURNEY TO THE LAND REALM)

"Exquisite specimens of Tiktaalik roseae discovered several years ago continue to function as rosetta stones for understanding the emergence of quadripeds on land" - H. Richard Lane, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Earth Sciences

Hello again, I'm M.O. Valent, at the moment the only producer of content to this blog, and for a while, I admit I've been very tempted to skip all those boring billions and give up to the 'somewhat accurate but cool fiction' thing, you may know that well from The World of Lisa post, I also considered to remove that messy post in particular - but, this may as well serve as an example of my messy endeavors about world building, in which I've reached as far as to come up with 15+ families of animals for a follow up from that point and beyond... It remained on the drawer for a long time still because I felt it would totally betray the blog's proposal itself

"[...] this blog is a way to publish my creations, I hope this is also a way to inspire other science fiction writers to better build their worlds, I already carry some content about it for the last 5 years and I hope to provide enough starting material for your creations." - M. O. Valent, 18/02/2019

And the case for Lisa and associates would fall well into the first point, but totally fail on the other two. See, I actually lost a lot of time trying to justify cool traits on those 'aliens' than to actually write hard science fiction - my initial idea was to create a world were creatures would be relatively small and bear iridescent bismuth structures as from scales and armor, that was it - it wouldn't be more than a poorly constructed exercise, however, that doesn't mean we can't get something useful from that scrap/sketch material.

So, if you ever feel something isn't right with your writing, stop, relax for a bit, and then take a cold look at what you have, if you're aiming feasibility in that sense, look for examples in the nature, that can sometimes take you to something like reading an obnoxious amount of papers to support a thing or disprove another, as long as the intent is to improve things up, that shouldn't make you a science-nazi though, but knowing what are you doing improve things a lot, that's why we study before an exam, or plan stuff before doing it.

That's also why you should have a small public or a friend to which you can talk about this stuff, so you don't stray from your objectives for a long time (like me, until a few weeks ago).

FROM FISH TO SALAMANDER

At the time, I was very excited about this project, making a planet from scratch and stuff, however, some points in history were a bit more exciting to me than others, which made me write about creatures for most of Paart's Paleozoic era, inspired by this march of progress, from fish to amphibian.

Simplified Tetrapod evolution from the late Devonian to the Upper Carboniferous

Subsequently, I came up with this simple graph as a guideline...

 Really simple Hexapod evolution march of progress

All of that, starting from an Eusthenopteron equivalent, which I so 'cReAtIvElY' named, Hexapterygia (six finned).

Generic Hexapterygia swim animation

I also went as far as to designing some of it's anatomy:

And now you may be asking yourself what is a Conodont? And there my friends, is where that frenzy began. At the start, I was just intending to build from this and beyond, pretty much like the youtuber Biblaridion came to make videos about (2 months AFTER Lisa's post and most of this material, I want to make clear that besides he have been much more organized than me, and already having a public, I'm not a copycat, nor he is by any way), and the thing that he's doing is some pretty good material you should take a look at, mainly on the cladistics topic.

Conodonts, or Conodontophores, first appear in the early Cambrian, and are found up the late Triassic

Conodonts, are a extinct class of animal, a slim jawless fish, similar to lampreys, getting it's name from it's conical teeth arrangements.

For quite sometime got myself wondering, what if certain classes of animals haven't been extinct, think of the several hominid species that could have colonized the planet instead of the Homo sapiens? Or what if some of the beardogs from the Miocene had survived and walked alongside humans? Or if the KT extinction didn't happen? Even more, how far would you have to come back in time and push the right piece out or into place to make the future stray into a completely alternate world?
Under the simplistic assumption that things would go similar to Earth's, I reached far into the late Cambrian aaaaaand...       I killed Pikaia, or what would later evolve to become it's equivalent on Paart.

Omae wa mou SHINDEIRU!

So, with the original chordates out of the way, a notochord analog would still evolve in order attend more complex tasks, with the characteristic still, that Paartians now would have the potential for multiple jaws (even though conodonts are jawless in a first moment).

And the story goes as follows with this cladogram:

This sketch is supposed to cover from the Cambrian explosion to the Devonian.

The X height marks an extinction event that kills almost the entirety of the Leptosaria branch of the Pseudochordates / Pseudoconodonts, the other side however thrived well in the new environment and flourished into the major classes of Xeno-fish.

Watch out for the H.ourakopis guy up there, it's about to become the Xsalamanders and Xturtles...

Yes, those were made in paint

And actually, I haven't really linked any major changes in the environment to those characteristics, other that the extinction of Eochordates and Leptosarians is due to pressures in the Cambrian Explosion itself.

Paartian fishes sketch

See, that after all this work, and a couple arts, all those fishes are really going to be is a sketch - isn't really a world I would like to see anymore, still, along the way, I've learned quite a lot more about the Paleozoic era and biology, and that this would be even more exciting under the light and work of more people, after all, who would I be working alone on this? For the good of us all, and for sake of a fun time, Project Paart have a brighter future as an Open World.

You can join the project by clicking here

We won't charge anything, all we ask is a slice of your time to help build a reliable source for other artists and sci-fi writers to inspire from

- M.O. Valent, 10/05/2020

PAART | MESOCAMBRIAN | CAMBRIAN | PART 2

IT'S THE CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION!

We finally arrived on what could be considered one of the most exciting turns on a planet's history

Before we get to build our bestiary full of weird ancient creatures, we must recap what happened so far in this world's history.

Paart been through 3,8 billion years of history, from it's formation, to the formation of it's little moon Taaf (which we will present later), to the origin of life in it's early seas, to glaciations, to super continents, and in resume - for the last 350Myr, Paart's been a messy and stormy world, about 20Mya, the super continent of Sthalika began to break apart, and with it's opening seas, came new ways and new habitats for life to explore, without much competition in this promised land, life began to experiment with brand new and exotic forms and lifestyles, starting an explosion of diversity that would be forever recorded in the mud of flooding valleys in the new continents.

Here we see the last genus of Albazoa die out - with the further breaking of cold oceanic currents, while the more versatile and complex Metazoans thrive in the calm and warm waters left after the last hypercane dissipated...

Cambrian Paart, 3850Myo

At the time Sthalika split, Paart's crust was divided in 8 plates, 2 of which were entirely under the Pannotic Ocean, half the mountain ranges from the formation of Sthalika eroded away with the severe Proterozoic weather, the water - previously locked in the Great Northern Ice Cap flooded plains the size of countries creating the Northern Sea and the Voreal Sea, some lakes later joined to ocean to form a complex of mineral rich Mediterranean-like seas as the continents drifted away from each other (Each currently named after what it looks like, because other than that there is currently no great features to call them by).

As said before, the disruption of equatorial and southern oceanic currents crowned the extinction of Albazoa, the so called Pannotic Ocean now formed a Pacific-like system of currents, creating a water hemisphere with occasionally heavy tropical storms, part of why over time, the eastern part of Piscia is getting eroded away.

The high density of nutrients and minerals of the water coming off the new seas aided the formation of hard structures like shells, teeth and carapaces, giving rise to what could be classified as arthropods and mollusks mainly.

A shy general cladogram resuming the last 400 million years for life

Project Paart is an Open World now, so the next chapter in this world's history may take a while to come out
However, you can follow the discussion here
We hope to see you soon!

[Cambrian Fauna]
coming soon!

- M.O. Valent, 02/05/2020

Last Updated, 30/08/2023

PLAN CHANGE ON THE FLY

WHERE ARE THE MAPS? /( °A°)/

Those 306 million years of Paart's history

So, the maps equivalent to Paart's Silurian up to the Carboniferous are gone (I think I deleted them while cleansing used/sketch artwork)... Somehow I lost roughly 300MY of history - climate and climate driven changes in the alien ecosystem are now back to the sketch board, and I decided that instead of poorly draw them back to match the start and end of the gap, I will throw away the second half of the maps I've done and build from the Cambrian up...

So, these maps...

...Are not canon anymore :(

- M.O. Valent, 27/04/2020

BIOLOGY | PART 7 | ANIMAL VISION

IS YOUR RED, THE SAME AS MY RED?

Probably not, we humans may have an average number of cones and rod cells, but it's an average, you would see a slightly different shade of red - that's unless you are asking this question to your dog, dog's can't distinguish red from green, only blue and yellow light, so it would probably ask you back "what's red?"...

Anyway, would this question even make sense to an alien - if it's entire biology evolved isolated from Earth's, going through different biological traumas, when even a small difference in a couple million years of such an event like the extinction of dinosaurs, could have led Earth's current biosphere into a different path...

Vision have evolved as many as 40 times along Metazoan evolution, from an evolutionary point of view, eyes in general only make sense if there is something to see, if it's physically possible and practical to an animal's survival.

Wi-Fi vision makes sense in the city environment, which is dumped with internet and other radio signals, however, Wi-Fi does not interact with many types objects and not in a useful way when it does - it interacts with metal structures that are dense enough or that are within the same order of magnitude of it's wavelength, this kind of vision does not differentiate between objects behind or in front of walls, or soil. As well, the structure required to detect radio would have to be as big as satellite dish made of many small antennae on the order of magnitude of the wavelength you want to detect, and from the right material to interact with, and have a way to infer the direction of incoming light - so your 'eye' can be arranged in a detector grid in order to form an image - could usually be made by blocking the light in someway, but again, Wi-Fi passes through most materials - the sheer size and engineering behind such an apparatus is too impractical for natural means of vision when evolution can come up with cheaper and more efficient ideas.

When it comes to life on Earth, even though the eye evolved dozens of times, the general environment remained the same, requiring pretty much the same general biochemical solutions to allow vision - often in the form of Opsin and Retinal.

Notice what are the available wavelengths after the atmosphere filters out incoming sunlight

It makes sense for life to use the wavelengths of light that penetrate further into the atmosphere, of course, inside their biological and physical constraints.

Earth in Visible light (left), compared to the same shot in Infrared (right), notice how the atmosphere is now much more opaque, and thus, fewer of this infrared light is able to reach the ground

A comparably wide infrared window exists on the scale of 8~14 micrometers (about the same wavelength emitted by human body-heat), however it's dimmer, and far from what I could find about animal infrared vision - which can be sensitive as far to NIR (760nm~1500nm), ie, not even close to that window.

WHAT ABOUT A SNAKE'S HEAT SENSING?

The pit organ of two different snakes

Vipers, Pythons and Boas do have heat sensing for wavelengths between 5 and 30 micrometers, however,  it's due to an organ on the front of their heads, which is connected to the visual part of the brain, the pit organ by itself produces a poor resolution image that is "overlaid" on the snake's vision, the pit organ also fails to properly detect prey of various sizes, as it uses the differences in heat sensing to point the prey's direction (pretty much how our brain uses the millisecond delay in sound receiving from each ear to tell us the direction from which it is coming), a large prey would normally trigger all the pit organ sensors at the same time and with pretty much the same intensity, small prey far enough from the snake could use the lack of resolution to it's advantage and blend within the environment - the pit organ's data latency is also limited to 50~150ms depending the state of the animal.

The pit organ main function in this sense - is not seeing (is not a proper eye), but being an auxiliary apparatus to the visual one of the snake. So aside from true heat sensing vision, a snake sees the environment with it's eyes and a slight thermal aura on warm objects.

"Because the pit receives direct input from the somatosensory, rather than the visual system, it seems likely that infrared signals are detected through a thermotransduction, rather than phototransduction mechanism."

"Our results demonstrate that the pit membrane serves as a passive antenna for radiant heat, transducing thermal energy to heat-sensitive channels on embedded nerve fibers." - [source]

CHEMISTRY OF VISION

Other than a few narrow specific bands of infrared, and the infrared window (which is a great stretch), the other viable bands of light to explore in vision are Visible light and UV-A.

Those, other than relying on the hot-wiring of heat-sensitive nerves to the visual cortex, use a complex chain of chemical reactions between light, opsins and retinal, from simple ocelli like those of small invertebrates to camera-like eyes of octopuses and humans.

Steve Mould does a great work explaining quite simply how this process works.

You can also read these papers if you are interested in further reading of this process.

The band that encompasses UV-A, Visible light, and NIR behave in similar ways with the environment, and are more likely to be used by life - how much of those is more dependent of their history and environment.

THE TAMARUTACA MYTH

Odontodactylus Scyllarus Mantis Shrimp

A.K.A. the Mantis Shrimp, it is a well known animal for it's supposedly 'super vision', lots of popular sites and YouTube channels would have you to believe it can dwarf human perception of color, after all, the animal does have 12 types of cones, however, a study published in the Science vol.343 (also shared by Nature) showed that Tamarutacas trained to associate food with color (pick the right color and you gain food thing) just can't distinguish between colors 25~12nm apart, which may sound like a nitpick stretch, except when we remember humans can tell colors up to 5~1nm apart. It turns out that the amount of cone receptors compensate for the lack of post processing capability of the shrimp's brain, and thus providing the animal with extra time to think on it's next move.

While we see this...

...The Mantis Shrimp sees "this"

(sharpened image and reduced color palette)

THE 'LIGHT SWITCH' EFFECT

This GIF resumes quite nicely the Light Switch effect theory

Is the theory that tries to justify the Cambrian Explosion - even though by the day I'm writing this, is still debated whether it was really a diversification boom as we depict, or if it just happens that there wasn't good conditions for fossilization of those animals for a long time, when these conditions came, it gives us the impression that life diversity suddenly skyrocketed in a period of a couple million years - still, considering there was indeed a boom in life diversity, how did it happen?

What we know about life evolution tells us that somehow the environment of the creatures changed in a way that favored a certain group of strategies, this change can be sudden (in geological terms) or gradual like natural climate change - like, how mammal diversity suddenly seem to boom after the KT event. In this case, the Light Switch theory suggests that atmospheric changes in composition allowed over time that more light could reach Earth's surface, and with such, animal life started to use this light to it's advantage, developing simple eyes, and with the advent of more complex eyes, predation, and mating took off as easier, and these new environmental pressure was the fuse to the ~~Caaaaambrian Explosion~~

However, what the Light Switch theory seemingly fails to explain, or at least, agree to - is in what time window would this have happened, as the Cambrian explosion seems to be offset in a few million years from the advent of eyes.

"The rate of eye evolution is difficult to estimate, because the fossil record, particularly of the lower Cambrian, is poor. How fast a circular patch of photoreceptor cells can evolve into a fully functional vertebrate eye has been estimated based on rates of mutation, relative advantage to the organism, and natural selection. However, the time needed for each state was consistently overestimated and the generation time was set to one year, which is common in small animals. Even with these pessimistic values, the vertebrate eye would still evolve from a patch of photoreceptor cells in less than 364,000 years." [Wiki]

Vision was around since the Late Ediacaran, and there is at least a 30 million year 'gap' between the Ediacaran and the Burgess Shale biota - what suggests that despite eyes being indeed a keypoint of the Cambrian Explosion, they weren't the main motor, this could be linked  to the later advent of shells, predation apparatus, the change of ocean chemistry, climate or other small changes we aren't currently able to spot in the fossil record that could have stuck life in a certain stage of eye development in the middle of the way, like some mass extinction(s?) overlapping with the lack of fossils could have limited the gene pool for eyes along the way...

More about the Cambrian Explosion and the origin of Eyes

[Leaps in Evolution, ep1 : Origin of Eyes]

THE CASE FOR PAART

On my original post about vision, I stated that animals like Lisa could make use of a special rod with a bismuth compound, which reaction with UV light would make re-emit light in the range detectable to the animal's cones (pretty much a fluorescent photo-multiplier), however, given the research I did for this post, I've found no such chemical that not only wouldn't be toxic or too reactive for this purpose, such as retinal tends to be, still, this task could still be performed not by a rod or cone cell, but by a tapetum lucidum in the back of the animal's eye, by synthesizing hard bismuth compounds in the form of small crystals reflecting light, like a chameleon's guanine crystals, using such a crystal like K3Bi2I9 (a type of perovskite) which happens to also be a photovoltaic material with high absorption to wavelengths less than 600nm and UV-A, peaking within the 440~520nm band, which includes Vol' peak emission at 493nm.

And thus not by a rod, but by an array of nerves and nano-crystals in the animal's retina, they are allowed sense much of incoming ultraviolet light - if the crystals were on the order of 200nm wide, there could be arrangements of ~3k crystals per mm in a retina that is about 4cm wide, by comparison human cones are arranged in 40k per mm, however the reflective properties of the crystal lattice would improve orange/red light absorption by the cones, while catching peak emission and UV-A light that got through the cones, and would otherwise be simply lost in the animal's tissues, this characteristic comes to be very useful as Paart turns out to be a relatively dark world (receiving 64% of Earth's light), maybe as to be present in most of life forms.

Technically, such an animal would still be trichromat (red, orange and green), with the addition that it can actually sense blue and UV-A though not through either cones or rods, and not as well as us humans do, such a creature would also have some problems differentiating blue from indigo, or sky-blue from prussian-blue, or just blue from UV for instance, because there is an entire band of light 200nm wide that can stimulate the perovskite nano-crystals the same way, except for the particular 490nm peak in which it is particularly more sensible to.

Normalization of light sensitivity (arbitrary intensity) according to wavelength (nm)

Here is a comparative perception of color by Humans (Above) and Lisa (Below)

Notice how this animal has a relatively accurate green/yellow/red perception, but makes poor distinction between blue/green and blue, blue and UV light

If you may opt for, it could be said that those creatures see blue and UV light in shades of gray - varying mainly in intensity, the closest you may experience to Lisa's vision then would be an overcast and foggy day.

- M.O. Valent, 25/04/2020
- M.O. Valent, updated in 30/04/2020

PAART | PALEOCAMBRIAN | CAMBRIAN | PART 1

THE PALEOCAMBRIAN WAR

*The Only Thing They Fear is You*

The end of the Neopyrgian period had set an evolutionary arms race - on one side, the pioneering Albazoans, masters of the seafloor, soft-bodied creatures that enjoyed life under the cloud cover of that cold and stormy world Paart was. On the flip-si46de, Metazoans, bottom feeders, living from the organic leftovers adrift in the sea, crawling between vile germs and decaying matter, decomposing it... For millions of years, the status quo of nature were Albazoans populating fields the size of entire continents, while Metazoans were practically exiled into the shallower regions, where the waters were simply too violent for the simple life-style Albazoans had.

The polyps couldn't fight against the weather, which would keep their brood adrift alike any other particle, which if not by the benevolent intervals of peace - just a shy and little,  "Hi" from the big bright light in the sky - could make them float for decades or even centuries... An innovation, accompanied by the forces of time, starts to turn the table over the Metazoans.

The sessile polyps already knew that in order to reproduce efficiently in their harsh environment, they could either bud and let their brood fall over near them, or, they could let it choose where it wanted to go, and when it were strong enough, and big enough, it could find it's way, into a better spot and set it's foot firm into the ground.

The climate at the time stimulated anemones, medusae and other cnidarians to be streamlined, while other more sessile animals, could grow long filaments to collect incoming organic matter

Geologically speaking, the very end of the Albanian Epoch was marked by intense earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, titans - long dormant under the icecap that sealed almost the entirety of the only continent... Sthalika.

Still, those mere tremors would not stop any of the creatures around the globe, what came after the tremors, were the main attraction of the circus that's about to begin... Before we get ahead of ourselves, let's take a look into the world as it was.

150 million years ago - from this point in time of course - the great continent Sthalika had formed, putting the world into an ice age, and establishing the means by which the current ecosystem has formed.

50 million years ago, the tremors that formed the continent, are now back, and fusing the rock above through brute force, until, about 20 million years ago, the very first crack into the ancient polar ice echoed around the world like 900 megaton bomb. The blast was so intense, it stopped the weather for the next week in a 3000km radius, Vol shone with all it's glory upon the frozen lands of the equator, as snow and pebbles fell hours after - upon the equator and south pole.

Like this, but without the fireball (Deep Impact, 1998)

And while the wind regained it's strength, falling back in track with implacable force, more and more similar events, a chain reaction that lasted ages, boom, boom... Boom... Kilometer per kilometer, the ice and land bellow broke, a seemingly never ending Réveillon where the fireworks were as loud as Krakatoa could ever be, a dozen times a year...

Paartian mornings were announced with the omnipresent cracking of ice - like the rooster calls nowadays on Earth... And once water flowed down the mountains as the ages passed, and the sea flooded the ravines and icy canyons carved with loud spasms of the earth, there was no turning back.

A recurring event everywhere for the next 20 million years

The starting shot has been given, the rivers became seas, and the seas interconnected with the ocean... And the further continents were from the poles, the more unexplored space were left for the nearby living Metazoa, polyps, reefs, critters, blooming within the promised land.

However, the breaking of the ice was only the start, while continents moved towards the south, they disrupted the oceanic currents that maintained the accelerated sedimentation of the deep sea, and the stormy world faded away in the sands of time...

Albazoans persisted, in the southern hemisphere, now - reduced in areas with cold currents similar to those found in the last eon.


The anemones and chalimorphs didn't hated each other, they didn't think one was better than the other, they didn't even acknowledged each other's existence, even after all this time, they both have been fighting the same enemy, in the dark, with the tools they had available - against Time.


The ever lasting titan, ghost of past Christmases, the herald of extinction - Time. And just as light had become once again abundant in this world, like prisoners in the solitary for years, when the day rose once again, upon the newborn shallow seas of Paart, the critters from both sides could tell, without a doubt, that the darkness was no more...

Paart's early Cambrian seas would often show Metazoa thriving more and more.

An aspidopod (dark arthropod on the right side) attacks an elpidomorph larvae (center pink creature)

Left side, brachiopods feast on dead elpidomorph.

Nevertheless, they saw the world as it is, it's scary, it's lonely... Their ancestors had guided themselves with their hearts and simple nervous systems, they could no see the world in it's majesty, glory, and unrelenting force. The very force that wouldn't spare their lives - it will be a crime consummated long ago, left for whatever survives long enough, to dig around these lands, and see through time, the unwritten history of this newborn world... 

Paart during the Cambrian had most of it's landmass on the northern hemisphere

KEY EVENTS IN THE PALEOCAMBRIAN (by category and approximate chronological order)
Appearance of:

• Animal size ranging between 1cm and 9cm
• Reef building animals (Sponges and Corals)
• Simple shelled animals (Mollusks, Brachiopods, and Clams)

Geology and Climate:

• Plate tectonics allow the water to flow into the northern hemisphere
• Volcanic activity increase carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
• As the ice blocks absorption of gases by the soil, the atmosphere enters into a greenhouse process, allowing the polar ice to melt faster as the continents migrate southward
• Oxygen levels stabilize near the equilibrium point at 9%

- M.O. Valent, 14/04/2020
- M.O. Valent, updated in 15/04/2020

- M.O. Valent, updated in 25/04/2020

- M.O. Valent, updated in 27/04/2020

- M.O. Valent, updated in 29/04/2020