(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
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.
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
