Posts tagged adaptability
How does a Neandertal compare with an anatomically modern human? This diagram below is a simplification of the real answer: The average Neandertal male stood 64 inches tall, weighed 143 pounds an...
In an alternate Earth, early or midway in the Eocene Epoch, there debuted a family of angiosperm trees whose roots need to be completely submerged. As a result, the limit is that they can't germin...
First things first, a little backstory: Sometime between the Paleocene and Eocene epochs, there was a mysterious, sudden, dramatic rise in global temperature. This moment in time was known as the...
Some 55.8 million years ago, Earth underwent a really dramatic heat wave known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. What happened, exactly? We don't know how it happened, but we do k...
"Serina" is a popular speculative evolution project in which, apart from a long list of fish, invertebrates and plants, the only terrestrial chordate to colonize this terraformed moon is the canary...
There are several questions related to effects of different gravity levels on the human body, but none adequately answer a fundamental question: What is the maximum and minimum gravity that nearly ...
The TBD are a fantasy humanity offshoot that is fully adapted to life a few kilometers beneath the surface, settling in cracked earth near vents and hot spots. Air quality ranges from stale to tox...
It's become a popular speculative evolution trope for the likeliest candidate of the mythological "wyvern" to be a Cenozoic family--if not superfamily--of scansoriopterygid dinosaur. Now the first...
Back home, five million years ago, the warm, wet climate of the Miocene sloped downwards into the cooler, drier Pliocene before descending even further into the more so Pleistocene. The slope was ...
In exploring likely candidates for an alternate Earth without rodents, someone suggested multituberculates to me. Here's a little summary as to who the multituberculates were for anyone not in the ...
I once read a novel about a prison-planet which was chosen to make the prisoners suffer. One of the different "tortures" was a gravity three times higher than that on Earth. Would the human body s...
Back home, Amphicyonidae (bear-dogs) predated Ursidae by only four million years. While the latter still lives in the form of eight species, the former had been extinct for two-and-a-half million ...
By "bryophitic", I mean "non-vascular land plants", being the liverworts and the mosses. (Hornworts are comparative latecomers, so we won't be talking about them.) Without vascular tissues, these...
Here is all you need to know about the creodonts: They were a group of carnivorous mammals that, despite having carnassials, had no relation to Carnivora. They were a global force, occupying terr...
As landlubbers, we often let ourselves think that if salty seawater is undrinkable for us, it could be even worse for plants. However, certain types of angiosperms have found ways to not only thri...
66 million years ago, the dinosaur empire was in its death throes when its final nail in the coffin came hurtling down from the sky. A clump of rock the size of Mount Everest smashed into the Gulf ...
If we humans are serious about terraforming our famous neighbor, Mars, then the terraforming process would take thousands of years before it becomes habitable enough for humans to live in. But tha...
Long ago, I asked a question on how to make the Nine Realms of Norse mythology--Niflheim, Muspelheim, Asgard, Midgard, Jotunheim, Vanaheim, Alfhiem, Svartalfheim and Helheim--a reality in regards t...
One of the oddest of cryptids is an octopus haunting the lakes of Oklahoma, a landlocked state. The reason this is odd is that although freshwater mollusks are common, Cephalopoda (the class consi...
Recently I was talking with a friend of mine on fantasy stuffens. I brought up that its interesting that dwarves are rarely in the desert and he immediately listed reasons why the dwarf build is ba...
I am a post-human adapted for permanent life in vacuum and micro-gravity. How might my physiology and biochemistry overcome the following challenges? Please note I have a strong cultural aversion ...
I am a post-human adapted for permanent life in vacuum and micro-gravity. How might my physiology and biochemistry overcome the following challenges? Please note I have a strong cultural aversion ...
What is a flower or shrub back home is a tree in an alternate Earth, and vice versa. That is something worth exploring. For example, Taraxacum officinale can grow from stems typically up to 5...
Imagine that, in the near future, pollution, overpopulation and war leads to a massive extinction where almost all chordates, some invertebrates and many plants are wiped out. Small, resilient plan...
So let's say you have a typical Space Whale: 27 km from stem to stern, an ecosystem for many creatures in and of itself. I feel that I don't need to explain this part... just picture an average spa...
On Earth, most animals have tongues, albeit in many forms. This is due to the evolution from a common ancestor. Tongues are not necessary for communication, be it auditory or otherwise. However, th...
I'm creating a fantasy planet with an interior that has a god phasing in and out of our dimension, adding to and taking away mass in mysterious fashion while keeping everything but the influence of...
Back home, the Tibetan Plateau averages 4,950 meters above sea level with its highest point being Mount Everest, 8,848 meters--29,029 feet--above sea level. At such heights, problems are resulted ...
In the great apes, there are two worlds--ground and treetop. Representing the ground is the largest primate on Earth, the genus Gorilla. Representing the treetops is genus Pongo, the orangutan. ...
This is the classic winter picture of a boreal forest, or taiga. This habitat exists only on subpolar latitudes, where the climate is too extreme for broad-leaved angiosperms to take root, thus ...
Bradypodidae is the family consisting of the three-toed sloths, the one we most associate the word "sloth" with. As far as we know, they exist only in the tropical forests of Latin America and nev...
Anytime one thinks "flightless bird" and "aquatic bird" put together, one would immediately think of Sphenisciformes, the penguins. But during the Late Cretaceous, there swam a different kind of f...
In this alternate scenario, there is a clear ecological distinction between broad-leaved deciduous trees and coniferous trees based solely on altitude. The broad-leaves and other angiosperms are t...
Basically I want to create a world in which some of the humans have developed a higher body temperature in order to survive cold, harsh climates, such as the poles or even tall mountains. The reaso...
Suppose humanity found a rocky planet outside the solar system. It is in the habitable zone of its star, has breathable air, clean water etc. A true paradise. Only problem is, its surface gravity ...
The situation: A planet largely composed of water, with land masses being island chains scattered planet-wide. At all times there is precipitation of some sort, whether it be snow or rain based on...
I'm thinking on the colonizing of another planet by humans. The conditions of this planet are quite different from Earth, and particularly the day-night cycle is much larger. In my fictional plane...
In the universe that I'm creating, the earth has been destroyed by nuclear wars fought by human kind. Nearly 98% of the population has been wiped out. There exists a society of technologically adva...
