Posts tagged extinction
We know that in biology, a species evolves to better survive its planet and its various climates and geography, which is mainly a result of natural selection. But, sometimes, this natural selecti...
Say the word "Australia", and one of the first things to come to your mind would be the marsupials. Of the 334 species of pouched mammals whose earliest ancestors witnessed the fall of the dinos...
After 150 million years, the most successful empire in the history of Planet Earth finally collapsed 66 million years ago. A five-mile-wide space bomb--there's still disagreement as to whether it ...
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 ...
A long time ago, the 60 foot long Megalodon roamed the oceans. Fast forward to 2.6 million years ago and they went extinct. In the story I'm writing Megalodon hasn't gone extinct surviving at least...
Horse were originally native to north america but between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago they went extinct likely due to expanding glaciers into their territory. The question I propose is how could I ...
I want to use the an active large ignious province (LIP) as a "biome" on a continent in my world. This video about the Siberian Traps inspired me. A LIP modeled after the Siberian Traps gives you a...
I was certain somebody would have asked this before, but after scrolling through the Similar questions list I couldn't find any duplicates. For this question, let's say that an asteroid or comet s...
EDIT: As many have pointed out, the whole Lunar Collision aspect I originally envisioned is probably more extreme than I predicted. I don't know where to start as far as the math goes, although my ...
It is the year 4056 (or probably later). The rocket with the last residents of Earth just took off, because global warming and pollution couldn't be stopped nor reverted and Earth became uninhabita...
Humanity just disappears tomorrow, let's say it is like the Thanos-snap but it kills everyone. How long until the last unambiguous evidence of our existence disappears? What was this last relic? Th...
With the evolving global warming and thawing of permafrost, an ancient deadly virus begins to spread from Siberia across Eurasia, affecting domestic animals first and mutating quickly onto the rest...
A cool thing to imagine would be a world where the land was dominated by megafaunal frog-descendants, as it is/was by mammals today, dinosaurs before the mammals, and non-mammalian synapsids and cr...
I want the surface of my fantasy planet to be made hostile every few thousand years for long enough to make every species go extinct that breeds on land. The easiest explanation seems to be other p...
An alien race was rubbed the wrong way by humans being humans and decided that humankind has to go. However, unlike many other science fiction stories, they do not intend to give the humans even a ...
Let's say we have the technology to produce all of the human food in factories without the need for land (i.e. Solarfood, Memphis Meats). Right now, there is about 50% of all habitable land use for...
In my epic fantasy I have four races of creatures which were all hunted down due to their valuable blood which grants the drinker magical abilities (premonitions). After time they all became extinc...
Mars has been colonized, close to a million people are now living above (and below) the martian soil, every few months a ship from Earth arrives with more resource for expansion and more settlers, ...
NB: This is not a duplicate of this question, because A) it only asks to wipe out humans, not any other life-form, and B) it insists that one person must survive. The survival of anything is not po...
The last time I asked a worldbuilding extinction question, I asked on what sorts of factors would create an extinction event in which 96% of all terrestrial species and only 70% of marine species d...
I have a generic Earth like planet, same atmospheric composition, and the same oceanic composition. The crust of this planet is predominantly silicon based but plenty of iron, nickel and copper. ...
A colony of space travelers makes their way to their new home planet. After landing and establishing their base camp, a wood worker begins to cut down trees and notices that none of the trees have ...
252 million years ago, the worst event in the history of life on Earth occurred. 70% of all terrestrial species and 96% of all marine species became extinct through, according to geological record...
Context To revive the Carboniferous period of earth one man and a group of other scientists have been genetically engineering and breeding land arthropods into giant sizes and exotic shapes since ...
I want this world to have two things, typically on the complete opposite end of geological timescales: Land fauna is incredibly "Young" - Pretty much nothing larger than a "large" insect (Some li...
I am writing a fiction set in the 'dark ages', a pre-industrial, pre-gunpowder world. On Earth that would be no later than 800 AD, but this doesn't have to match Earth. There is no magic, and I won...
This is possibly not quite the right place to ask this question but it's fundamental to the world I'm working on so here it is; if faced with a potent existential threat, in the form of an outside ...
How plausible would it be for an asteroid impact to create a hole through the Earth's crust into the mantle? What sort of traces would such an impact leave behind? Would it be survivable by at le...
Cobaltduckworlda has had somewhat of a similar biological past as earth, but not exactly. As examples, sentience has happened multiple times, and not just in primate-like species. Beasts that did...
I am trying my hand at a matriarchal society (human beings, technology similar to Earth's 13th - 16th century), and I find that for that to work they will need reasonably efficient contraceptives (...
Some Background Details In 1908, the Siberian region of Tunguska made headline news when an explosion knocked down 80 million trees in an area of only 770 square miles. The mystery was that there ...
