Activity for JohnWDailey
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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Megamangrove Roots--Which Kind of Aerial Roots Would Best Support Their Large Size? 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 germinate in waters that dry up during low tides, nor can they at depths deeper than 250 feet. Such trees wit... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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Could Sharks Survive a Longer PETM? 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 "Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum", shortened into "PETM". In just 20 to 50 millennia, the temperature... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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Would a Longer PETM Save the Creodonts and the Mesonychians? 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 know that within 20,000 years, the temperature climbed by five to eight degrees Celsius (or nine to 14 de... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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Could Meridiungulates Colonize The World Before the Opening of Panama? The last time I asked something similar, I asked if it would be possible for xenarthran mammals (armadillos, sloths and anteaters) to be thrown off of South America from life-giving rafts to other parts of the world. The possibility is very strong that they could survive the long treks across oceans... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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Would the Oceans in This Map Be Freshwater? So long ago, I asked on how to make Earth's oceans as brackish as Lyr's, one of the many worlds imagined by artist Chris Wayans. The only real answer I got was something that that world had already gotten covered--less land. Simply speaking, the less land there is on the surface, the less rock ther... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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Could an Ice Age Extinction Wipe Out All Marsupials? 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 dinosaur empire 66 million years ago, close to 70% of them live in Australia, the rest living in the New Worl... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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The Serina Series: Episode I: Cats "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. The project's creator, "Sheatherius", then explored how this one species could branch out into multip... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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Could Long, Dense Walls of "Megamangroves" Deflect The Deadliest of Storms? This is the world's tallest tree--the coast redwood. It can grow as high up as 115.5 meters. Any taller, and the transportation of water in its vascular tissues would not climb all the way. But in an alternate Earth, there are multiple species of angiosperm trees whose roots need to be completel... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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How CAN a Wyvern be a Scansoriopterygid Dinosaur? 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 thing you'd be wondering is, "scanso-WHAT?" and I won't blame you. The name is not as memorable or cat... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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How Different Would the Outcome of the Fall of the Dinosaur Empire Be if Chicxulub Hit at a Different Season? 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 was an asteroid or a comet--hit on one of the worst places imaginable--a Yucatan Peninsula high in conce... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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Can You Evolve a Second Pair of Pectoral Muscles Without The Need for Flight? Somewhere on DeviantArt, there is an insightful tutorial by someone named "Uzlo" on how to create anatomically believable angels. Among the instructed details is the possibility of developing a second pair of pectoral muscles for the wings. But in an alternate Earth, humans have evolved this second... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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How CAN You Justify Melalo's Dorsal Casque? This, ladies and gentlemen, is Melalo, described in the Book of Creatures website as "the oldest and most feared of Ana's children." His name literally means "filthy", "dirty" or even "obscene". This guy is said to project "anger, rage, cruelty, sadism, frenzy, rape, and insanity" to anyone who c... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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In an Ice Age Extinction, Which Latitude Would Be Hit Harder--Tropical or Temperate? 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 so gradual that to my knowledge, no extinction events happened. But not in this alternate Earth. Five ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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How Would a Continental Landmass Sink? Atlantis is real. It's just that there's more than one of them, and none of them are actually called "Atlantis". Instead, they consist from the Kerguelen Plateau in the Indian Ocean to Zealandia, a continent who sank 130 million years ago, leaving their highest points to be the North and South isla... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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Could Reptiles Be Simultaneous Hermaphrodites? Reptile reproduction, it turns out, is more flexible than our own. Whiptails, a girls-only species, can lay unfertilized eggs without the need for a male. And Komodo dragons have recently been discovered to perform parthenogenesis, or virgin birth, even though they are also capable of sexual reprod... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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How Would the Multituberculates Survive Longer Than in Our Timeline? 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 know: Multituberculata (commonly known as multituberculates, named for the multiple tubercles of the... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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Would the Muroid Niche Be Occupied by Just One Clade? The muroids are a superfamily of rodents consisting today of mice, rats, voles, hamsters, lemmings and gerbils. There are at least 1750 different species of them, proof apparent of their environmental versatility. That, for me, is the problem. Rodents like the muroids are so successful that in a s... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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What Else Could Reduce Global Sea Levels? Anyone who has studied ice ages would know that during the last two-and-a-half million years of Earth's history, there have been periods where there was enough ice to suck up a lot of water. As a result, sea levels fell by an average of 100 meters. Among the most famous examples of this sort of dro... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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How Would These Planets Affect Earth's Eccentricity? A cleaner, narrower-focused improvement of How This Alternate Solar System Influences the Milankovitch Cycle, so not a duplicate. For further clarification, eccentricity is the shape of a planet's orbit, with the value of 0 being a perfect circle and 1 or more being a parabolic or hyperbolic oval. M... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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What Kind of Bolide Would Chicxulub Be to Create the Bigger Airburst--Asteroid or Comet? 66 million years ago, something brought an end to the long-established dinosaur empire. The pendulum just kept shifting between an asteroid and a comet, astronomical bolides that actually have different chemistries, hence the distinctions. Bolides that explode in midair are not unheard of. As of 2... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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How to Make This Alternate Earth as Black as The Dark Knight "The Dark Knight" is a nickname given by astronomers to the exoplanet TrES-2b, a gas giant with an albedo of one percent, blacker than paint, blacker than coal"”in fact, blacker than anything on Earth! There are several reasons it is so dark. Its atmosphere is full of materials that absorb light, an... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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The One Problem With Terraforming and Colonizing a Super-Earth Many people are excited with the idea of super-Earths--rocky, habitable exoplanets greater in mass, density and diameter (because I'd prefer to go the whole way than stop at the halfway point) than our Earth--being also more habitable than our Earth. That would make sense climatically, geologically ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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In a Red Giant Binary System, How Far and How Wide Can the Habitable Zone Be? Our estimates of our own habitable zone--a piece of space in which liquid water is possible--have varied over the years, but the current estimate is by Ramirez and Kaltenegger in 2017. Based on an expansion of the classical carbon dioxide-water vapor habitable zone model and assuming a volcanic hydro... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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How to Renew Old Mountain Ranges Conventionally, there are two ways to build mountains--direct collision (as is the case with the Himalayas) and one side sinking beneath the other (which explains why the Pacific Ring of Fire is volcanic.) But in an alternate Earth, we have found an Appalachian Mountain chain in which the highest pe... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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Maximum Size Limit for a Wooden-and-Bamboo Neo-Ziggurat There is a concern that's been brought up only recently--steel and concrete buildings are environmentally wasteful. In further clarification, they waste away too much greenhouse gases. And considering how many steel-and-concrete skyscrapers currently exist worldwide, that is incredibly damning. Wh... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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The Red-Headed Whale. Why Would the Head be Red? In the waters of Iceland, the natives have their own word for a particular brand of cetaceans--"Illhveli", literally "evil whales". And the bloodthirstiest of them all is Raudkembingur, Icelandic for either "red comb" or "red crest". Now, the outlandishness of some mythological animals is so mini... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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Perissodactylian Cetaceans Perissodactyla is an order of mammals consisting currently of the seventeen species of horses, rhinoceroses and tapirs. Usually, any clade is connected by a coupling of genetics and physical morphology. The ancestor of all perissodactyls, even the extinct brontos and indriks, looked a bit more like... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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Planetizing the World of Jack and the Beanstalk: How Small is Too Small? We all know the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk--a farmboy sells his cow for some "magic beans", which in turn grow into a mountainously tall stalk that led him to the land of a giant. Now, scientifically speaking, the only way for Jack to meet the giant is if the beanstalk led him to a habitable wor... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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Could Bear-Dogs Look and Act Like Actual Bears? 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 years, which made me suspect that the ice ages were what drove the bear-dogs into extinction. But in an... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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Bryophitic Plants in an Underwater Forest 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 plants can't grow big or far from water or any kind of damp soil. But that's just on land. In an alte... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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Can a Mammal Develop a Jaw Shaped Like a Beak? Many mythological creatures have a popularity secondary only to the dragon (the one true global force.) Among them is the griffin, a half-bird-half-cat cut-and-paste. Now, in an alternate Earth, the griffin is a real clade of primarily arboreal mammal, which means ditch the third pair of limbs and ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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The Great Oxidation Event...Artificially Imposed on a Tharn-Like Alternate Earth From 2.4 to either 2.1 or two billion years ago, Earth underwent a surge in a waste product that we know as "oxygen". Before that, life thrived in an ocean rich with iron under an atmosphere loaded with carbon dioxide. This Great Oxidation Event has also been referred to as the "Oxygen Catastrophe"... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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Wolves and Hyenas--Allies For Life In recent years, we have found evidence in the Negev Desert of the Middle East of a striped hyena, a solitary carnivoran, tagging along with a pack of wolves. This sort of alliance is found nowhere else on Earth, and we're still not sure if this was just a one-time deal. But in an alternate Earth, ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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Pinniped Creodonts 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 territories all across North America, Eurasia and Africa. They lived a long life, from 63 all the way to 11 ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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Can Owl Ears Instead of Echolocation Guarantee Life in Cave Colonies? In an alternate Earth, there are no bats. Instead, there are "flying monkeys" (which are actually lemuriform primates, rather like bushbabies or lorises.) And even though they have batlike ears, they don't echolocate. Instead, they hear their way through the nightscape a bit more like owls--their ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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The Itsy-Bitsy Insect Has Made a Web. How Differently Would it Look From Spider Web? In an alternate Earth, a mass extinction wiped out a percentage of the most successful phylum ever--Arthropoda. All that survived of the class Arachnida were the really small varieties--the ticks, the mites, the pseudoscorpions, the whip spiders and the hooded tickspiders. So who would fill in the ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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Dr. Frankenbull's Problem: How To Tell Aurochs From Bison The mad scientist community is...mad, to put it kiddie-appropriately. Their logic has the tendency to make 0% sense 100% of the time (provided, of course, that they ever bring it up.) So you can imagine a field scientist's confusion when the community tasked him to imagine a hybrid between a wild b... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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The Mad Scientist Asks, "What Would a Hybrid Between a Grey Wolf and a Dire Wolf Look Like?" Within our society is a mad scientist obsessed with hybridization. His specialty is canids, and he could not get enough of the canid hybrids that had happened in the past--wolfdogs, coywolves, coydogs, jackal-dogs. But there was one element that eluded him--a once-contemporary to the modern wolf, t... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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How to Justify the Enfield's Long Claws Here is Carolina Lang's interpretation of one of Britain's heraldic beasts, the enfield: For anyone not familiar with the creature, here's A Book of Creatures' basic description of it: It has the head of a fox, the chest of a greyhound, the talons of an eagle, the body of a lion, and the hindl... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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Could a Greater Number and Diversity of Marine Plant Species be Possible? 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 thrive on marine environments but specialize on them. These are the mangroves and four families of alismata... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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Will the Dinosaur Empire Still Stand Strong If Chicxulub Hit Earth at the End of the Jurassic? 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 of Mexico, bringing about the end of 70-75% of all species. Oh, the dinosaurs are still alive, don't get... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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Northern Great Lakes in an Alternate Island Africa--Would the Sahara DESERT Still be Around? Recently, I found this map of Africa's paleolakes in the Imaginary Maps reddit: Finding this map was mere coincidence, but this map definitely interests me. Now there have been multiple what-if, worldbuilding and alternate history scenarios set in this Sahara with freshwater lakes instead of noth... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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How To Make Earth's Oceans as Brackish as Lyr's Allow me to present Lyr, one of a handful of worlds crafted by artist Chris Wayan: The one detail among a vast many that is important to this question is that its salinity is about 1.5%, roughly half that of Earth. Do you know what that means? It means that the oceans of Lyr, a habitable planet ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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We Have Successfully Established Plants and Insects on Mars. How Long Will It Take Them to Colonize the Entire Planet? In my last question, I have asked on how, once Mars has been terraformed, Terran species of plants and the insects on which the majority of them rely on would adapt to Mars's longer year. By far, the only answer I got is to start the pioneering at the equator, where there won't be any seasons to wor... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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How Can Plants and Insects Cope With Living on a Terraformed Mars? 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 that is only the beginning... Turns out that there are many, many, MANY problems we should take into consi... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A Stable Red Giant Trinary System In an alternate universe, we have a spot in the Orion Arm where we have nine Earth-like planets orbiting three red giants. Judging from the size and luminosity of each star, it's been conferred that each of the stars has been a red giant for 542 million years, which means it doesn't have as much t... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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Earth Has Four Seasons Lasting Years. Is This Too Much? In this alternate Earth, the axial tilt is still leaning to the extent of the temperate and polar zones having four seasons--spring, summer, autumn and winter. The one key difference is that each season lasts, not for three months, but for three years. This is because it orbits a trinary system--a ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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Nocturnal Photosynthesis It's a basic fact that most plants need sunlight to generate growth. Sure, they also need water and nutrients, but their reliance on sunlight is the one sole thing that separates them from animals. Now, compare our sun to our moon. Even at its fullest, moonlight can only get to an apparent magnitu... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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How Developed Would Baby Mwindo Be? In real life, humans get pregnant for only nine months. Once born, the baby has a long way to go before it can stand, walk and talk. But don't tell that to Mwindo! The African saga of the hero Mwindo starts with the favored of Shemwindo's seven wives having a longer-than-normal pregnancy. It's ne... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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Which Stars Would Best Suit For the Habitable Zone of The Nine Norse Earths? In an alternate universe, the nine realms of Norse mythology--Midgard, Asgard, Vanaheimr, Jotunheimr, Alfheimr, Hel, Nidavellir, Niflheim and Museplheim--are actual, real-life "Earths", in the sense that all of them have the exact same features listed below: At least one large natural satellite, on... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |