Posts by JohnWDailey
On May 18, 1980, Mount Saint Helens made American history with an eruption that took 57 human lives and killed thousands of animals. It has released only a quarter of a cubic mile of ash, but it i...
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...
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 ...
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 alread...
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...
"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...
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. Bu...
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...
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 ...
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 se...
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"....
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 ...
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,...
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 di...
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 ...
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 environme...
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 ...
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...
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 dif...
"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 Ea...
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 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 ...
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 vo...
