Posts by JohnWDailey
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 ...
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 morph...
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, scienti...
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...
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, ...
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 loade...
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 nowher...
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...
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, ...
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 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 ...
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, coy...
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 ha...
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 ...
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...
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...
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, ...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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 M...
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 sens...
