Posts by JohnWDailey
So, to make it normal for a human to have tetrachromacy, having four color receptors, would make our night vision nonexistent. In an answer in the question linked above, someone brought up the tap...
In one of my more recent questions, one Xandar The Zenon commented that a mutation that creates the gene for red or orange pigmentation on the human skin is more likely than green, blue or purple. ...
Today, most mammals have dichromatic vision, meaning that they have two color receptors. Which color depends on which species you're asking. For example, the real reason bulls charge at matadors ...
This question is based on the articles saying that the Mongoloid body plan was all due to an individual mutation from 35,000 years ago. In science fiction, humanoid aliens that aren't of the human...
The largest animals alive today--and to loom into the human imagination--are the whales, a group of mammals that had been going from skinny-dip to full-blown dive in just 53.5 million years. Due...
Here is what we know of the planet Mars so far: DIAMETER: 4212 miles MASS: 6.39 × 10^23 kg DISTANCE FROM THE SUN: 141.6 million miles It isn't to say that we haven't found water on Mars, ju...
Knowledge has come to me recently that mussels can suck up pollutants, making them crucial cleanup crews in the New York filth. This knowledge is the inspiration for this alternate scenario, in wh...
No matter which mammal you are talking about, be it a rodent or a bat or a cat or an elephant or a whale, all have the same lung size--7% of the entire body volume. In this alternate scenario, the...
Here's the scenario: 400 million years ago, a species of lobe-finned fish created tetrapod history as it gulped up air, not water. Fast-forward to 342 million years ago, and one species immediate...
As a whole, the reptiles have a problem. The majority of them have legs sprawled away from the body, so when they move, they would suffer a kind of problem called "Carrier's constraint", and what ...
Back home and in this alternate scenario, the Ozarks are all that remains of a Proterozoic mountain range hundreds of millions of years ago. Back home, the Ozarks look like this, highlit in lime: ...
Without a doubt, the most iconic mammals of Australia are the pouch-bearing marsupials. You can find less than 250 species in that one island-continent. Marsupials have been around for 65 milli...
Looking at the topographical map of the two main islands of Britain--England to the east and Ireland to the west--is looking at two and a half million years of ice sculpting, grinding and melting...
There are three different species of pine collectively called "bristlecones", all of whom can grow in weather too harsh and soil too poor for any other tree to take root. They are renowned for the...
Our most iconic bridges can be categorized in two basic types: Suspension... ...and cantiliever. Here is the scenario in question: There is a straightforward (as in radiating out in cardina...
From 359 to 298 million years ago, the "Carboniferous Coal Swamps" dominated the continents. It was the Carboniferous coal itself that sparked one of the greatest watersheds in human history--th...
You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen. But how will nature give Santa's reindeer the best justification of all? Flight is the first and most obv...
Now the first question is"”which elf? Santa's elves? Shoemaking elves? Keebler's cookie-making elves? Tolkien's elves? The Dökkálfar (dark elves) and Ljósálfar (light elves) of the origina...
The traditional description of the mermaid is half-girl and half-fish. That, both biologically and dramatically, is just ridiculous. If the mermaid were half-fish, then why does she move her tail...
Believe it or not, the diminutive but rough dwarf is the closest of all the humanoids to be biologically realistic. How? Let's look up Homo neandertalensis, the stereotypical caveman, in comparis...
From 5.96 to 5.33 million years ago, disaster struck the Mediterranean Sea. A tectonic snag turned this... ...into something like this. In this alternate scenario, the sea separating modern ...
Undoubtedly, one of mythology's most iconic creatures is the centaur, a human being with his or her waist glued to the torso of a horse. For this post, we are avoiding the question of how evolutio...
What many people mayn't know is that there actually three basic types of algae: Green algae, the origin of the kingdom Plantae Brown algae, found primarily in kelp forests And red algae F...
This is the Bering Sea today... ...and this was the Bering Sea as recently as 25,000 years ago. Truth of the matter is, the Bering had been shifting back and forth from land to sea for 100 mi...
This is a skeleton of a titanosaur, not quite the longest of the dinosaurs, but most certainly the heaviest! As far as we have found, we'd found no species exceeding 75 tons. This post focuses ...
