Posts by JohnWDailey
Today's dinosaurs--the birds--have a uniquely avian piece of anatomy called the syrinx, located at the base of the trachea. Because it is located at a point where the trachea branches to the lungs...
Back home, Earth's moon is 2159.2 miles wide and orbits 238,900 miles from its parent. But let's pretend that the moon is 2500 miles wide and orbits 200,000 miles from Earth. Would the nightscape...
Back home, the Pleistocene ice never reached farther south than New York or London. These ice ages had been coming and going for two and a half million years. On average, there was enough ice to ...
One of Milutin Milankovic's three big factors in his ice age theories was Earth's obliquity, or axial tilt. Earth's axial tilt varies between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees at an approximation of 41,000 ye...
Back home, the bird order Passeriformes consists of roughly 100 families totaling up to roughly 5400 species--that's over half of the entire class. But if the songbird order never existed, how wou...
Back home, the phylum Cnidaria (jellyfish, coral, anemone) and the class Amphibia are two of the most ancient groups of animals on the planet. But let's say that, on an alternate Earth, many milli...
In this alternate universe, we still have the gas giants of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. However, each planet has its mass increased $3.5$ times. How would this change affect the gravity o...
Back home, one ice age during the two and a half million years of the Pleistocene lasted a total of 100,000 years, ninety thousand of intense cold followed by ten thousand of milder interglacial we...
For 10,000 years since Beringia, the bridge connecting Asia to North America, had vanished, the Asian and Native American races show great distinction. But if Beringia has persisted to this day, c...
In this scenario, I've done the following changes to the western United States. 1) Only the Rockies stand firm, so no Sierra Nevada or Coast Range. 2) The coastline has altered as though 75 met...
If we remove all the ferns and horsetails from the ecological equation would grass be the only candidate to fill the void? If not, then what else?
In this scenario, corals, sponges and bryozoans have been extinct for 65 million years. In their place as reefbuilders are echinoderms, bivalves, barnacles and worms of the infraclass canalipalpat...
The Gobi Desert is what ecologists call an "interior desert" because it's too far away for water to reach. Now imagine that the Caspian Drainage Basin to the west has experienced a 75-meter rise i...
In my alternate Earths, the plant class Ginkgoopsida has retained its prehistoric diversity, unlike back home, in which only Ginkgo biloba remains. In order for that diversity to be possible in th...
The highest point in the Ethiopian Highlands is 14,928 feet above sea level. It is here that the Nile River begins its journey to the Mediterranean. If the highlands were instead 21,737 feet abov...
Lake Eyre in Australia has an area of roughly 4,000 square miles, but the basin itself is over 450,000 square miles. If the entire basin were freshwater, how would that affect the Outback's climate?
In one of my Alternate Earths, I have made the following changes to Africa: 1) Re-angle the mainland (meaning Madagascar stays right where it is) to the point that the Mediterranean is connected ...
Currently, the distance between Australia and Antarctica is a rough estimate of 4500 miles. But if that number were cut by half, what would Australia's climate and ecology be?
70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens sapiens suffered a genetic bottleneck that reduced the population of likely 100,000 to 3,000. Over seven billion people of several distinctive races are descended fr...
During the Permian and Triassic periods, all the continents had joined together to become the supercontinent Pangaea. Its size means that the majority of terrestrial life might have been confined ...
Today's Mediterranean Sea is just a shadow of its former self, the Tethys. In an alternate scenario, I have rearranged the African mainland to an angle that turns Gibraltar from a strait into an i...
At 29,029 feet above sea level, Mount Everest has been credited as the tallest mountain on Earth. The only problem is that Mauna Kea, Hawaii's highest point, is 33,500 feet tall from its peak at 4...
I've been told that if I raise the axial tilt from 23.5 degrees to 25, I'd end up getting hotter summers and colder winters. That's great, except that Earth's diverse climate makes that statement ...
I have been told that if I slow down today from 24 hours to 30, I'd end up getting hotter days, colder nights and more intense weather. That's fine, except that Earth's diverse climate makes that ...
