I Would Actually Evaporate If This Happened

Pasodau is a seedworld established alongside its sister world Snekens in the far future to study the dynamics of evolution without the intervention of sophonts, recalling the numerous worlds established by the Old Ones in time immemorial.

The affair of seeding, as is typical of Terran lead terraforming, was a chaotic undertaking of measures and countermeasures to establish a sustainable atmosphere and biosphere, a process born from the frantic attempts at stabilising the fragile, almost mono cultural terraformed worlds established by Terran factions following a number of narrowly avoided and even total ecological collapses leaving thousands dead and millions displaced. Whilst successful at preventing such planetfalls through redundancies and diversity, this method of seeding a world makes determining the full list of species introduced near impossible due to many extinctions, failed introductions, hybridisations and genetic modifications that occur at a species, genus or even family level amongst microfauna and flora. The list of species that are larger, more distinct, or introduced later in the process is much more complete, with all vertebrates seeded being recorded.

The map above shows the planet at the time of seeding.

Pretty much 6ft spot on, but my brother’s like an extra half foot taller

@ mutuals rb this w how tall you are i wanna know

i’m 4’11

Formids

Common names in English:

Formids, skullcrawlers, skullants, nightmares

Binomial name:

Xenosapiens Sp. (Wise aliens)

X. tescacolonus (tundra settler wise aliens)

X. tescaperegrinus (tundra wanderer wise aliens)

X. hesperomons (western mountain wise aliens)

X. orientomons (eastern mountain wise aliens)

X. tescagigans (tundra giant wise aliens)

X. silvagigans (forest giant wise aliens)

X. campusincola (plains dwelling wise aliens)

X. boreasilva (northern forest wise aliens)

X. notosilva (southern forest wise aliens)

X. insula (island wise aliens)

X. hesperosilva (western forest wise aliens)

X. orientosilva (eastern forest wise aliens)

Description:

Formids are a genus of centauric hexapods and were the first alien sophonts encountered by Terrans.

They posses an endoskeleton primarily consisting of sodium chloride, with a pair of vertebrae-like structures each containing a notochord. Each limb girdle is made up of three bones holding the first segment of the limb and attached to the twin spines. Beneath each girdle is a trio of large plates derived from osteoderms, serving as both protection for the organs and structural support. Each limb is made up of four segments, with a ball and socket joint at the base of a single bones followed by two pairs of parallel bones which in turn connect to three wrist bones. Four digits attach to the wrist, with 3 internal bones, four external bones and a claw in each finger. The hands represent the more basal zygodactyl structure of their ancestors, where as the feet have become digitigrade to better support movement on the ground.

The skull is made up of a solid block containing the brain to which 18 jaws are attached. In the digestive system, two ancestral pairs have fused into the dorsal and ventral primary jaws, two pairs evolved into the masticatory jaws used to help break up food and push it down the throat and a pair into molar jaws used to crush and grind food. Food then passes into a stomach within the rib cage of the second limb girdle before passing into an intestine-like absorption structure. The respiratory system is made up of their iconic through-lung with an anterior and posterior air intake and a hind air vent. Taking in air through a nostril on the outside of the dorsal primary jaw it then flows into the olfactory chamber containing the olfactory jaw before being drawn past the anterior valve jaw into the cephalic lung by the diaphragm jaw. It is then pumped primary anterior lung before either being expelled from the posterior air intake through a voice-box like structure or transferred to the secondary anterior lung, where it is drawn into the posterior lung before being expelled from the respiratory vent. The other jaws of the skull are made up by the two pair of eyes, two pairs of eyelids, a pair of structures similar to the mammalian inner ear, a pair of antennae, two pairs of stridulatory jaws and a pair of tridactyl cephalic limbs, with each digit being derived from an ancestral tooth.

Formids have two circulatory systems. The primary circulatory system is pumped by a single heart in the rib cage of the first limb girdle and transports oxygen carrying blood cells, most immune cells, inorganic ions and hormones dissolved in water. The secondary circulatory system is pumped by a trio of hearts in the rib cage of the third limb girdle and transports simple sugars, amino acids, lipids and immune cells dissolved in water.

Formids also posses a series of kidney-like structures in the rib cage of the third limb girdle closely resembling the malpighian tubules of Terran invertabrates whilst a pair of liver-like manufactory organs between the second and third limb girdles.

They are covered in a thin layer of translucent, mildly iridescent keratinous structures analogous to mammalian fur and derived from ancestral osteoderms, allowing the colour of the skin to be seen underneath. This was key in ancestral collumacephala to both allow them to retain heat but also for their chromatophores to be visible through their integument. In formids and their relatives many of these chromatophores have been lost alongside much of their UV vision in a burrowing ancestor, in addition the development of iridescence common in fossorial species. In modern formids functional chromatophores remain solely on the skull where they are used to convey emotions, although the introduction of ink into the vestigial chromatophores of the body has been and continues to be used as a for, of self expression through fluid tattoos, however it is a very delicate process and the tattoos fade as the cells die. Most emphasised in species from the southern continent but common to all formids is the development of a winter coat should below average temperatures be encountered for a long enough period, being shed should the temperatures warm.

Like a majority of cetocnidarians formids are hermaphrodites. Typically a single infant is born from each parent, typically in early spring, clinging to the back where it feeds on a specialised organ developed from the ancestral secondary circulatory system. Born blind and furless, they feed from this organ for roughly half a year before developing fur and being weaned, however they still cling to their parents fur. After another half year of their eyes have opened fully and they under grow a rapid stage of development, being fully capable runners two months, however their brains are still far below adult capacity and are highly instinctual. After another year they undergo a second growth spurt where they rapidly gain cognitive abilities equivalent to a human child. Typical formids are most often considered mature in the modern day by sixteen years old and independent from parents at around twenty, however the tundra species are often a year or two behind their northern relatives and the two giant species may not be considered mature until their early twenties. Despite their neotenic features, Xenosapiens insula has a similar rate of development to its mainland relatives.

Ancestrally formids typically lived in clans made up of immediate family, members from neighbouring clans and wandering individuals. Despite the sedentary nature of many of these communities (the most major exclusion being two tundra species and many clans from the two plains species), these wanderers maintained connections between clans and allowed the spread of genetics and ideas, hence how almost all modern species of Xenosapiens can still produce fertile offspring, although this comparative isolation and long timespan has lead to significantly greater variation than amongst Homo.

Despite having entered space shortly before humanity, Xenosapiens is a much older clade than genus Homo, with some estimates placing their common ancestor as far back as six million years ago, with some modern species existing as far back as two million years ago. For the majority of their history, formids have been isolated to the twin southern continents and some surrounding islands, though a small population of appears to have reached the westernmost island of the shattered continent after their ships got caught in the westerly current upon which they survived for a minimum of several hundred years before seemingly going locally extinct, although reports of shipwrecked sailors and wild men joining later colonies have been thought be some to represent the last of this distinct culture. Throughout their history formids have used a variety of complex tools constructed from wood, stone and bones, independently domesticating a variety of fauna and flora and living as nomads or agricultural communities as slowly trades of raw materials and manufactured goods developed across the continent, only becoming global a short few hundred years before the first formids flung themselves into the stars to land upon their twin moons.

The first sophonts the formids encountered were the Terrans, when two scientific missions to study an unusual solar system encountered each other. Following this formids joined the Terrans (and unknowingly a number of other sophont species) in the Great War, the conclusion of which lead to the formation of the USS (Union of Sophont Species).

You like spec evo. I have decided that you are now a mutual. You are cool

Cheers!!

Meep morp

ATTENTION

If you see this you are OBLIGATED to reblog w/ the song currently stuck in your head :)

Another human as I put off the dread of having to draw a Formid not in side on perspective

on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

Meep morp (moots and whoever feel free to join)

ALL MY FELLAS!!! 🗣️🗣️🗣️‼️🦅🦅🗣️🗣️🗣️

Make YOU using THIS PICREW and tag 5 people!!!!

Yep, it's a chain!!!

@eyesofrhodochrosite @taaaaaaawnyfrogmouth @mikebeanz @ofthefrogs @kredena-dark

I’ll bring cookies, biscuits and hot chocolate!!

Open tags cause if you see this you’re probably a moot

tumblr sleepover

ur invited to my tumblr sleepover!!

reblog with ur moots/anyone you find cool to invite them

what're you bringing and what're we gonna do/watch

@astro-can @joannaisimaginairy @hauntedloverr111 @livingponcho @kitab00m101 @tuturthecarvroom @youngjusticerulez @peanutsharks @purplesnowwolf @ask-bea-the-shifter @afrogwhocantdraw @little-ghostgirl-31 @bookishwarriorscientist @nightmareshiftss

im bringing candy and gossip (my school has sm tea) and we're watching mean girls bc im basic

-sam

Eight detonations toll like bells as the leviathan finally fell still. Behind it, the hulking mass of the vessel split like a maw, mechanical arms grasping desperately like pharyngeal jaws attempting to stuff the corpse down its gullet. Lifeless eyes that had seen the passing of near a century slip above the surface a final time as it is dragged into the metal cavern under the unseeing gaze of its kin.

As the soulless beast of steel snags upon the pier the mighty corpse is hauled from the gloom into air choked with smog and the roars of flame. Its fat feeds the furnaces, it’s flesh fuels the half starved skeletons that scamper beneath the showers of sparks and screaming metal, over watched by stone faced enforcers and bent to the whim of the monsters that lurk in dens gilded with gold far beyond the land scarred with soot they use to line their pockets.

To compare those lords of depravity to the dutiful guild of scavengers, to the ever inventive legions of parasites or the humble handiwork of plagues would be a disservice to these pillars of nature’s establishment. They are a cancer, a corrupting rot spawned from a broken system, a self perpetuating scourge that bloats and grows as it draws the life from all that surround it until the entire house of cards collapses under their weight. This is not survival of the fittest, nature red in tooth and claw, not pulling yourself up by the bootstraps nor the mandate proclaimed by some long dead god. It is a death cult, an ouroboros swallowing itself until the bloated head chokes on the famined tail, a self fulfilling prophecy of destruction doomed to fall.

But when the ash and dust have settled, the countless cohorts of creeping things have worked their time honoured role, when the unrelenting tides of time have weathered steel and skeleton alike, these kleptocratic kings of ruin will lie forgotten, merely another scar among the countless upon the Earth, the graves upon which they had built their foundations finally finding closure beneath silt and soil as the chorus of life sings on without them.

-bit of a vent post to try and deal with whatever the deep fried fuck is happening to the world rn