Serina: A Natural History of the World of Birds

The Tempuscene: 11 - 50 million years

A biome map of Serina fifteen million years PE, showing tectonic changes since the Hypostecene, among them the separation of Anciska and Striata and the full fusion of Striata southwards with Wahlteria, which has nearly closed off a large inland ocean, as the supercontinent of Cirrus breaks into two distinct landmasses for the first time. Anciska itself also begins to pull apart, with its north moving eastwards and its south southwards towards Stehvlandea, widening a thin land bridge.

It is now fifteen million years since Serina's establishment, and the Hypostecene is over. In the last few million years, Serina has entered into a new climactic condition, with the moon gradually exhibiting a worldwide trend towards cooling and the spread of aridity. Within five million years of Serina's abandonment, once life had been allowed to establish itself firmly to its new ecology, initially mild and tropical conditions had already begun to dissolve, unsustainable without artificial maintenance. Instead, the world of Serina began to revert towards the drier grassland world its geography naturally would sustain best. With the gradual decrease in precipitation over much of the moon, bamboo forests which spread from pole to pole within only a few million years of establishment began to retreat to a smaller number of remaining, isolated regions still moist enough to support their rapid and lush growth, as hardier prairie grasses, sunflowers, and dandelion derivatives reclaimed much of their former range. Less reliant on high precipitation, these plants can store large quantities of water and nutrients in underground roots and tubers and guard it from hungry animals with spines and unpalatable tissues. Where rainfall is too low for bamboo to grow, but higher than on the open grasslands, sunflower barrens transform into the beginnings of a new sustainable woodland type as suddenly as other floral groups develop tolerance to the toxic tannins they produce and evolve to compete beside them.

Beginning eleven million years PE, Serina entered the Tempuscenic Era. Characterized by a gradual shift of the Serinan world from tropical to temperate, it will bring Serina's first ice age as seasonal ecosystems will begin to outnumber tropical, the latter of which will soon be confined solely to a thin but rich ring along the equator, as the polar regions of Serina begins to experience snowfall for the first time. Only a taste of what is now to come, at the era's height Serina will develop its first permanently frozen polar ice caps, which will not melt again tens of millions of years.

Serina will not become a snowball world, however, any more than our own world is today. Winter will still give way to spring, and spring to summer. A seasonal rotation on a tilted access means Serina experiences its seasons not unlike our own. There will always be balance, and life - now well established - will go on. Migration becomes widespread, as animals are forced away from comfortable home ranges with increasing changes in their environments as winter and summer grow increasingly different. Faced with these same challenges, Serina's flora begin their most noticeable evolution yet, beginning to take on appearances increasingly unlike their ancestors and to grow in new, innovative ways, carving their own path up the tree of life silently, often overshadowed - but not stopped - by the lively activities of the insects and animals around them. As desertification spreads, it is the towering tree-like sunflowers that slowly become Serina's equivalents to the cacti and other hardy succulents of Earth, reducing their foliage to only a seasonal flush, eventually for some to lose it all together in favor of swollen and spiny trunks with only their vibrant golden blossoms to ever belay their ancient ancestry as a common garden plant and roadside weed - but other plants will soon rise again to compete. Remaining equatorial and patchy temperate forest is still dominated by bamboo, which now lies overshadowed by more drought-tolerant flora in most of the rest of the rest of the world. In millennia to come, however, it will experience a resurgence, as the Tempuscenic and the changes it has brought will be the foundation - thanks to some little helpers - for the next major innovation in the plant kingdom which will put them one day again on par to - and perhaps even beyond - their hardier foresting counterparts. Conditions will no longer be universally paradisaical and pristine in a changing world, but change brings adaptation. Change is the only thing, anywhere, at any time, that always stays the same. As it always has, life goes on. And as it goes on, it becomes ever more distinct, unique, and diverse.