Fantastic Forms: Boras, Simiagibs, and the Anteater Muck

Fantastic Forms

250 million years of natural selection has altered some animals dramatically from their ancestors. From countless small mutations occurring in every generation since life colonized Serina have accumulated only the most beneficial. Individually slight but collectively mighty, a quarter billion years of slow change has left some creatures all but unidentifiable.

This is the case for many of the animals which can be found in the tropical rainforests of equatorial Serinarcta in the early Ultimocene. A warm, wet climate without discernible seasons, these habitats are incomparably diverse and incredibly favorable to plant and animal life. Abundant resources and a steady supply of food throughout the year allow many distinct groups to coexist that could not elsewhere, and it is here that two lineages in particular, each about as far removed from either of their ancestors as anything so far to exist on Serina, have come to converge on a single niche - albeit through very different means.

above: life of the tropical rainforest in the Ultimocene, 250 million years PE.

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Both of these types of creatures have taken to a life in the treetops, becoming skillfully acrobatic climbers with dexterous hands to grasp and swing, acute vision and large brains with which to quickly process information. They are social, opportunistic and omnivorous. For most intents and purposes, they are both variations on monkey-like animals which have come to a similar point in their adaptation despite extraordinarily distinct ancestry. One hailing from the softbill birds and the other from the tribbets they are, respectively, the boras and the simiagibs.

Boras are the sister group to the terries as descendants of the mitten bird and very much like them are intelligent, social creatures with highly developed facial appendages which they have adapted into fully functional manipulators. Indeed, as a result of having left the ground almost entirely for an arboreal life, the tentacle arms on the snouts of the boras are even more exaggerated into long and highly muscled tendrils fully capable of wrapping around a branch and hoisting up the weight of the animal, each functioning fully as a new hand - something their ancestors had lacked since the Cretaceous period some 316 million years ago when they specialized their forearms irreversibly into wings. To facilitate their life high above ground the boras have remained considerably smaller than their ground-dwelling kin and for the most part are no larger than twenty-four inches tall and some twenty pounds in weight, with most being considerably littler still. They rely on their tentacles extensively to cling to thin branches and vines in the canopy as they forage for the fruit, seeds, nectar and small animals that make up their diets, frequently clinging by them alone whilst they use their elongated hind legs equipped with three opposing toes to pick up food and bring it to the hooked parrot-like bill hidden under the soft tissue of the snout. Indeed their hind legs, which are frog-like and similarly adapted to provide powerful jumping force, have moved so far back along the body to make bipedal movement awkward and cumbersome and so in the rare event a bora must come to ground, if an upright bounding hop is not adequate it props itself up upon its snout appendages and uses them as legs - and so has become a true secondary quadruped, at least faculatively. Like the terries, they are dutiful parents. Most species are monogamous and raise their young in tree hollows - like terries, they will transport their eggs if they feel they are unsafe in the current nest and the young, when hatched, will cling to the backs of both parents for up to several months before they reach any degree of independence. A diet particularly favoring fruit has resulted in a new selection for dichromatic colour vision lost in the nocturnal ancestors and so the boras are often more colorful than other softbill birds, with the large eyes as well as the naked skin of the legs and snout becoming canvases upon which bright and showy shades of red, yellow and blue are cast that allow species to identify their own kind and for males to impress both mates and rivals. Even the fine, hair-like plumage of the boras is bright, frequently marked in bold shades of red, gold, black and white.

Sharing the jungles with the boras are the arguably even stranger simiagibs, handfishes directly descended from the gibbets which adapted the individual digits of their front legs into not one but two pairs of forelimbs, and split their tails into two long grasping fingers which have by this time produced animals of a truly hexapedal form. With two pairs of arms splitting from a single large shoulder joint - actually the ancestral wrist - they are perhaps even more sure-footed in the trees, for they can climb about, feed and forage without ever lifting more than three legs from a branch at a time. While some remain carnivorous others have incorporated a lot of plant food into their diet and enjoy a broad banquet similar to that perused by the boras and it is among these that have become some of the largest, reaching sizes rivaling chimpanzees. Though certainly simpler of mind than the boras they are unarguably the most cognitively advanced tribbets outside the tribbetheres, living in social units and providing enduring care to their offspring which are carried by the mother until they can climb on their own. In order to fuel both their active lifestyle and an increasingly complicated brain the simiagibs become the second tribbet group to develop a warm-blooded metabolism. Interestingly though, they have so far had no need to develop integument as a result of their very mild habitat and so are covered only in a very smooth layer of glandular skin. Perhaps limited from moving to cooler latitudes by the success of other animal groups, this lack of adaptation limits the spread of the group to the tropics where the climate is always warm. Color vision is well-developed in the group and they make even more dramatic use of display patterns than the boras, their skin sporting dazzling arrays of spots, stripes and splashes of color that is frequently iridescent and furthermore can be altered by highly-developed chromatophore cells that enable the animals to brighten and reduce the intensity of their markings in a matter of seconds as well as to change color totally in some species - abilities also present in some tribbetheres as well but greatly limited in practical use by the presence of insulating hair. Male simiagibs are often larger and are always the more vividly colorful, for they usually control groups of females and their offspring and compete for mating rights. In addition to their bold markings, males advertise their strength to rivals and proclaim their possession of a territory with loud booming calls in the morning and evening, when sound carries furthest in the canopy.

Boras and simiagibs share these jungles with many other creatures of varying levels of closeness. In addition to the most advanced ape-like gibbets are smaller kin that have specialized down different lines. One such creature is the boggle, a wide-eyed, squirrel-sized proto-simiagib that has developed membranes of skin around its forelegs that allow it to parachute across wide expanses between trees both to avoid its own predators and pursue flying insect prey. Able to flutter its wings additionally to prolong its flight and to change the trajectory of its glides midair, it approaches the requirements for true flight. To power this high activity level it too has built upon the slightly warm-blooded metabolism of its ancestor and exhibits one on the borderline between true warm and cold bloodedness. A highly agile hunter, it bounds through the trees in search of insect prey but can maintain its body temperature only a few degrees above ambient conditions and cannot readily dissipate excess heat so that it largely avoids direct sunlight except in cool weather. Its eyes and ears both are large and well suited to let it find prey even in total darkness, and it returns to a secluded tree hollow to spend the day in a state of torpor where its body temperature falls to ambient levels.

Less closely related still, but nonetheless united among them as tribbets are the rodent-like, three-limbed molodonts which remain Serina's most successful tribbet group by far with some several thousand species. While ground-living forms such as the circuagodonts have evolved increasingly specialized dentition, that of most arboreal groups is primitive - two teeth, one on top and one on the bottom, which grind together to pulverize hard food sources such as seeds. As a result of the sheer efficiency of this design, chimera trees - symbiotic organisms consisting of a sunflower tree and an ant colony that rely on one another for survival - become increasingly prevalent in the Ultimocene, for they have forgone the production of such edible seeds entirely. They now produce young plants immediately on their branch tips, each protected by bitter tasting alkaloid chemicals in its tissues, which the winged male ants produced by the colony pluck and carry away to plant as they begin their own colonies.

Lastly pictured is a bird with no close relation to any other creature pictured, even the boras - from which it separated some 240 million years ago or more. It is a muck, and one of the very last ones if the birdles of the oceans are disregarded. Three species, each quite similar to each other, have developed a novel taste not for the plants that sustain their largest living relative the lumberbeest but for the ants that are so omnipresent in every arboreal environment. While the lumberbeest feeds on ants incidentally whilst browsing the anteater mucks seek them out, breaking open nests with their large front claws while holding a secure grasp on the branch with their hind feet that have secondarily returned to a grasping state just like in their very distant ancestors. A long tongue is used to slurp the insects into the beak, which has partially fused together and opens only at the very tip at an angle of a few degrees. The anteater is slow and lethargic even for a muck, totally reliant on environmental conditions to remain active and totally unable to flee a predator and so relies on cryptic coloration and a protective coat of enlarged scales, each edges with sharp ridges, to protect itself from all but the most determined predators. It has freed itself from the need to return to the forest floor to lay its eggs by forming its eggshells with a thick glob of unhardened shell material pooled on one end which dries within a few minutes in the open air. The anteater muck then uses this material as glue, attaching its eggs to the inner walls of tree cavities, where the eggs then develop on their own with no further attention. Colored with brown and grey speckles like the wood, they are difficult to see in the dim light and give off little scent to attract predators. Frequently the mother will choose to lay her clutch within a nest already occupied by some other small animal, ignoring its defense by merit of its sturdy armor, and so rely on the other creature as protection for its developing young which eventually will hatch by night. Fully able to care for themselves from birth, they slip away while the rightful occupants of the nest are either asleep or out hunting for food.