The Shaggy Giant

Striding down from the great mountains of the Himalayas came giants. Two-humped hairy beasts that loomed tall over any other creature came in small herds, settling in the lands below. Though the climate was agreeable, considerably warmer than the now-frozen upland deserts they abandoned, the menu was not. These giants were champions of survival, able to go months without food and water, and could stomach the spikiest of plants and even some meat and skin. Even so, they suffered. Each one was forced to live on whatever scraps the skeletal ecosystem could offer. Those were lean days, dry and dead, barely supporting the sickly, inbred camels for whom survival was an eternally open question. When the world finally began to heal, their bodies were shrunk, their numbers were low, and they were starving —  but alive.

Through chance and skill, wild Bactrian camels would live to see the world form anew. They would do so from above, for they are by far the largest terrestrial animals to make it to the other side. As times bettered, their numbers grew and their range spread, and as the ecosystem healed, so did they, shedding the signs of a bottlenecked, impoverished population. In fact, they were nourished beyond health, for the world soon had plenty to eat and nothing large enough to eat them or push them aside. As time passed, this changed, but they never lost their head start. They have spread across Asia and, recently, into Africa and Australia. Nearly everywhere they live now, they are the largest of the local animals. But their largeness comes in many forms.

Take the lofops. These beasts evolved in Sundaland's semi-arid shrubby lands, shielded from the rains that allow forests to grow elsewhere on the subcontinent. Easily identifiable from a distance, their humps are thin, long, and flabby, containing little fat. They flop to one side or the other, sometimes on the same side, sometimes opposite sides. Though to a lesser extent now, they are still used to store fat, which causes them to grow longer and wider; a sign of fitness in lofops. A lofops that finds itself in a confrontation with another will back down if the other's flat humps are longer than its own.

With the appearance of large and competent predators of animals their size, lofops ancestors grew in response while adopting a squat, heavily-built stature. Instead of fighting with kicks or, in the case of competing males, shoves with their necks and shoulders, lofops heads grew larger while their necks, a target for foes, grew short and stout. They kept their neck-swinging behavior though, encouraging the evolution of three sets of flanges on their heads: the rostral flange on the bridge of the nose, the brow flanges derived from the sun-blocking brows of their ancestor, and the cheek flanges growing from the back of the lower jaw. These features are what lent the animals their name; lofops means "hill-face" or "ridge-face". These bony protuberances are covered in thick skin which sheds its hair as the animal grows. With use, they become hard and callused; old individuals often appear to have five horns instead of flanges on their faces. Different individuals use their weapons in different ways: some may prefer to swing their heads and thus use their brow or cheek flanges to attack, while others charge and use their rostral flange. This preference is reflected in the distribution of cornified skin.

Lofops have developed into various species since spreading from Sundaland. Some graze, others browse shrubs and trees; some frequent the grasslands, others the forests, while their more hirsute relatives call tundras and taigas home. Uniting all the species is the presence of a distinct summer and winter coat and a long whip-like tail which fends off the plagues of biting flies that accompany the yearly melt. They are also united in being very large. In the largest species, males attain a shoulder height of 230 cm (7.5 ft) and weigh 2,400 kg (5300 lb), outweighing a male white rhino and towering much taller. Females typically weigh about 70% as much and have smaller flanges, though comparably sized flat humps. They live in herds composed of females who have lived there their whole lives, as well as itinerant males that come and go between them. Calves are born in the spring with small flanges and humps and can walk and run within hours of birth. They are defended from predators by all herd members.

What predators are there to defend from? In the 5 million years hence, there is a well-established set of hungry animals that threaten the lives of any large animal. These include descendants of mustelids, mostly the yellow-throated marten, which has diversified greatly into various predators thanks to its early adoption of pack hunting, an art once nearly lost on Earth. Among these are lion-wolves, tan-colored hierarchical martens that can team up to take down very large prey, dingo-pumas, adaptable medium-sized hunters found in many environments, and jackal-lynxes, nocturnal stalking predators and omnivores with only very loose social structures. Red foxes have also produced large hunters, these tending to be solitary.

Just south of the lofops' homeland, the waters around Sundaland and northern Australia are still very productive, the shallow sea and relative warmth feeding communities marked by macroalgae and various marine plants. This is the warmest sea in all the world, with only mild winters, though still cold enough to turn Florida into an ice cube. Upon finding these warm, clear waters, wild Bactrian camels encountered a serendipitous situation. Camels are unable to swim, or so says a common misconception, but in fact most animals are able to swim and camels do so fairly well. Not only are they able to live here, but their adaptations to a cold desert have unintentionally "prepared" them to thrive here.

For one, they are not picky eaters, able to transition to the shallow flora with ease. In reaching and diving for this food, their noses aided them well without any modification, for their ability to close tight helps just as much to keep water out as airborne sand. Their feet, too, proved helpful, for their single sole shared by both toes, once providing a large surface area for standing on sand, found use as paddles in the water. Though some populations of camels can drink saltwater to a certain extent, adapting to live on saltwater completely is not necessary, for their extreme water-saving adaptations allow them to survive using only the water within their food until an escapade to an inland water source is needed. The low-density fat on their backs allows them to bob quite stably in the water, while their fur shields them against hypothermia from being in the water too long. Given all this, it is no surprise that the wild Bactrian camels have taken to the ocean multiple times independently, making them omnipresent anywhere with shallow depths. Selecting one of these lineages arbitrarily, we have the nessie and its unique adaptations in the millions of years since.

Nessies are typically seen bobbing lazily in the water, up to nothing at all. Their way of life is easy and their moods complacent, taking everything at their own slow pace. Floating is effortless thanks to the mound of fat covering their backs, replacing the two distinct humps, which makes a float that keeps the animal upright even in choppy seas. It even serves as a rest for their heads when napping thanks to their flexible necks. These necks are comically long, making up half their length when outstretched, and serves to reach the algae and plants in the shallows with minimal effort. To eat them, the nessie submerges its head and manipulates the flora with its large, whisker-covered lips, eating an item and moving to the next, mowing a wide swath around it. Their broad faces allow them to take in much food at a time, so that when they are satiated, they can go back to their carefree ways. They swim very well, splaying their semi-rigid footpads to push against the water, but most of the time there is simply no need. Occasionally, however, they may need to dive for when food is further in the depths.

Nessies swim in waters they cannot drink. Instead, they live on the water from rain and that contained in the tissues of the vegetation they eat. If they wish, they may venture inland for water, though it is rarely needed. A walking nessie is a silly sight, its flattened foot-pads sounding like flip-flops on the ground and its neck held awkwardly stiff, now required to hold up its own weight. The land has more than just water for them; it also provides food and surfaces to scratch their bodies or toenails against. It is the scratching they truly need from the land; to soothe an itch, to slough off old skin, and to wear down their very slowly-growing toenails. Land is also a requirement for them to mate, since, like all camelids, nessies mate with the female laying down and the male sitting atop her. Pregnant mothers will preferentially head to land to give birth, though they can give birth underwater; a newborn nessie requires its mother to push it up to the surface to breathe for the first time. Young nessies have trouble suckling underwater, so they will stay on or near the shore alongside their mothers before they are weaned.

When a nessie reaches adolescence and beyond, it will be free of most enemies. Other nessies may confront them, for they live in loose social groups and occasionally may fight each other, but these are relatively tame. Fights between males are one of the few times a nessie will get active and vicious, as the two bite and beat each other until one gives in. Rarely, however, an adult nessie's serene life may turn to one of sheer panic and horror for only a few final moments. With hardly a warning, a massive pair of jaws erupts from the water and drags it under, leaving its herdmates to flee in shock. Yes, large predatory whales are back and occasionally find themselves in the shallows.

Like the forests of the sea, healthy forests have existed for nearly five million years now, their recovery period now dwarfed by the time elapsed since the extinction. For much of that time, there were no large animals which could feast upon the high-up leaves. Consuming them from the ground would require a specialized herbivore, the development of which is not always favorable. However, in this case, such a herbivore was nigh fated to exist. With wild Bactrian camels the sole giants of their world for so long, and with lineages heavily pressured to find other food sources because of their ever-present fellow camels, these already long-necked creatures would discover the benefits of an extremely specialized high-browser. This is exactly what became in the towering capebacks, the largest terrestrial animals upon the whole Earth.

There are various species of towering capebacks distributed across the forests of Sundaland, mainland Asia, India, and Arabia, all sharing certain characteristics. They are long-legged and long-necked, yet still robust. Their humps are flattened, with the hind hump barely present. The front hump is much larger, with its fat more evenly distributed across the back, along the shoulders, and reaching into the base of the neck. Their fur, which alternates between summer and winter coats, is much thicker in cape-like areas centered on their main hump, hence their name. Finally, towering capebacks are true giants. The largest species' males can weigh 7500 kg (16500 lb or 8.25 tons), heavier than an African elephant, and can tower 6 m (19.7 ft) above the ground, making them the tallest mammals that have ever lived.

With the immense heap of fat upon their backs, towering capebacks act like capacitors in their ecosystems, gorging on food when it is present and burning their store when it is not. Those found in subtropical and temperate forests favor leaves, twigs, and whatever fruits they can find, stripping them from the branches and moving quickly on. When the ground is parched and the temperatures low, herds will cluster together and nibble on evergreens to wait out the lean winter. Species that live in cold areas have much larger humps, for they will need them not only for fuel but for their insulation. During the summers of the cold deciduous forests and taigas they call home, they similarly build up their heaps of fat. During the winter, their mounds are burned away as the animal subsides on bark, pinecones, and pine needles. This makes them dependent upon evergreen trees in the winter as well, so their populations often migrate slightly northward in the winter, not southward, as the deciduous trees lose their leaves. A towering capeback at the end of winter is a sorry sight, its great mound of fat now reduced to a patch of very loose skin on its back and shoulders hanging limply to one side.

Towering capebacks will occasionally sit squat on the ground like their ancestral camels used to, something they've retained for mating and sleeping. This offers them the possibility of dustbaths and mudbaths. They can also get a drink with ease this way, for their proportions would otherwise force them into an even more awkward position than the one giraffes use to get their heads near the water. Drinking, however, is not often required.

A important question remains about many of these descendants: How did they get so big? Seemingly a silly question, there are good reasons to believe that their size is impossible. The largest terrestrial mammals of now and the past were hindgut fermenters, while Bactrian camels are foregut fermenters. The difference is key: hindgut fermenters house symbiotic bacteria in their intestines that digest cellulose for them, while foregut fermenters do the same but store the bacteria in one of their stomachs, for they often have more than one. Foregut fermenters are more efficient, absorbing a larger proportion of nutrients in their food than hindgut fermenters, which end up ejecting much of it. However, hindgut fermenters process food faster, largely fermenting the material along a linear intestine as opposed to it sitting in a stomach chamber. Furthermore, when food is available in very small amounts, they can actually extract more from a meager diet than foregut fermenters, which require a constant flux of food to keep their digestion going.

The fact that camels survive doing exactly this despite being foregut fermenters shows that they are an exception, however. They are not ruminants like cows and goats, instead having evolved convergently with them. Camelids have three stomachs as opposed to the four of ruminants. Their forestomach, a two-lobed structure, plays a much larger part in digestion than the first stomach of ruminants. First, it holds food longer and more thoroughly digests it. Second, its walls can be used to recycle urea, making better use of both energy and nitrogen from their diet. Last, for reasons not entirely clear, it processes food significantly faster. These adaptations, like all adaptations, come with disadvantages: Nitrogen in their diet can more easily poison them than ruminants. However, the advantage is that having the first stomach house the majority of cellulose-digesting activity, as well as that strange ability to recycle some of their urea, allows them to process more food and to live on less nitrogen, which is often a limiting nutrient. Therefore, they possess the advantages of foregut fermentation with several extra bonuses typically offered only to hindgut fermenters. In this way, they are not as limited in size as other foregut fermenters.

One major effect of these large camelids proliferating is that plants all over their range have struggled to defend themselves. Wild Bactrian camels are heavily adapted to eating tough vegetation, with thick tongues and oral papillae in their mouths that protect against spines and force tough foods down the gullet. This means that many of the physical defenses plants have against herbivory will not work well. These effects will be later explored, but they define much of the flora across Asia and its neighboring landmasses.