Paleontology The Squibbion's Discover Their Past

In the new industrial age, many long-held beliefs began to fall out of vogue and be replaced with new ideas. The belief that religion was the force that shaped the world began to be questioned with the discovery of scientific ideas.

As miners tore up the soil in search of coal, strange creatures began to be excavated and brought to light strange creatures that looked nothing like anything they had ever seen.

Well, the Squibbion had likely known about these fossils for century's they would have been attributed to mythological creatures it was only now that they began to look at them as creatures that once lived in the past.

Many tried to imagine what these creatures looked like many skeletons of bizarre-looking animals with four legs and long sturdy backbones like Blish but nothing like any Blish they had ever seen.

Many speculated on what these "Tetrapods" looked like ranging from fairly close to CM Kosemen levels of bizarre with many early paleontologists assuming they were some kind of long-extinct bizarre Blish.

However, as coal miners dug deeper more bizarre fossils of Tetrapod it became clear how old the earth truly was stretching back to 4 billion years. But the age of the earth complied with all the new creatures being found new ideas began to be formed.

With the idea of deep time and extinction beginning to become more accepted the theory of evolution began to be formed.

As some began to take note of the similarities between the beaks of various Blish ideas of survival of the fittest and natural selection systems of classification began to be formed tetrapods were finally figured out to be an extinct class of Chordate only distantly related to Blish who belong to their class and had made the jump from water to land separately.

But soon the inevitable question was asked "Did we evolve from something" Squibbions had always attributed their uniqueness among other animals to some sort of creation deity and many thought that "Us who god made in his image coming from a bunch of those tree Squids at the zoo preposterous"

But scientists began to see the many similarities shared between them and other Terra Squid and for the first time the Squibbion's were able to place themselves on the tree of life

An early Squibbion scientist's sketch of the Terra Squid family tree.

However, a big mystery concerning their evolution was the fossils of their family tree ended 120 million years ago leaving scientists puzzled about where they came from.

However, as Squibbion began to explore the sea they began to draw comparisons between them and the cephalopods they dragged up from the sea it was obvious that the Squibbion were some type of highly derived Cephalopod.

As the Squibbion dug deeper into the earth fossils of Cephalopods began to be unearthed and the Squibbion were able to piece together the complete evolutionary tree of the Cephalopods going back to the base of the Cephalopod branch of the tree of life.

A museum exhibit showing the fossils of Ammonite shells among the most common fossils found in deeper rock layers and a painting of Cameroceras the largest extinct natalid in the fossil record.

Soon the Squibbion were able to even find things going back past the first Cephalopods genetic and fossil evidence proved that Cephalopods were a derived Mollusk meaning that the bizarre hopping snails were among the Squibbion's closet non-Cephalopod relatives. Even further back the Squibbion could find their relationship among other invertebrates and even back to the pre-Cambrian primitive early Bilaterians where they and the Vertebrates took separate paths.

However, these discoveries created a new effect on Squibbions psych superiority. The fact that the Squibbions were the only sapient Cephalopod in over 700 million years made many common Squibbion who didn't know about the complex evolutionary chain that brought the Squibbions to were they were thought that they were the final and grandest form of the Cephalopods and that they were untouchable the pinnacle of life.

Nature was soon to show them just how wrong they were

A piece of artwork portraying Knightoconus Antarcticus an extinct Monoplacophoran thought to be the ancestor to the Cephalopods as it has a chambered conical shell-like natalids but unlike modern Cephalopods lacks a Siphuncle.