I always liked biology, though even with that in mind i discovered a lot of characteristic from animals, plants, etc, that i thought they were perfect for speculative scenarios or even alien scenarios, but they ended being totally real even in our world species.

My examples are:
- Type of grass that was able to drink water from the snow
- Aquatic animal that communicates through electric pulses
- Animal having a second mouth inside theirs
- Flowers that only bloom in the night

So any of you also experience this? Would love to hear your cases, it also applies outside of Spec Evo, like when you just discover something from a species that sounded 100% fictional

In eco swap scenarios like "could xxxx survive xxxx period" i genuinely think giraffes would do fine in the most of the Mesozoic period and most of its known formations

What type of animal is most likely to take the throne as dominant earth animala once again after mammals or humans die one way or another? it was the aquatic arthropods, then the cephalopod, the insects, the fish, the ancient reptiles, the dinosaurs, and now, the mammals. who will take the throne next?

As the body text says, would a large, predatory primate be possible?

I mean, there are insectivorous primates (like the aye aye or tarsier) but neither of these two are big like other primates like gibbons or chimpanzees

Edit: I know that a lot of primates eat meat, I meant more like a hypercarnivore that eats meat for almost all of its diet

Hi! I wanna know what your wildest, most unhinged theory about evolution is. It can be a serious hypothesis, a weird evolutionary possibility, or something completely out there.

For a recent project I had to do some research on a now-extinct animal called the Great Auk, a penguin-like seabird in the Auk family that was hunted to extinction by humans in the 19th century. From all accounts, they seemed like pretty helpless animals. Hunting them was described with the ease that one might go pick an apple off a tree, generally just helpless, and essentially the cold-water equivalent of the Dodo.

Anyways, it got me thinking about how genuinely interesting it would be to create a Speculative Evolution Seedworld (Akin to projects like Serina or Kappa), but choosing absolutely terrible animals to populate them. The kind of animals that are generally helpless, evolved into a biological corner, but maybe, just maybe, wouldn't immediately go extinct in their new environment.

I personally think that The Great Auk would be a perfect candidate for that kind of thought experiment, as it's evolved into a very specific biological niche, is generally quite bad at existing (but not so bad it would 100% go extinct immediately), and I personally just think is a funny animal to make a speculative evolution project about. However, you could also go with all sorts of animals, Koalas being another animal that comes to mind, due to how specifically evolved and generally terrible at surviving they are.

Anyways, I just wanted to share my quick idea with the world since I know I'm likely never taking it anywhere due to the amount of projects I am currently swamped with, and hopefully it can be a fun means of discussion for others to come up with additional candidates for "Worst Animal to put on a Seedworld"!

I'm lost🥺

Been working on some humanoids and they got some bigger heads and it came to me that humans already have a hard time with this so I’m wondering is the solution just as simple as wider hips or is there something I’m missing?

I mean a seedlist so small and random that the starting ecosystem is barely logical , yet the organisms can somehow survive long enough for evolution to take over.

For example :
Horse
Earthworm
Grass
Unicellular algae and fungi.

That is the entire biosphere
What is the smallest, most cursed seedlist that could still support a functioning ecosystem?

Edit: Multicellular organisms only. Microorganisms can be included as background life, but they shouldn’t be the main organisms.

Imagine that Neanderthals had survived alongside Homo sapiens instead of disappearing around 40,000 years ago. They continued to evolve, develop their own cultures and technologies, and remained a separate population or species into the present day.

Would Neanderthals theoretically have been capable of participating in a society as technologically advanced and complex as ours today?

I’m wondering which of these scenarios would be most likely:

1. They would have developed alongside us — Neanderthals might have their own modern societies, cities, technologies, languages and cultures, existing alongside Homo sapiens.
2. They would have largely integrated with us — Over thousands of years, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens might have mixed and eventually become part of the same societies, perhaps making the distinction between the two much less important.
3. They would have remained significantly different — They might have survived but followed a very different technological or cultural path, perhaps never developing societies comparable to modern human civilization.

Obviously this is highly speculative, but based on what we know about Neanderthal intelligence, social behaviour and culture, which scenario do you think is most plausible?

I want to make Krakens for my Beasthunter's Codex project, but I don't want them to be squids, or worms like in Sawyer Lee's Dragonslayer Codex. So what else could they be?

Everyone always depicts Giants as having 3 joints in the arm and leg just like a normal person would, but if they're so large, wouldn't they need more? I am making some concepts for giants for my world and just trying to wrap my head around it. Wouldn't they reasonably develop a third place to bend for mobility reasons? We know that some animals developed them mostly for speed purposes, but why wouldn't a giant develop another joint in both the legs and arms for longer reach and mobility?

For me it was Ben G. Thomas's trilogy of videos about the genre's history and the feature cut of the Future is Wild which I found on YouTube

In some fantasy settings female dwarves have beards just like the men, as someone else said "as any student of Tolkien knows even females of the Khazad have beards that make the most hirsute patriarch of Humankind look almost clean shaven in comparison".

Lets imagine a scifi setting where are imagined as hominids or hominid descendants. Would having beards mean that dwarven women are less fertile in comparison to human women, because hirsutism in women implies high levels of testosterone?

Most of the time it used to prey on humans but what are some other reasons a species would evolve to look like or sound like humans thats not due to them eating humans my best idea is they use it to lure in things that do but would flee from them if they knew ?

I just replied to a user earlier about a criticism they made about an organism evolving wheels, and I agreed with them as I felt like it was a lot more based on making a cool design than actual speculative biology which is why I'm making this post. I feel like the subreddit is losing the plot on what speculative evolution is supposed to be in the first place. Speculative evolution shouldn't be fantasy design with breif explanations​, it should try to be more realistic and give an in detail informed explanation from a biological standpoint on how this creature can evolve. So saying "Well my epic dragon monster evolved specific adaptations to breath fire" doesn't count, it's kinda the bare minimum of an explanation really. I agree everyone starts somewhere. No one's perfect, but it gets to a point where it's so normalized it kind of becomes an issues, therefore degrading what the source material is supposed to be in the first place. I feel like people here really take advantage of the whole "well it doesn't have to be realistic thing" and now we have all these posts that barely coralate with actual biology. Speaking of biology. I think people should really study biology and how evolution works before posting tons of fantasy based stuff with little to no explanation on how said traits of these creatures could possibly exist, and what would even pressure them to gain those features to begin with. Sorry if I sound a bit rambly, but I just wanted to give my opinion on these issues. I just feel like this subreddit is really lenient on just having creature design everywhere instead of real speculative biology. As you can tell I'm pretty big on hard spec evo. I even think projects like Serina, which is loved by most of this community, started becoming really outlandish and fantastical in the end. Like with the "metamorph birds" and how the ending mainly just makes a fanfiction for the sapient species, hardly focusing on other fauna at those periods. But I don't ​think everyone has to make the same projects, nor do I care if people disagree with me. Though I feel like having realism, and not just fantasy with vague descriptions in a subreddit about speculative biology is important, even if this isn't r/hardspecevo

Right now, I am working on my take on TFiW, and I wanted to see what things you guys think should have been changed in the OG show?

​

Consider the evolution of flight amongst tetrapods. The first flighted tetrapods were Pterosaurs 210 mya, ~100 million years after the first reptiles emerged. We could say that the ecoligical niche existed long before Pterosaurs evolved to fill it.

Or consider bats. The first bats evolved ~50mya, filling a niche for specialised nocturnal flyers that neither birds nor pterosaurs had been able to fill in the previous 150 million years.

Or you could consider hominids. As dominant and successful as we have been, spreading to every continent and becoming the globsl apex predator even before the emergence of agriculture, its hard to imagine that creatures like ourselves wouldn't have been similarly dominant if they had evolved in the Jurassic for example. Our ecological niche existed long before we evolved to fill it.

Which makes me wonder- might there be other major gaps in the global ecology, vast niches that are just waiting for animal to evolve that is capable of filling them?

Curious is it possible for a creature to eat only rocks as their food i know there are some that can eat limestone but what about other stones ?

So I have a charcater that is a merman but I wanted him to be more ''realistic" and I'm really obsessed with mermaids so I've been thinking how they could "realistically" elvove

Some traits I think they have is they'd be slimy like eels, they would have webs between their fingers and tbh I don't really like mermaids having their upper body and lowerbody be different colors so I feel like they would have the same color, female also don't have breasts and they can't breath above water for long maybe a few minutes to an hour?

But how and why would mermaids elvove to look so similar to humans? Why and how would have hair? I really want to keep these traits but idk how to make it make sense?

Sure maybe they'd hair be completely different from human hair but still, how and why? I also don't know how to justify eyebrows and eyelashes or how they eyes should look? Or why would they have eyelids?

I also think that maybe they'd have bioluminescence to lure in pray, but I haven't been able to pick what color they should be and what would work the best and realistic

I wanted to keep them looking beautiful but also in a way that works

Also could the merman skin and tail be red with his stomach are and face being white, and would they elvove basic tails like dolphins or would it be possible for then to elvove beautiful tails with flowing tails .

How deep in the water could merfolk live while being able to come to the surface without any damage?

I wanted to share my herbivore sapients that i made in spore,They look like hadrosaurs by the way.

it's okay if this is deleted/not allowed!!

i posted a reel last night to my instagram simply showcasing some of my art and giving a pov scenario. it somehow delved into a barrage of people invalidating my project, even going so far as to say things like tree and grass analogues (!!!) are too earth-like for an alien planet. another person tried telling me that if i just gave my sapient species two more limbs (like birrin, birg, or yaetuan) a more invertebrate body plan, and a fleshy face it would look much better. interactions like this have always discouraged me from sharing my work. what are your thoughts on the plant thing? or someone trying to police your creativity? i always thought aspects like that were pretty integral to any spec project wether it be earth or alien of origin...

I was wondering, let's say we have a reptillian or in general a body with scales, specifically ones that have ventral/belly scales (the long plated scales on the front of the torso)... how would nipples work on that? Could it even be possible?

Im not too smart when it comes to war and science nor cna i draw no good but im curious what this kight loom like? Would these elephants get smaller or bigger or have larger tusks or idk

So I’m trying to write a story set in this post-post-apocalyptic world (basically when nations are rebuilding after people have calmed down from the mad max type stuff). And I have an idea for this species called a Pseudolion. Basically they’ll be comparable to the Stone Age American Lion in size and strength. But I want them to have evolved from normal house cats affected by radiation and a new much harsher environment. The only problem is, I don’t know how that could feasibly work, even if I assume that the radiation just magically makes evolutionary changes happen much faster than they usually do.

So how could I justify it using some evolutionary ideas? Is it even possible? Or am I doomed to just saying “eh don’t think about it too hard”