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JohnFrog

@john-frog

Local self entitled anuran specialist, speccer, worldbuilder, biology nerd

Some lore on my (supposed to be) main worldbuilding/spec evo project Batrachiterra.

In the not-so-distant future, humans have technologically advanced quite a bit, principally in terms of space travel. Humans can terraform Earth-sized planets and moons at their will, using their new homes to live, mine metals, farm animals, plants, and study certain substances, components, fauna, diseases, and even weapons in a controlled ambient environment. Such an environment is the planet Frog world. Frog World, frog's world, Frog world, many names are used to refer to the planet Heqet, in a close solar system where humans settled in to study frogs. But why study frogs? The enterprise that did this process of terraformation, called Batrachotechnologies, began the project in order to study, breed, and preserve frog species that became endangered on Earth. They aimed not only to preserve frogs but also study their poison, the batrachotoxin, in order to make vaccines, medicines and antidotes against diseases and poisons respectively. They brought to the planet the following frog species: The genus Dendrobates commonly known as poison dart frogs, the Cane toad Rhinella marina, Giant leaf frog Phyllomedusa bicolor, the Common toad Bufo bufo, and the Colorado river toad Incilius alvarius.

The terraformation was done trough some decades, the process started when the first spacial stations settled in the solar system. The atmosphere of the planet was very similar to Earth's one, but it still needed to be changed, massive machines called 437H3-R were sent to produce gases such as oxygen in high quantities. Later on, more machines were sent, now the L1L1-P0D's, who bred phyto-plankton such as algae, an important component in order to stay with the oxygen levels alright. But L1L1-P0D's also bred Zoo-plankton needed to keep the numbers of algae in check. Then it was time for "greater" life get in, drones nicknamed 533D-3R launched spores of mosses, lichens, ferns and fungi in the continents, "pioneer species" who helped to break down nutrients from rocks, a necessary thing in order to get trees in the planet later on. But in the seas life seeded was more diverse, aquatic plants and animals were seeded to kind of establish the ecosystems of the oceans. Why "kind of"? Detritivores and primary consumers were added, but, for unknown reasons, no fish species was added, so, the ecosystems were kind of incomplete.

Then the last part of the seeding process started, once the pioneer species did their job the long term species came in. Trees, vines, grasses and bromeliads were seeded, and following them invertebrates too, such as pollinators and their predators.

The terraformation thus proceeded, and humans and frogs could now settle in to start research and breeding respectively.

However, the plans to peacefully research the poisons were suddenly changed, the enterprise was purchased by an ex-military who aimed to use the research to make bio-weapons and sell them to violent organizations suchs as mafias and terrorists, the GCL: Galactic Council of Life, discovered the plans of the new owner and proceeded to interrupt the enterprise, locking their access to the solar system, evacuating the planet and leaving the new inhabitants of the planet to their own luck, in order to adapt, evolve, and thrive, on the planet of frogs.

~~~

Batrachiterra will follow the path of evolution in this terraformed world and see what wonders will emerge in the natural history of the planet Heqet after the new residents establish themselves in a competition-free ecosystem and adapt to fill its various empty niches.

Quick look at dragon anatomy ALL dragons have this setup, however river dragons possess gills too, i will simply describe the organs that need explanation here:

  • Rostral organ: an electroreceptive organ used to detect prey using electric fields, dragons have a distinct electric field of their own.
  • Lungs: all dragons have lungs, in fact lungs are an ancestral trait of all fish. Dragons evolved in quite anoxic environments such as the murky waters river dragons live, so they needed extra oxygen (the ancestral environment also explains why strong electricity evolved in these fish).
  • Womb: dragons are unusual for they give birth to live young instead of laying eggs like most other fish do.

Crows are scary They

  • use tools
  • Can be taught to speak (like parrots)
  • Have huge brains for birds
  • like seriously their brain-to-body size ratio is equal to that of a chimpanzee
  • They vocalize anger, sadness, or happiness in response to things
  • they are scary smart at solving puzzles
  • some crows stay with their mates until one of them dies
  • they can remember faces
  • SIDENOTE HERE BECAUSE HOLY SHIT.  They did an experiment where these guys wore masks and some of them fucked with crows.  Pretty soon the crows recognized the masks = douchebag.  But the nice guys with masks they left alone.  THEN, OH WE’RE NOT DONE, NO SIR crows that WEREN’T EVEN IN THE EXPERIMENT AND NEVER SAW THE MASK BEFORE knew about mask-dudes and attacked them on sight.  THEY PASSED ON THE FUCKING INFORMATION TO THEIR CROW BUDDIES.
  • They remember places where crows were killed by farmers and change their migration patterns.

Guys I’m really scared of crows now. (q

Yeah but have you seen this 

A colleague of my dad’s lives next to a lake, and looked out the window one morning to see a duck trapped in the ice. A crow swooped down. “Oh hell,” she thought, expecting carnage, because crows are opportunists. But the crow chipped at the ice with its beak until the duck was free.

Idk of this counts but a few crows saved me from a magpie swooping attack once ,they’re bros who can tell when magpies are being unreasonable and need to chill

I love crows so damn much. When I was fifteen, I hit a pretty serious bout of depression, to the point I was in my room for months. Well, a family of crows made a nest in a tree outside my window. There were two parents and two chicks. One chick was healthy and strong. One was weak, and had a caw like something being strained. It sounded more like a rooster crowing and so my parents jokingly named him ‘Buck’.Well… months passed and Buck’s sibling was taught to fly. His parents focused on the sibling because the sibling was strong. The father stayed behind to try and teach Buck, but I saw him try to fly, fail, and crash to the floor. His father helped him back up into the tree.

Every day, I would watch Buck from my window until one day I opened it and started talking to him. He was small and gangly and he couldn’t caw right. His feathers were all over the place and I felt a kinship. So I made a deal with him. I told him that if he could do it, if he could fly, then I could find the strength to get up. Well… near the end of the season, after talking with him every day, I finally saw him get out of the nest. He went to the edge of his branch, braced himself, and jumped… and just before he hit the ground, he soared back up into the sky. I cheered harder than I ever had before.

That winter, Buck left the area. I was crestfallen. I felt like I’d lost a friend. But I was so damn proud of him. 

Cut to the next spring? I’m walking up the driveway one day when suddenly I hear a sound… a broken caw. I look up, and Buck is sitting in a tree above my head. He stared at me and puffed his feathers, then hopped down in front of me and cawed again. I was so damn thrilled, and I told him how proud I was of him. He ruffled his feathers and then soared off into his old tree. 

That summer? I heard two broken caws. One from Buck… and one from his chick.

Cut to ten years later? We have a family of crows who all have a very distinct caw and they come here and spend every spring, summer, and fall on our property. Buck still greets me every spring.

that last reply made me wanna cry. that’s so beautiful.

Don’t forget the Russian Crow SLEDDING DOWN A ROOF not once, but twice. 

this one morning i kept hearing really loud caws, i remember it was like 5am, LIKE REALLY LOUD AND ANNOYING AND AGGRESSIVE, so loud that i could hear it through a closed window, and i eventually went outside to check it out. there was a crow on my front lawn, it had an injury on its head and couldn’t fly and there were two other crows circling right above it, and they were cawing like mad. 

i tried to get close and take a better look and one of them dived super low and tried to attack me. so i went back in the house and chopped some sliced raw meat and tossed it at him from a distance.

a few more times later, very soon after, they could tell i was trying to help, and did not attack me. i was “allowed” to walk up close and pick him up, he couldn’t drink water properly so i had to dip my finger in a bowl and stick it in his mouth.

i did this few times a day and it went on for about a week before he disappeared, i thought he recovered and left, but he came back the next day and lands on me, and i see him around the block quite often, and he would come sit on my shoulder for a few minutes and then fly away again. i feel like i’ve adopted a son.

Best birbs !!

your son is Beautiful and Strong

every time I see this post it has different crow stories and every time I reblog it again because all crow stories are good stories

Like, I wouldn’t want to be on bad terms with a crow, but they are a really smart animal, they aren’t scary You just want to be nice to them because they will know and they will remember, and they will pay you back if you treat them a certain way.

As a side note, I volunteered at a rehab (Hope for Wildlife), where they were rehabbing a crow with a broken wing–who was named Russell Crow. He kept pulling his bandage off so a sleeve was cut off some old clothing and put on him like a little sweater. 

!!!!

I don’t think I’ll ever not reblog this. This posts makes me cry and smile at the same time.

He’s so handsome!!

40,000 years ago, early humans painted hands on the wall of a cave. This morning, my baby cousin began finger painting. All of recorded history happened between these two paintings of human hands. The Nazca Lines and the Mona Lisa. The first TransAtlantic flight and the first voyage to the Moon. Humanity invented the wheel, the telescope, and the nuclear bomb. We eradicated wild poliovirus types 2 and 3. We discovered radio waves, dinosaurs, and the laws of thermodynamics. Freedom Riders crossed the South. Hippies burned their draft cards. Countless genocides, scientific advancements, migrations, and rebellions. More than a hundred billion humans lived and died between these two paintings—one on a sheet of paper, and one on the inside of a cave. At the dawn of time, ancient humans stretched out their hands. And this morning, a child reached back. 

A Timeline of Humanity:

From mammals to fish. Here we have a more basal relative of the common dragon previously posted here. This one is riverine and they are quite rare, think of sarcopterygians in our world, lungfish and such.

As all dragons they have electric organs though not very strong as in later forms. Another basal trait is that they dont have lungs as developed as the ones in other dragons and can pretty much still breathe with just their gills if they wanted. They live in murky waters though and so need to breathe air from time to time or else they would drown. They use electroreception and their whiskers to sense their surroundings. Another basal trait is their unfused head/thorax.

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bedupolker

Jumping mice... they hibernate, can jump up to 9 feet according to one website, and have really big footsies. what can't they do?

the Xa

I wasn't planning on revealing another sophont, but it's a creature I have a decent amount of information and sketches on, so I decided to post it while I work on some complex 3D art for this world. The Xa are tall black birds you may have seen in the Intro to Total Convergence..?.

These two meter tall avians use their wings for walking. Their thumb has increased in size and the claw has re-appeared and modified into a hoof. They primarily use their beaks for manipulating with objects, but their feet, which the Xa leave off the ground when walking, greatly assist with this. Another ancient feature that has re-appeared in this bird are the teeth, but they aren't used for eating. The teeth of the Xa have bright golden and dark red stripes and are flattened, resembling our incisors, and are used as a dispaly structures during communication.

Normally, a Xa would walk around with their head resting on the neck, their beak covered up by their thick plumage. This one got startled by a distant noise and is looking around.

I'm still deciding whether to keep the "lip pads" or not.

A Xa's perception of reality and the rate at which they take in information is also remarkably fast. An average Xa, for example, is able to read one A4 page full of text in circa five seconds. This means that a Xa can graduate way faster than a human, making up for their short lifespan. This is one of the reasons why it can be hard for them to enjoy movies, the ones that were made by non Xa are unwatchable because of the "low frame rate".

There is almost no sexual dimorphism in these birds. On normal occasions the gender nor sex of a Xa is not distinguished at all, and probably no Xaian cultures have different social roles for men and women. The only way to tell the sexes apart is through pheromones, which are only released on special occasions. Only Xa are sensitive to these pheromones, and non avians wouldn't be able to tell the difference at all.

The Xa are relatively short lived, maturing at the age of seven. In the prehistory, they could live up to be twenty years old, but thanks to modern medicine, their lifespan has increased to be up to thirty years. When hatched, a baby Xa is born featherless, growing a coat of ash-brown downy feathers after ten months. A "pre-teen" coat - black contour feathers - begins to appear at the age of four, and at the age of seven, the "adult" plumage with its characteristic white eye pattern and contrasting, irridescent black feathers on the Xa's crest appears. These white patterns typically fade to gray with old age. The irridescence is also a lot less striking in older Xa.

Due to their plumage, they don't really need soft fabric to make their clothes comfortable, they mostly focus on making waterproof and elegant garments. But soft fabric can sometimes be a sign of the wearer's status. Because of their reliability on their beak as our equivalent of hands, the great majority of utensils and tools are made to be carried in and controlled by the beak. Tools and guns specificaly are mostly attachment based - there are several types of universal helmets that are used to attach a variety of tools to them. A lot of guns can be operated with both beak and hands. Shooting a gun is a lot easier when a Xa uses their beak, but hands are more practical when they need to quickly draw the weapon.

More on their evolution later!

Final mammalian dragon design this year.

The first dragon created by a god, the god's worshippers asked it for a beast that would destroy their enemies in flames, strength and velocity. So the god created this creature, it has echolocation to find its enemies anywhere, bat wings to outpace any mount, strong jaws and body to destroy armor and fire to burn their fields and villages.

Beautiful! I want to pat its pretty head.

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john-frog

I mean, you could! Dont recommend it unless you are one of its trainers

Final mammalian dragon design this year.

The first dragon created by a god, the god's worshippers asked it for a beast that would destroy their enemies in flames, strength and velocity. So the god created this creature, it has echolocation to find its enemies anywhere, bat wings to outpace any mount, strong jaws and body to destroy armor and fire to burn their fields and villages.

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aflo

posting this on twitter will get you put into witness protection

The magic of childhood is that you were constantly encountering new things. The best way to feel that way again is to fill your life with new experiences.

The magic of childhood is that you were constantly encountering new things. The best way to feel that way again is to fill your life with new experiences.