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Sheatheria - Move this Later; The Land Where Everything is Backwards
Topic Started: Jun 29 2014, 11:14 PM (200 Views)
Sheather
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Sheatheria's Premise



What would evolve if life from our planet were introduced to another world located in an alternate universe?


The Sheatheria Project concerns this very idea. A world as wild, crazy, and yet still theoretically possible and ecologically stable, as one could imagine, presented through the exploration of a large, habitable planet in a realm distinct from our own, where the laws of our universe do not always apply, where our own life has been introduced and allowed to go crazy in this alien environment. It is a massive planet, eight times the mass of Earth (with a diameter of 26,000 km and the surface area of approximately four Earths) yet its gravity is only 85 percent of Earth's.

Planet, Courtesy of Dragontunders, including comparison to Earth


You will find below a table of contents directing to every update so far posted (obviously this post you are reading has been revised since first being posted), but out of them all, the very most fundamental to read to understand how Sheatheria works - including the disparity between its size and gravity and its bizarre equatorial phenomenon, can be found below.

Sheatheria: Where Everything is Backwards

Sheatheria is therefore populated originally by Earth life, though the exact manner through which Earth life reached the planet is unknown. It is believed the organisms on Sheatheria can all trace their roots back to our own planet, however, and the fossil record reveals that all life on the planet originated through four confirmed and distinct waves of migration - once during the mid Permian, again during the very early Triassic, once during the mid-Jurassic, and once during the late Cretaceous, home-earth time (Sheatheria is several hundred million years older than Earth). Whether these migrations were natural in nature - perhaps via natively-occurring portals between the universes, which share the same space, or via artificial terraforming of the world by an unknown and perhaps long gone entity, is unknown. In the event the mysterious world was colonized via natural forces, the exact nature of these resulting "portals" is unknown, but considering it seems no Sheatherian animal ever returned to Earth even after earlier colonizations would make it seem likely any resulting rifts were only accessible one way, which would effectively have trapped any organism to enter them on its new side. It seems the length of time the presumed portals were open has also decreased over time; life seems to have transferred to Sheatheria from Earth for over 9 million years during the Permian, which was long enough for foliage to colonize the barren planet and stabilize a sustainable atmosphere, and for the first small animals to arrive. The Triassic colonization then seems to have lasted nearly 6 million years, long enough for considerable biological exchange once more. The Jurassic colonization, however, lasted at most only 2 million years, and the Cretaceous one appears as such a quick blip that its portals may have lasted only a few hundred thousand years before closing - or being closed; even so, this was long enough to permit the arrival of some of our most dominant faunal and floral groups today. This gradual hastening of the portal's lifespans are presumed to be the result of the two worlds likely slowly pulling away from one another in space time, and the result being it being both more difficult for the rifts to form (if they are in fact natural) and for them to stay open for long. This may explain the lack of any new rifts since the last known the late Cretaceous 69 million years ago. During their height, portals occurred worldwide, not merely in one location either here or on Earth, and resulted in interesting organisms evolving for long lengths of time in complete isolation in this new world before eventually coming across each other. This has resulted in sometimes interesting animal relationships one might not expect, and permitted perhaps surprising faunal groups surprising amounts of success.

It is now the equivalent to the modern day (our time) in Sheatheria. Life has had many millions of years to evolve, and has taken wild forms, gifted with the seeds of life from our world and with over 7 times the land area of their ancestral planet to colonize. Though some things could be no less like our world, due to a remarkable combination of attributes, as well as the colonization of the planet with Earth flora, Sheatheria supports an atmosphere and biosphere nearly identical to Earth's at a fundamental level. In the backwards world, animals have evolved in ways we could never imagine on our own planet. If there ever were a god, he was far less conservative in his work here than elsewhere. Multiple sophonts call this world home, with civilizations separated only by natural barriers, such as one finds on a planet where the ice cap occurs at the equator. Here "birds" walk on all fours, slugs can fly, dinosaurs live alongside recognizable modern-day animal groups and bizzare animals unlike anything we know, in a world caught midway between past and present, familiar and fantastical.

We welcome you now to Sheatheria.

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Satellite Map, Courtesy of Dragontunders


Map of Named Regions


Table of Contents


Also be sure to check out the other supplementary threads in the Sheatheria subforum.

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This is a WIP transfer from Speculative Evolution forums.
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