Fun fact: Wayne barlowe also did concept art for avatar, Harry Potter 3 and 4, priest, John Carter or Pacific rim

The only thing that throws me off is the time dates. Like is, say, 100 million years, the start, middle or end time of said period?

Horses are smart??????????????????????????

I thought the rattleback was originally meant to be a procupine descendant.

Awesome!

To be fair I think the book does give more explanation for somethings, hope you read it in the future.

IIRC in the book the tv special is based on, Darwin IV's lower atmosphere had only recently become easy to see through. Presumably, there hasn't been enough time for sight to evolve and outcompete sonar as a sense. The bioluminescent patches really don't make sense, though.

It’s made by the same person who works on avatar

YESSSS

I like this vid, very in depth and well researched. I was brainstorming an idea for a future earth spec evo, and wanted antarctica to migrate into the tropics where it would be the land of birds and whales, so getting ideas and critiques on the penguin-whale trope was enlightening and fresh. I like your ideas for alternatives to whales and seals as well as what could happen to whales and seals as well. gives me some ideas for the project.

Mmm fried Oblonga

Man, this is an amazing video, and I love how detailed it is. Discussing the Silurian, Carboniferous (or Mississippian/Pennsylvanian as some call it) and Permian However, I'd like to point out an error I noticed due to doing a video series on trilobites. While Anomalocaris probably could prey on trilobites given their size the structures of their mouth parts was relatively delicate and likely would have hunted stuff in the water column and not risked damaging them by raking them in the mud. It seems other Radiodonts with more robust mouthparts predated upon trilobites. Hope you consider doing more prehistoric wildlife inspired videos

Man, I love this channel

So our sea are the most peaceful but in time new sea predators will evolve again but that left to speculate biology which my project the wild future is all about

Our ancient sea were once the sea of mythology and legends

Drones have just arrived at the scene, compared to tanks. If a drone becomes sufficiently autonomous thru AI, jamming will not work.

Cool, makes me wonder though how life would be on a more exotic planet. How would life originate and live on a carbon world instead of our oxygen silicon if it were possible?

Isaac Asimov also wrote a few non robot stories, one of which was called "No Connection" which was about a race of sapient bears called burrows.

It's funny cause most of the animals are fine, except the main characters which are way too human like. Plus the plot is basically native americans in space

Interesting 🤔

It makes me wonder what would have happened if Mars never lost it's ozone, would it have converged with life on earth with multicellular organisms or would it remain single cell forever

Interesting video, I love your coverage of niche topics. I do wonder though given how hellish our own world if Venus has been located further away from the sun if it'd be cool enough to have supported life

Thank you for making these videos about early life, I find them very interesting.

I love our videos, they are very well-made. I love abiogenesis, and I'm glad there is great content for such a niche topic! Keep it up!

Kinda like body armor drastically lost importance from the 16th century onwards, when firearms became too strong

Idea: macropredatory marine turtles

with all due respect, You started giving examples of niche swaps after saying all the niche swaps are lacking creativity. What make your niche swaps "better" than the ones you talked down to? I think we should just let people enjoy their imaginations. I disagree with your entire video.

Have you heard the first teaser for talon is out

Spec evo enthusiasts will always say "climate change" and will never actually show earth's climate changing.

Okay.😊

Humanity’s population is dropping now.

I wonder if air breathing fish like lungfish or marine tetrapods would do better against anoxic events.

I definitely could see seabirds getting bigger but the limit is hauling themselves onto land to lay eggs. It is unlikely that they’d internalize the egg laying or have floating eggs. A large semiaquatic and flying bird is possible. The standing up posture isn’t the only posture and could allow for more on land hunting as well. A small filter feeding whale like seabird does seem possible.

The mass extinction effects most animals and sea birds being the uniquely lucky ones is unlikely but also needing to account for their food sources and plants the live among.

Penguins, like Turtles still need to haul themselves onto land to laid their eggs.

I still lean towards Venus being a better short term and long term target of colonization and terraforming, but I can see how many of Mars' issues seem more readily surmountable than speeding up Venus' 5,832 hour day.

Dinosaur is just really bad at taking the fully aquatic niche.

This is what gets me with spec-evolution writers: it's fun for the imagination to pretend humanity would go inexplicably extinct and not think that we wouldn't already be taking most animal life along with us to our own doom. *Humans on earth make up 2.5% of all animal biomass left on Earth,* which is an actually big percentage that's gonna be hard to ever get rid of us all short of another Everest-size comet hitting the world again. And with the impact we're leaving on the Earth right now, it might as well be like a giant asteroid. Which circles back into kinda contradicting the entire spec-evo thing in imagining what life would appear if there's gonna be a mass-extinction level event that 2.5% of our collective biomass won't be able to pull through in a million years. 2.5% of animal biomass is big enough that as well be AN ENTIRE TAXONOMIC CLASS by itself, and that's just ONE species: us humans. We literally aren't going anywhere unless the world's entire food chains collapses completely and it's something you don't want to think about what crazy animals will appear in 1 million years and beyond. ... There's half as many insects today as there were 20 years ago. Yaaaaay for our heavy use of chemical pesticides removing what most wild animals live off on! And our entire fish stock is on track to be depleted in 40 years, so it honestly makes the whole idea of penguins - which all eat fish - taking over the whales' niche pretty meaningless. Thank your local Chinese government why things like overfishing are that bad now.

The scientific knowledge is top-notch but the logical through-line that forms the skeleton of this piece is hard to follow. Disregarding anthropogenic impact on extinction patterns in spec evo settings that are based on the question of "What will happen if humans (i.e., primarily noted for being the source of anthropogenic impacts) existed, had an impact, and then disappeared?" Attacking the starting premises of a spec evolution exercise due to that fact that it might be improbable (but, as you later say, still possible) before the first creature can even be speculated upon, effectively killing the exercise before it begins. Requiring fleshed-out explanations for starting premises based off humans having an impact on the ecosystem before disappearing, while stating that examining HOW humanity left the world the way it is mixes anthropology and speculative biology in a way that should be avoided. Attempting to argue that speculative evolution exercises can still be a fun and creative endeavour while limiting the starting premise to the most probable scenarios, then using as examples: 1. small toothed cetaceans re-creating leviatitan ("what if small whale, but big?"); 2. what if walrus, but big?; and 3. what if a whale that superficially looks like a small ichthyotitan, but big? Yes, in some cases it might be more likely for an organism to adopt body plans that closely related species have adopted in the past (i.e., effectively recreating the extinct animals) but strictly limiting yourself to previously existing body-plans is neither creative nor fun. Why bother recreating leviatitan from cetacean relatives, recreating paracetus from aquatic mammals and recreating icthyotitan from an cetacean? Convergent evolution being what it is, it would be difficult to distinguish a leviatitan from a "small toothed whale that turned into a large toothed whale occupying the same niche as a leviatitan" without cutting them open. By gate-keeping speculative evolution to requiring only the "most probable" premises, while leaving very little room for entirely new body plans, you're limiting evolution to having genera endlessly rehashing the same body-forms for millions to hundreds of millions of years.

esse cara e muito bom, adoro os videos dele

I think the first time i heard this trope was in 2000 the future is wild. The gannet whale. I get it im old just shut the fu(k up.

All you'd need is a miniaturized CRAM and drones become useless.

So far zero bird species has gone to giving live birth. Which would be necessary for penguins to reach extremely large sizes.

For a country like the US, in small skirmishes, cost is largely irrelevant as they spend most of their money on the army for economic reasons not military ones. That said, if an army were to put the whole value of a tank into a swarm of drones, I think the drones would do more damage. Until effective jamming is implemented a drone is essentially a guided shell with far more capability in terms of accuracy, range and more than a tank shell. So why use a tank at all? Tanks are not used for troop transport, so why do you want to take a tank anywhere if not to shoot things that can now be much better shot with either a drone, or drone assisted artillery. Sure once jamming is more effective and tools to shoot down drones become more effective the equation may change but we will likely see many improvements in drones too such as fibre optic control wires, anti jamming methods, preplanned flight plans, AI targeting and more. I really do think that drones will be a better investment for most armies in the near future, although a combination may be wise.

Ok two things: firstly: it is posiblle to have an patogen take out the humans, because we still haven't found a cure for marburg or Ebola, and those are likely to create future pandemics that will either make us go extinct alongside all the rest of the simians or greatly reduce our numbers Secondly: it's more likely to have fire breathing dragons evolving from the seabirds, or birds in general, that already spew some substances in the form of toxic puke, and already have some proto teeth to crack the eggshell, than getting whale penguins, which won't even be the ones to evolve in those things considering that both geese and flamingo exist and already have teeth that they use for different purposes similar to those of the whales

Actually you are wrong about that, there were marine creatures that returned to the ocean before Igosuars, some Amphibians.

One question im sorta curious about is how distant your cousin has to be for reproducing to no longer be harmful, maybe 10th? 20th? Who knows.

Spec evo doesn't have to be so rational. Its an imagination of a future, not a recreation of the past. It can be, of course, if you want, but there is much more creative freedom than with speclative paleoart for example.

I love your videos but could you include the sources listed at the end as links in the description? It would make further reading a little easier

@21:50 Penguins, or any other seabird, would have to evolve into the only live bearing dinosaurs in history that we know of. Certainly the only birds. The chix would have to be born precocial from Day 1 and be ready to swim on their first birthdays! There is a lot to overcome for any known seabird to evolve to replace whales. My $$ is on Pinnipeds.