Analysis / Speculative Biology

As a genre in its own right, it is no surprise that speculative biology has developed tropes of its own. Here are a few of the most common ones, along with, where possible, the works that served as the Trope Maker for them.

• In projects spanning long periods of time there tends to be a progression of stock eras: a temperate era, a glacial ice age era, a tropical hothouse era and a supercontinent era, with the temperate often absent or in any order. Very rarely are there repetitions. Compare The Cycle of Empires; like it, real life history doesn't follow this neatly, with the last 66 million years going from temperate (Paleocene) to hothouse (early Eocene) to temperate (late Eocene and Oligocene) to hothouse (but milder; Miocene) to temperate (Pliocene) to glacial (early Pleistocene) to temperate (first interglacial) to glacial (last ice age) to temperate (for now).
  • Troper Maker: The Future is Wild, which showcases three time periods: an ice age 5 million years from now, a hothouse planet 100 million years from now and a supercontinent 200 million years from now. But further codified in seed world projects like Serina and Hamster's Paradise.
  • Related to above is a mass extinction at the end of the hothouse era, usually due to extreme volcanism. Again The Future Is Wild started it but the two seed world projects did the same to the letter. Logical in a Doylist manner, as Hamster's Paradise was directly inspired by Serina.
• Animals being a Fantastic Fauna Counterpart due to convergent evolution, usually resembling a Mix-and-Match Critter between its ancestor and the animal whose niche it now occupies.
  • Trope Maker: After Man: A Zoology of the Future
• If the project is set during a cold ice age period, expect to see large saber-toothed predators converging on Smilodon that hunt large herbivores inspired by woolly mammoths. This is an example of Artistic License – Paleontology, as contrary to the Snowy Sabertooths trope, Smilodon actually preferred warm woodlands (though the northern populations would've had to deal with snowy winters), and its preferred prey was bison and camels instead of mammoths. ^note The lesser-known saber-tooth genus Homotherium did inhabit these kinds of climates, and did hunt mammoths (albeit young ones instead of fully-grown ones), but it had completely different proportions from its more famous cousin, having long hyena-like legs and shorter fangs.
  • Trope Maker: After Man: A Zoology of the Future
• Flightless bats, whether they be aquatic and penguin-like, or large terrestrial predators. While some extant bat species (such as vampire bats and the short-tailed bats of New Zealand) are surprisingly competent on the ground, no known bat species has ever evolved flightlessness to the same extent of some birds, possibly due to their extended wing membranes and sprawling gaits.
  • Trope Maker: After Man: A Zoology of the Future
• If someone does a project where the Cretaceous mass extinction never occurred, expect at least one flightless pterosaur species. While pterosaurs may have had similar restraints as bats preventing them from becoming fully flightless, the azhdarchids such as Quetzalcoatlus and Haztegopteryx were scarily good at terrestrial locomotion, and thus azhdarchids tend to be the most popular ancestor for these creatures, especially since azhdarchids were extremely diverse and widespread at the end of the Cretaceous.
  • Trope Maker: The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution
• A variation of the former are penguin-like pterosaurs. They are comparatively very rare yet, but they are actually semi-backed by the real world diving pterosaur Alcione (though it could still fly).
  • Trope Maker: The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution
• If the setting is an alternate Earth where the continents and geography are largely the same as they are today, expect Australia and Madagascar to be hotspots of unusual evolutionary forms, or strongholds of older taxa that thrive there despite having been outcompeted by other clades elswhere on other continents. However, a heavily criticized cliche associated with with this concept are creatures resembling koalas and kangaroos that just so happen to also evolve in Australia for no good reason, such as the Marsupial Dragon from the Dragonology books or the Gwanna from The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution.
• Large aquatic birds, usually descended from penguins, replacing marine mammals such as pinnipeds and cetaceans. Bonus points if the bird develops viviparity like many marine reptiles of the Mesozoic. While viviparity may not be as unlikely in Archosauria as previously believed (since the metriorhynchids, a group of marine Jurassic crocodylomorphs, show no signs of terrestrial locomotion), there is debate as to how likely it is for birds and other dinosaurs to develop it, as birds require calcium for their eggshells.
  • Trope Maker: After Man: A Zoology of the Future
• Rabbits will often evolve into ungulate-like forms, no doubt since a lot of the early ungulates would've superficially resembled rabbits in appearance. Something similar will also occur with South American caviomorph rodents such as capybaras and maras.
  • Trope Maker: After Man: A Zoology Of The Future
• Monotremes are also a common choice to explore evolutionary possibilities, though many speculative examples tend to just stick a platypus bill onto badgers/squirrels/raccoons/etc.
  • Trope Maker: Spec World
• Large mammalian predators in future-evolution works tend to evolve from rats, shrews, or weasels. Mongooses, foxes, and feral cats, while perhaps not so common, are also popular choices. Many projects also have baboons evolving into large carnivores, since modern baboons have been known to take on prey as large as small antelope.
  • Trope Maker: After Man: A Zoology Of The Future
• Large flightless predatory birds, usually inspired by the phorusrhacids (AKA the famous terror birds) of prehistoric times, are also common. Popular choices include acciptrids (especially the secretary bird), falcons, owls^note there actually was a large ground-dwelling owl that inhabited Cuba until recent times and was mistaken for a phorusrhacid when it was first discovered, herons, seriemas (no doubt due to them being the phorusrhacids' closest living relatives), roadrunners, and corvids.
  • Trope Maker: Technically The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades as it contains flightless predatory petrels, but the Trope Codifier would be The Future is Wild
• Large herbivorous flightless ratite-like birds, usually descended from tinamous, gamebirds, waterfowl, rails, or pigeons.
  • Trope Maker: After Man, which includes a few flightless herbivorous birds.
• If another sapient species evolves after humans go extinct, the most popular choices tend to be birds such as corvids and parrots, due to them having intelligence on par with great apes. Octopuses and squid are also fairly common choices.
  • In conjunction with the "if dinosaurs never became extinct" trope, a common concept is designing a sapient dinosaur species, inspired by the Dale Russell's infamous "Dinosauroid", though making it look humanoid has fallen out of favor, with contemporary attempts making it look more avian, popularized by C.M. Koseman's Avisapiens.
  • Trope Maker: The "Dinosauroid"
• Terrestrial cephalopods are also popular. Considering that octopuses have been known to crawl around on land for surprisingly long distances, this idea is semi-plausible, though the lack of hard parts to support their soft body will act as a limit on their size.
  • Technically, The New Dinosaurs is the Trope Maker here, since it featured terrestrial ammonites, but The Future Is Wild is the Trope Codifier.
• Eusociality in an animal group that never developed it before. If it's an invertebrate, it'll usually be inspired by hymenopterans and/or termites, while if it's a tetrapod, it'll usually be inspired by mole rats.
  • Trope Maker: After Man: A Zoology Of The Future
• Speaking of Ants, bees, termites, and waps; they're also qualifying choices for intelligent life post-humanity since despite being less intelligent than them, all four already display behavior that they share with humans such as cultivating livestock, creating large structures that serve as their kingdoms, and serving an Insect Queen who fills the same role in their hives as human political leaders with nations.
• Genetically modified or naturally evolved human descendants. Expect a lot of Body Horror and Uncanny Valley.
  • Trope Maker: Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future, though The Time Machine could be considered the Ur-Example.
• Pigs are frequently shown to either evolve into large megafauna similar to modern elephants and rhinos or into carnivorous hunter-scavangers. Considering many wild pig species can already reach a decent size and have been known to eat carcasses and weakened animals, this isn't too unlikely.
  • Trope Maker: After Man: A Zoology Of The Future
• Parrots evolving into predators is common in some areas likely due to their crushing beaks, high intelligence and grasping feet. Since we already have keas which are omnivorous and cockatoos are known to eat insects, this is fairly plausible.
• Due to the unusual aquatic adaptations of Spinosaurus, many writers have explored what would happen if it became fully aquatic like the marine reptiles it shared its world with. It's debatable whether dinosaurs can develop viviparity or not.
  • Trope Maker: A parodic artwork called Spinofaarus vegatiacus homaging two of the artists friends, depicting a Spinosaurus reconstructed as a reptilian elephant seal. Notably, this thing actually predates the more insane discoveries in the late 2010's.
• Since ceratopsian dinosaurs are believed by some to have been omnivores that supplemented their mostly-herbivorous diet with meat, some creators have explored the idea of fully-carnivorous ceratopsians that converge on theropods.
• Inspired by Serina, a common trend in spec biology is the use of "seed worlds" where terraformed/suitable moons or planets are seeded with a choice few of Earth organisms and allowed to evolve on a scenario with no competitors, enabling said organisms to adapt to novel new niches they couldn't on Earth. Many of these "seed worlds" follow the same basic trends as Serina did, with a single species of tetrapod among the species the world is seeded with, and eventually leading to the evolution of one or more intelligent species.
  • Trope Maker: Serina
• This also extends to speculation about extraterrestrial life, such as exploring evolution on alien ecosystems similar to Snaiad, or trying to design plausible sapient extraterrestrial species while trying to keep away from The Greys or Humanoid Aliens. Unfortunately, these projects sometimes go too far in the opposite direction by focusing so much on being as alien as possible that the resulting organisms are often quite Awesome, but Impractical. (For instance, they'll often have a ridiculous number of limbs or eyes despite these being energetically expensive to grow.) It's also fairly common for the planets to have lower gravity than Earth's as an excuse to avert the Square-Cube Law and have these organisms grow as gigantic as possible without exploring the other ramifications lower gravity would have on the life.
  • Trope Maker: Expedition
• Trying to re-design mythical creatures from fantasy and folklore to be more "realistic" and biologically plausible, such as "Mermaids: The Body Found" or Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real. Mer-people and dragons are among the two most popular candidates, exploring the development of sapient aquatic humanoids or the evolution of large flying reptiles (which usually though not always tries to subvert Vertebrate with Extra Limbs) by either making them four-limbed and wyvern-styled, or by explaining their six-limbed nature as having descended from an entirely different lobe-finned fish ancestor with three pairs of fins.
  • Trope Maker: The Flight Of Dragons
• Reverse-engineering fictional characters or species (usually from animation or video games) to be more biologically plausible. The Pokémon franchise seems to especially lend itself to this concept, but other works have also received this treatment, with varying results.
  • Trope Maker: R. J. "Arvalis" Palmer's Realistic Pokémon art series.
• Like all good things, there are memes in the speculative biology community. This often manifests in a creator's work as some tongue-in-cheek speculative creatures that were designed to be subtle references to popular memes. In most cases, the morphology, scientific names, and behavior of such species are Played for Laughs, giving what was otherwise a serious and potentially dull genre a dose of levity and comedy.
  • Trope Maker: Spec World, though some works by redditor u/Tribbetherium, most notably Hamster's Paradise, may be considered a Trope Codifier. The Ur-Example, though, is probably the Oakleaf Toad from After Man, which has the genus name Grima and a tongue resembling an earthworm, a reference to Grima Wormtongue from Lord of the Rings.
• Terrestrial descendants of some sort of amphibious fish species, such as mudskippers, walking catfish, or epaulette sharks. Bonus points if the tail becomes a leg of its own, turning the creature into a tripod, a concept inspired by the tribbetheres from Serina.
  • Trope Maker: Serina
• Some like to design alternate timelines where terrestrial vertebrates evolve from a different ancestor besides lobe-finned fish, such as ray-finned fish, sharks, and placoderms.
• Since the release of the MonsterVerse it's become a trend in kaiju stories, both original and fan fiction, to make semi-grounded kaiju redesigns (of both existing and sometimes original kaiju) with explicitly detailed anatomies and evolutionary histories with immense amounts of Bizarre Alien Biology to explain their abilities. Some common features that tend to pop up are radiation fueled metabolisms to explain their size and having Skull Island present as a Death World full of strange prehistoric plant and animal life.
  • Trope Maker: The World Of Kong: A Natural History Of Skull Island.
• Island ecosystems where adaptive radiation from a common ancestor has resulted in a single clade filling virtually all of the available ecological niches, in an exaggerated version of the diversity of the Galapagos finches. Bonus points if their diversity hinges upon a single attribute that the different species use in different ways—again, an exaggerated version of the Galapagos finches' beaks.
  • Trope Maker: The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades

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