Trivia / Serina

• Approval of God: Sheather approves of fan art and fan creatures shared on r/SpeculativeEvolution.
• Creator's Favorite:
  • Sheather admits in the finale forum post that circuagodonts became his favorite creations.
  • Of the numerous sophont characters of the Late Ocean Age, Sheather considers Blaze the woolly wumpo to be his favorite.
• Dear Negative Reader: This post in which Sheather calls out r/SpeculativeEvolution commenters for nitpicky, pedantic criticism and other rudeness.
• Fandom Nod: The Serina fanbase clamored for a sapient tentacle bird species for so long that when Sheather introduced the woolly wumpos, the subtitle for the page was "At long last, sapience strikes within the tentacle birds."
• Fan Sequel: Williams: Planet of the Tribtiles is one such project that arose from the Speculative Evolution Reddit, where a reptile-like tribbet and a gill-breathing eargill metamorph are seeded onto a brand new planet. Unfortunately, as of mid-2021, that project doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.
• Follow the Leader: Serina ended up making a major impact to the speculative evolution community due to its interesting concepts, unique premise, and detailed worldbuilding. Common concepts from Serina that ended up becoming widespread in the genre include:
  • Seed worlds. While most previous examples of Speculative Biology focus on future evolution, alternate histories, or alien life, seed worlds were a novel new concept where a single choice Earth organism is introduced to a planet with a functional ecosystem that can support it, but with no other competing vertebrate organisms. Serina was the Trope Codifier if not the Trope Maker, giving rise to other seed-world projects on the Speculative Evolution subreddit, such as Hamster's Paradise.
  • Creatures with odd-numbered legs having the unpaired leg be derived from the tail, inspired by the Tribbetheres. One notable example of this are Alphynix's terrestrial dolphins who, lacking hind legs, modified their tails into a third "leg" (though these predate the apparence of tribbitheres in Serina).
  • The portrayal of sapient species as just as subject to the laws of natural selection as any other creature. Most sophonts in spec evo are depicted building cities and civilizations, but the fork-tailed babbling jay's fate was an interesting, if cynical, portrayal of sapience being inherently doomed, or at least not all getting to reach an advanced stage.
  • The ideas of terrestrial fish evolving into a wide variety of forms. While tetrapods descended from the lobe-finned fish, the tribbetheres descended from teleosts, as such many projects inspired artists to design land dwelling descendants of sea robins, frogfish or even limbless eels that become terrestrial snake-like forms (akin to Serina's eelsnakes).
• Missing Episode: Sheather's finale forum post where he describes in detail his initial final plans for the series has sadly been deleted and never archived.
• Promoted Fanboy: The merwals were originally fanart from a friend of Sheather's, who decided to canonize them as the last of the mertribs (who were originally intended to be extinct by then).
• Science Marches On: In the entry for the Seamingo it is stated Earth only really has the conditions for filter-feeding herbivorous birds in salt lakes and freshwater habitats, hence why Serina uniquely has filter-feeding seabirds. Lo and behold, 2022 saw the describing of flightless filter-feeding marine swan fossils.
• Shrug of God: When questioned about the fate of the transplanted sea stewards as well as any other details about their new home, Sheather replied with this:
  make up your own headcanons about it because it doesnt matter.
• Tribute to Fido: The moon's initial continents of Wahlteria, Stehvlandea, and Karii were named after Sheather's pet canaries Walter, Steve, and Kari.
• What Could Have Been: Sheather announced in June 2020 that he was putting a halt on the project, although as it was nearing completion anyway some concepts were shared on the Spec Evo forum. Most of the planned elements were reintroduced once the project was later resurrected, but a number were scrapped for a variety of reasons:
  • Predatory molodonts called cutthroats that eventually produce bipedal forms that walk on their two front legs while leaving their hind leg as a clawed hand. These were eventually reworked into the sawjaws.
  • As all life dwindles to extinction in Serina's final ice age, the last living creature: a species of neotenic metamorph bird resembling a Sand Worm, with the last chapter telling of the last surviving female's final days, before she hibernates for the winter...and spring never comes again.
  • When the new ending was made, it changed the circumstances behind the union between the antlears (now known officially as the woodcrafters) and gravediggers from a simple alliance of convenience to the two species growing closer together after an orphan Gravedigger was adopted by the Woodcrafters and it spreading from there while also removing the race of sapient vibropteryx altogether. They are even described as an In-Universe example.
    Sheather_888: Serina's story is always evolving as much as its creatures, and occasionally something just doesn't fit in with the direction any longer. In a way I feel this is more realistic, and perhaps more poignant; the vibropteryx joins a number of other species that might have reached sapience and developed a culture had circumstances only been a little different.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: Due to arguments on the r/SpeculativeEvolution subreddit on how plausible the project is, Sheather ended up having to temporarily ban people from posting Serina content to Reddit completely.
• Word of God: Some tidbits about Serina are only mentioned by Sheather in comments on the Deviant art pages for his artwork.
• Write What You Know: Dylan Bajda has kept pet birds, including canaries, for years.

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