My Late Night Brain Has Exactly Two Modes

my late night brain has exactly two modes

Recently my post on pre-Cambrian life forms has been popular, so i thought y’all might like

more Unknowable Eldritch Life History content

So...before the Cambrian explosion, where many of the animal phyla we know and love today originated, there was...the Ediacaran biota.

You may have heard that the earliest multicellular animals were crawly things a little like worms, or maybe sponges or anemones, or other basic, familiar, boring squishy things.

But those comfortably boring images of squishy worms and sponges on the primordial seafloor? LIES.

The truth is...much less comforting.

Described by scientists with words such as “problematic,” “enigmatic,” “unclear,” and other academic renderings of the sentiment “Hey what the FUCK,” the fossils uncovered from before the Cambrian are a window into a period of life so alien the vocabulary to describe it doesn’t exist.

These things weren’t worms or sponges or anemones, because those things weren’t invented yet. In many cases we don’t know if they were animals, fungi, protists, or something else, and it’s been hypothesized that some of them aren’t any of those things because animals, fungi, and protists weren’t invented yet.

One hypothesis is that some Ediacaran organisms represent stem groups to modern categories of organisms—impossibly ancient ancestors of things recognizable as “animals” or “fungi.” Another possibility is that they belong to extinct “intermediate” branches between plants, animals, and other kingdoms as we understand them.

In my earlier post I referenced Eoandromeda, Haootia, Thectardis, and Namacalathus. I’m delighted to tell you that it only gets weirder from there. This was before the invention of “heads” and “limbs,” foolish mortal.

Instead, we had...Bag And/Or Tower with Sticks

Somebody’s Backbone Just Sitting There. Corumbella is described as a predator in its wikipedia article, and this is...not elaborated upon. THANKS.

“It superficially resembles a compressed cabbage in appearance, although in reality it had a more intricate, fractal mode of organisation.”

Abyssal Tree. Parviscopa is described as potentially being a juvenile of another species in its Wikipedia article. Okay. Let me process the concept of “juvenile” as it relates to something like this.

Donut (critically, the genus name is Obamus, after Obama.)

???????

The article descriptions of these life forms really just highlight how limited language is, how pathetically dependent we are upon familiarity and common understanding to make sense of anything. We struggle to intelligibly describe them because no living comparisons for them exist.

Can you picture this in your head? Yeah, me neither. And it grows by adding segments to...both ends?

...And...doesn’t have a digestive system. Or any organs at all. Cool. That’s cool. I’m fine thanks.

Scientists think maybe it photosynthesized, but also maybe that it might be a version of cnidarian (jellyfish or anemone-related organism), which really summarizes our level of understanding of what it was.

By the way, the seeming lack of a means of obtaining sustenance in many of these creatures is kind of a problem. It is so with the rangeomorphs, a group of sessile, frond-like creatures (including our pal up there, Abyssal Tree) that look like plants, believed to be ancestors of either animals or fungi, and the erniettomorphs. Some scientists speculate that they directly filtered nutrients out of seawater by osmosis. Maybe. They had to do something, presumably.

These are not sci-fi space aliens, they were and are all objectively real living things that lived on Earth just like us. And little as a deep sea marine tube worm or a sponge cares for human affairs, these things are so much less connected to us than even those creatures. They would never meet even the vaguest analog of a vertebrate. They didn’t know what leaves or fish were and didn’t care. We don’t understand them and maybe we never will.

Okay just. Imagine you’re just...vibing deep in a cave somewhere, looking at the rocks, alone in the dark, and you point your flashlight at the cave wall

and you see this.

What you are looking at is the 550 million year old remnant of a real, unknowable living creature. It is older than limbs, older than eyes, older than everything you could use to explain yourself to it, and you’re seeing it.

Contemplate that. Contemplate the fact that you are just a weird evolutionary offshoot of some creature that fucked around and decided a notochord was a good idea.

You’re breathing and moving, but that was not inevitable. It’s just another thing that evolution is trying out for a little while.

You’re seeing it. What does that mean? What are you, next to it? What are you doing, wandering around up there in the air? You have holes! You aren’t fixed to the ground! You’ve developed organs sensitive to light and sound, and you’ve gathered them up at one end of your body!

How does the sunlight taste? What do you see? What is “seeing?”

location: moss oasis, endless barren waste

known for: moisture, spores, mite farming

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Detective Darian Jackdaw is the best P.I. this side of Hell. Or at least he was before one of his cases caught up to him and left him for dead, or rather left him undead. Can the great detective Jackdaw solve his own murder? Or will the secrets surrounding his death die with him?

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