The Future is Wild review

[Infinity Blade]

Oct 9, 2023 23:15:05 GMT 5 creature386 said:

Since we're already discussing the tetrapod extinction, I think I need to throw this one in:


Do you see this Spinosaurus-lookalike abomination. That's a Titan dolphin, a carnivorous land dolphin (!) that lives 200 million years in the future and preys on garden worms and has its eggs eaten by terabytes (!).

It's from a planned virtual reality game called The Future Is Wild VR. This game is being produced under the creative control Joanna Adams who is the creator of the TFIW franchise as a whole, so it isn't some weird kind of fanfiction or anything. It has exactly the same biomes and creatures as the show (so, the megasquid still exists), but the extinction of mammals, let alone tetrapods, has been completely retconned. Not only that, the extinction of modern marine mammals that allegedly occurred in the near future has been retconned, too.

I am not sure how to interpret this. It is possible that the creators eventually realized how absurd the mammal/tetrapod extinction is, but didn't want to give up on the cool animals/biomes they created, so now they're planning to keep them + absurd future mammals.

(Maybe criticizing a game that doesn't exist yet is a bit low, but I just wanted to share this. The less is said about the plausibility of a Titan dolphin itself, the better.)

Image doesn't show for me, but I've seen it before and I know what you're talking about. And yeah, that dolphin is the wildest, most "nope" spec evo idea I've ever laid eyes on.

EDIT: nvm it shows for me now.

[Exalt]

I'm going to have to disagree, I need to hear why it's so implausible, putting aside the water to land transition being hard.

[creature386]

Oct 9, 2023 23:19:19 GMT 5 Exalt said:

I'm going to have to disagree, I need to hear why it's so implausible, putting the water to land transition being hard.

Well, for one, there would be too much competition for reconquering the land to be practical. For another, the way it is depicted, it would have no place for its internal organs whatsoever, as its torso entirely consists of its ribcage. Cetaceans don't work that way.

There have been some attempts to redesign it, but it most certainly couldn't walk bipedally as depicted on the art:
alphynix.tumblr.com/post/175439816884/so-in-the-light-of-the-ridiculous-titan-dolphin

[Infinity Blade]

Also WHERE THE HELL DO THOSE LEGS COME FROM??? How do you get what are basically just theropod legs with actual nails/claws at the ends of their toes from fully specialized flippers? They certainly couldn't have come from the now-nonexistent hindlimbs of dolphins. Once you make a drastic phenotypic change like that (i.e. forelimbs to flippers), it's extremely difficult, if not straight up impossible to go back. How is a dolphin going to have anything left in its gene pool to re-evolve digits that are completely separate from each other (as opposed to being fused by flesh into a single functional flipper) and ungual bones?

EDIT: I need to make it clear that it's the design that has me flabbergasted. If it sounds like I'm mad at anyone, I don't mean to come off that way.

[zoograph]

Oct 9, 2023 23:09:04 GMT 5 Exalt said:

I was thinking earlier: this show creates a scenario where tetrapods have been gone for 100 million years...and makes no giant arthropods. They would likely point at the oxygen level idea, but I don't recall of this series ever talks about oxygen levels.

Nah, they briefly talked about it in Tropical Antarctica (EP8), but that's pretty much it.

[zoograph]

Oct 9, 2023 23:15:05 GMT 5 creature386 said:

Since we're already discussing the tetrapod extinction, I think I need to throw this one in:



Do you see this Spinosaurus-lookalike abomination. That's a Titan dolphin, a carnivorous land dolphin (!) that lives 200 million years in the future and preys on garden worms and has its eggs eaten by terabytes (!).

It's from a planned virtual reality game called The Future Is Wild VR. This game is being produced under the creative control Joanna Adams who is the creator of the TFIW franchise as a whole, so it isn't some weird kind of fanfiction or anything. It has exactly the same biomes and creatures as the show (so, the megasquid still exists), but the extinction of mammals, let alone tetrapods, has been completely retconned. Not only that, the extinction of modern marine mammals that allegedly occurred in the near future has been retconned, too.

I am not sure how to interpret this. It is possible that the creators eventually realized how absurd the mammal/tetrapod extinction is, but didn't want to give up on the cool animals/biomes they created, so now they're planning to keep them + absurd future mammals.

(Maybe criticizing a game that doesn't exist yet is a bit low, but I just wanted to share this. The less is said about the plausibility of a Titan dolphin itself, the better.)

Even funnier is the fact that experts (I think it was Dixon, or maybe another person I don't know the name of) shared the concept art of a slug-like Titan Dolphin, which, while weird, would be much more possible.

[Exalt]

Well, the flipper argument seems to make sense, since AFAIK birds have not gotten fingers back.

As for the competition, idk what to even say since a post super mass extinction world is being retconned in the first place.

I'll have to trust your judgment on the organ spacing.

I feel like this prompts the question: what can and can't 100 million years do?

[Exalt]

Oct 9, 2023 21:42:19 GMT 5 creature386 said:

There we are. We have finally arrived at Mordor and I have to grind my axe.

Oct 9, 2023 19:24:13 GMT 5 zoograph said:

Final Thoughts. FIV is often criticized for copying past eras and pasting them into a future. 5 MA, for example, is pretty much supposed to be a stereotypical interpretation of an Ice Age, with terror birds and sabretooth predators. 100 MA, on the other hand, is supposed to Mesozoic, which is especially noticeable here (well, Toraton aside). Windrunner is supposed to be a “1990s azhdarchid”-like crane (which is insane, considering they killed most currently thriving mammals but left rapidly declining Gruidae alive), while Poggle is, as I said, stereotypical primitive mammal. Oh, and Silver Spiders are Morlocks (glad to see Welles enthusiasts on the team). Another problem is that while ecological interactions are fine, each individual chain is completely fantastical, something we’ll see a lot in 200 MA. With that said, we’re going to open the Pandora’s box now… beware.

Given the sheer frequency at which this happens, I think this is a feature rather than a bug. I recently wrote a small essay in our General Nature and Paleodocumentary discussion thread where I mused on the nature of paleo documentaries (and, more broadly speaking, speculative documentaries in general). I argued that a lot of them, are to an extent, allegorical because the focus is rarely on the animals themselves, or even on factual accuracy, as much as it is about conveying underlying scientific principles. (Except for Dollo's law. That underlying scientific principle has to be butchered 10000x times to make any of this possible.)

I cannot find the post in question.

[theropod]

Oct 10, 2023 2:11:30 GMT 5 Exalt said:

Well, the flipper argument seems to make sense, since AFAIK birds have not gotten fingers back.

As for the competition, idk what to even say since a post super mass extinction world is being retconned in the first place.

I'll have to trust your judgment on the organ spacing.

I feel like this prompts the question: what can and can't 100 million years do?

Honestly I think Dollo’s law is one of the most misunderstood evolutionary concepts out there. So misunderstood, in fact, that it led to all the good and easily recognizable evidence for birds being dinosaurs (known since the 1860s) being ignored for the worse part of the 20th century because some danish artist thought dinosaurs lacked clavicles.

The law states that it is statistically improbable to re-evolve a modified structure exactly as it was, not that it is impossible alltogether. That improbability is because not all mutations have a direct selective disadvantage or advantage, and therefore it is not likely that exactly the same structure, including various neutral features, would re-evolve without at least some modification showing its evolutionary history, as not every aspect of that structure would be positively selected for (in addition to various other complications, such as modification to one trait often entailing modifications to another one that may make it impossible or less likely to then revert some of those modifications without reverting others etc.).
Clearly, the more complex and the less useful something is, the less likely it is to re-evolve…just as it also would be less likely to evolve in the first place. However, of course extremely similar structures can evolve convergently, so reversals must be at least as possible as that (in reality, reversals are more likely to happen as animals retain at least some of the instructions for lost traits in their genome, even if they aren’t expressed any more).

The modification from flippers to limbs with digits has happened before, and fins of cetaceans still have the of requisite bone structure that could serve as a basis to re-evolve a weight-bearing limb (I would argue that for a cetacean flipper, it should be at least as easy to evolve back into a leg as it was for a basal sarcopterygian fin to do so, likely even easier). The problem is just that there would have to be viable intermediate stages and a viable evolutionary incentive to do so. Since they have almost completely lost their hindlimbs, and appear to arrest their development in quite an early embryonal stage, that would add a lot more complexity to give them back the ability to walk on land realistically when compared to something that already has hindlimbs of some sort. Somehow an animal evolving from an aquatic swimmer directly into a biped does not seem a very plausible evolutionary pathway, as the transitional stages (somehow having to learn to balance on just two legs without first having the benefit of a quadrupedal stage to even evolve something like quick, terrestrial locomotion or an erect limb posture would seem a lot less viable than the stages of locomotion through which various early tetrapods and reptiliomorphs went before some adopted semi-erect and then later erect limb posture, and, finally, bipedalism. If against all odds a dolphin had managed to evolve into a terrestrial predator walking on its forelimbs like some sort of creature from skull island, it having re-evolved individual digits would be the least of my concerns. If we can get birds to develop teeth and manual claws, then I’m pretty sure that over millions of years a land-adapted dolphin could re-evolve separate digits–it’s the land adapted dolphin part here that should sound weird, not the digits.

The thing is that this terrestrial dolphin concept is ridiculous. Certainly some other animal that could much more quickly and easily evolve into a terrestrial predator would be more likely to survive a massive, P/T-level mass extinction than cetaceans, which are uniformly large animals in relatively high, vulnerable trophic positions. Large, marine predators tend to always be among the groups to fare particularly badly in major mass extinctions (remember what happened to Endocerids in the Ordovician, to most placoderm lineages in the late Devonian, to Eugeneodontids and Ctenacanthiforms in the Late Permian, and the vast majority of marine reptiles at the ends of the Rhaetian, the Turonian and especially the Maastrichtian).
Whales re-evolving into terrestrial predators 200 Ma in the future is similarly ridiculous to Ichthyosaurs re-evolving into terrestrial predators after the Triassic wiped out most Pseudosuchians; surely the probability that at least some other tetrapod that actually still had functional legs survived is higher than that a cetacean would both survive as the only tetrapod, and then re-evolve terrestriality. That is not to say that it absolutely could not if you put it in a position where there was absolutely nothing else that could, but that scenario is just so absurdly unlikely it has no place in anything with pretenses of being a plausible future scenario. In that sense it very much fits TFIW’s fun premise, that the least plausible option is always the thing we should go with, for the sake of entertainment.

[Exalt]

I had not actually heard of Dollo's until this thread. What i said before was just the first thing that came to mind with the context.

I'm going to have to look up a couple of those groups.

But one more thing about the Titan dolphin that hasn't come up yet: what's going on with that dorsal fin?

EDIT: One more thing: would it be any more plausible for a pinniped to become more terrestrial, assuming they survive long enough for the possibility?

[zoograph]

Episode 10

“The Endless Desert”

Okay, as I promised, I’m going to start this review with an extinction criticism, but since theropod and Infinity Blade have already explained most of it, I will instead make a comparative analysis of three most prominent extinctions (for tetrapods, ofc) – Permian (the deadliest one), Cretaceous (the only one where all modern groups of four-legged chordates were present) and this one.

Permian: three main terrestrial vertebrate groups were present before the extinction of 70% of terrestrial species – temnospondyl amphibians (which possibly include modern lissamphibians), sauropsids (parareptiles plus diapsids) and synapsids (our own ancestors). Parareptiles were hit the hardest but still endured as somewhat tuatara-like procolophonids for the next 50 million years. Stem-mammals survived as three groups: therocephalians (who fizzled out fairly quick, but it still counts), dicynodonts (who were successful Triassic herbivores before dying out for some reason) and cynodonts (who gave rise to modern mammals). Amphibians recovered quickly and continued as Anamnia crocodiles and semi-modern forms, while diapsid extinction rate is still mostly a mystery (but with groups like lepidosaurians appearing in Olenekian, it probably wasn’t too harsh for them).

Cretaceous: ok, now let’s see how modern groups in a less deadly event. All lissamphibian groups survived due to low extinction rate in freshwater, even the ones as big as Habrosaurus. All of six Maastrichtian turtle families survived into Cenozoic. Lepidosaurians had a lot of losses, but these were mostly lizards, with snakes and rhynchocephalians not being that badly affected. Sauropterygians died out, which is expected due to planktonic food chain collapse. Crocodyliforms were still represented by modern crocs and dyrosaurids, one of the few marine reptiles of Paleocene. Pterosaurs went extinct (sadly). Dinosaurs surprisingly endured the extinction as three flying toothless groups (Paleognaths, Galloanserae and Neornithes) and thankfully came back in a drastically new form. Enigmatic choristoderes were also among the few survivors. As for us, no mammal group was lost, with some experiencing local extinctions (like North American metatherians and Asian multituberculates).

100 MA: All lissamphibians are completely dead. That’s barely plausible because of human extinction and already existing arid adaptations like burrowing, but I’ll let it slide since it’s not the worst offense here. All reptiles are completely dead, despite being even more adapted to deserts and having a lot of potential to occupy different ecological niches. All birds are completely dead. You know, tetrapod group least affected by humans (as a whole, of course), the only ones which city species number can be counted beyond 100. All mammals are completely dead, even rodents, who were mentioned in the second episode as “nature’s greatest survivors” and whose extinction goes against generalist survival principle that expert mentioned.

With that said, only one word can fully describe my reaction to this extinction - www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpwNjdEPz7E


Ok, let’s review the episode itself now.


Terabytes are okay. Honestly, they are just termites with little to no change applied. Or maybe that’s because I don’t know that much about Blattodeans.

“They’ve made it this far because they’re insects – nature’s greatest survivors”

I’m afraid palaeopdictyopterans would disagree.


Garden Worms are also fine, especially as a representation of symbiosis. As you can see, animals here are not as wild as in other episodes, which I think is how I wish show was actually like.


Same can be said about this black smoker-esque ecosystem, although the intermediate chain, Gloomworms, are rather flat. Sadly, I don’t really think it’s fixable, though some annelid enthusiasts can correct me on that.


Slickribbon, on the other hand, is fairly cool. Polychaeta are already one of the most majestic creatures in the sea, and this beast is no exception. Especially with that trunk it has.

“There are thousands of sea worms in the ocean [now], but they were almost annihilated in the mass extinction…”

Of course, these gentle soft-bodied organisms don’t fossilize well (except for cuticles and jaws), but from what we can gather they successfully passed all of Phanerozoic mass extinctions. Their (likely) earliest form, Phragmochaeta, lived around 520 million years ago, and, if Cloudina was one of them, they may have originated in Proterozoic. So, these forms wouldn’t be relictual like they are in the show.

Oh wow, at 21:32 we have our first Latin in the entire show. It’s so funny that they spent this kind of effort only on future polychaete groups, but not on vertebrates or arthropods. It’s as if they like this setting the most…


Final Thoughts. Wow, what an inoffensive episode. There is nothing to even say really – most animals are fairly plausible and do not differentiate much from modern groups. The only problem is the setting itself. Extinction of this size is not just implausible, but straight up impossible. Still, if I had an ability to rewrite this show, this episode won’t change much, although there obviously will be vertebrates around Terabytes and Slickribbons.


EPISODE 11 REVIEW COMING SOON!!!


The nightmare is here…

[Exalt]

I'm kind of surprised at the outcome of this one.

It's easy to overlook in the wake of the other four, but I certainly think the last, or rather, first, vertebrate group will warrant discussion soon...

[zoograph]

Episode 11

“The Global Ocean”


Oooooh boy….


We start with a Silverswimmer shoal. These peculiar animals are neotenic crustaceans, which are not that likely to develop into fish-like niches. There are plenty other animals who can do that first, like tetrapods (like in Early Triassic, where different reptiles briefly outnumber fish) squids or gastropods (whom we literally saw in Shallow Seas), but they wanted to be as wacky and awesomebro as humanly possible.

“Mass extinctions show that many marine species go extinct all at once, even large groups that are very diverse…”

So what? Fish survived all or almost all of the extinctions (the former if you count jawless representatives of Ordovician) with almost no losses in larger groups. There are only two exceptions – placoderms (if they aren’t paraphyletic) and acanthodians. Jawless fish, while mostly extinct, were in a major decline even before Kellwasser Event, and still survive as highly specialized hagfishes and lampreys. Similarly, acanthodians were represented by a sole family way before P-Tr. Only placoderms were abundant before disaster struck, but their total extinction can be attributed to a second extinction event that marks the start of Carboniferous. Even if you think about smaller groups and a much more recent dying that logic wouldn’t work. Cartilaginous fish lost only 7 families in K-Pg, while bony guys had 90% survival rate. Overall, I don’t think it is possible for all of our aquatic cousins to die – at best they will be reduced in species number and maybe even have less niches taken.

Around 06:40 we see a lot of different fish-like crabs that exist in the global ocean… Hey wait! These are just concept models! Show us more of these nicely designed species you greedy cowards!


Oh look, something snatched a Silverswi… oh no… oh no-no-no…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VM3uXu1Dq4c

Joking aside, Flish is probably one of two most iconic creatures FIW crew created (second one is, obviously, megasquid). But if actually think about it, it’s also one of the worst creatures FIW crew created (funnily enough, it shares this top spot with megasquid as well). While fish can develop gliding across water surface, flight is a different beast altogether. So, let’s start analysis of flish with…

…its tail. It is horizontal and bird-like. But do you know why birds (and even cetaceans) have a horizontal tail? Because it’s not a part of skeleton. In birds it’s just feathers (with bony tail reduced to pygostyle), and in aquatic ungulates flippers are made of fat (I guess). But in fish tail bones are connected with the rest of spinal column, and so most bones of their body should be rotated by 90 degrees. Sure, some representatives of the group like flatfish have horizontal vertebral column, but Flish, judging by its body shape, has a normal spine… and rotated tail. HOW???

Why does Flish have a dorsal fin? It’s not really useful – the only group which had such structures, pterosaurs, did them in a completely different way. While we are not sure why they had crests (aside from sexual selection), most of these bone derivatives were narrow and long, which not only were much more noticeable for females, but could’ve also helped in maintaining balance during flight. Even if the latter theory is not true, “muh sexual dimorphism” reason is a very weak argument. Not only because it’s unrealistic, but also because it’s not even mentioned…

Cold-bloodiness is also a problem. In all of Earth’s history only one ectothermic group conquered skies – insects (pterosaurs were likely warm-blooded). And they have quite a lot of issues. To even be able to fly, they need to warm themselves up through direct (exercise) and indirect (just temperature rising as the day starts) means. They also need to keep their temperature during the flight. If you ever walked in a forest, you probably saw wasps suddenly stop in a small sunlight spot – this is them warming up. I won’t spend much more time relaying to you a very complicated topic of insect thermoregulation, just notice that there are so, so much problems with ectothermic flight and the show doesn’t even mention them. Well, some fish can develop endothermy, but this show doesn’t even mention this, which made automatically assume otherwise due to a small number of warm-blooded fish.

Even funnier is the fact that Flish have scales. Not only can’t they efficiently warm up their body, these structures they have will be actively preventing sun heat from reaching their bodies (as they only conserve heat). So, like an ice cream in a sweater, bird-like fish will not reach the temperature needed for chemical reactions to power up wing muscles. Unless they are endothermic, but I already talked about that.

Flish also seem to have gills on pictures, which is illogical since their epithelium will dry outside of water. They may also have a modified swim bladder (which is hinted by the ability to screech like a gull), but that structure is much more useless without functioning thorax (once again, not mentioned at all in the show, not to say even more effective structures like air sacs might be needed). So, no matter what you think, in air Flish will (likely) suffocate.

And finally – the biggest question from a natural perspective. How do they reproduce? If they spawn, that means at least some forms of Flish live underwater and Silverswimmers can’t evolve into their niches (which will likely be oceanic plankton eaters). If they abandon their live young, how do child Flish learn how to fly by themselves? Do they just drop from cliffs? Even more problematic is the weight mother will have to endure while pregnant. Especially if their muscles are not warmed up by their own body heat.
Damn, what a backtrack. Still, it was needed to establish the sheer improbability of this creature.


“We know that birds evolved from dinosaurs…”

Nice, very nice. Big step up from After Man.

“In birds most of the hand disappeared – there are just two fingers fused together…”

Nah, it’s actually three. One of them is just an alula carcass.


Okay, now we move onto Rainbow Squid. It’s one of the few animals which doesn’t look that unrealistic. Even with that, I have some criticism. First of all, it’s only depicted eating Flish, implying this is its main food source. They are much, much smaller and can’t possibly sate a gigantic squid. Well, I guess it eats Silverswimmers as well, it’s just not clarified at all.

“The squid’s control of its body patterns is so sophisticated, that from below it mimics the colors of water surface…”

Uhm, firefly and midwater squids already do that, Mr. Narrator.


Wow, another species of Silverswimmer with a slightly different head (13:40). Wish it actually had something to do.


I find it kind of goofy that while expert explains cephalopod intelligence, a romantic violin plays in the background. Seems a little out of place.


And while we see Rainbow Squids mate, wild Sharkopath appears. Its sole existence is the result of a very well-known “durable sharks” misconception. All of cartilaginous fish before Jurassic are actually different groups that are now extinct, with the earliest modern shark group Heterodontiformes only appearing in Toarcian. Not to say that most modern species arose only in Neogene or even later. So even if cartilaginous fish survived, their 200 MA descendants wouldn’t be just modern sharks. But there is another, bigger problem.

How did they even survive? If they survived in the sunlight zone, they would either experience lilliput effect because of extinction of most fish and replace them to eat smaller food, or took over small niches as juveniles. That couldn’t happen, as Silverswimmer wouldn’t rise in that scenario. If they survived the extinction in deep water, they wouldn’t last very long, as abyssal is really not a great place to live. Yeah, they would’ve got a lot of free food from a lot of fish corpses, but then it would stop, and, due to only a small amount of energy going to macropredators in food chains, they will die. Black smokers are also out of question, since they are small and rare. With that in mind, you have a choice – either kill Sharkopath and help Silverswimmer, or the other way around. Choose wisely.

“The huge, gentle Rainbow Squid can’t defend itself against the simple, brute force of nature’s great killers”

Geez, so rough… Sharkopaths are animals too, you know.


“Life moves to the same evolutionary roots – kill or be killed eat or be eaten”


Final Thoughts. Damn, they were so proud of this one. They even put Flish on their poster! Still, it’s quite bad. None of the forms present in the episode are flawless – each one of them is stupid. Neotenic arthropods as fish are somewhat unlikely. Sharks surviving in this manner is even more unlikely (plus I hate that they are one-dimensional villains). Giant squid only eating fast-moving, hard-to-catch prey in such small quantities is unlikely. And bird-like fish is nearly impossible. The creatures are nice to look at, of course, but that’s it. Pure awesomebro experience.


EPISODE 12 REVIEW SOON!!!


The nightmare is here…

[Exalt]

I never thought that I'd see Silverswimmers be described as awesome bro.

You basically covered everything I would have said about bony fish, except that I would point out that as a group, they are 5 for 5 on surviving mass extinctions.

I can't believe that the shark thing is a lie...

"Birds evolved from dinosaurs, so we can make anything into birds" is surely some of the funniest logic ever conceived.

Also, how would you go from aquatic directly to aerial? Is that something that vertebrates can do, so you didn't mention it? Because in retrospect, it's like they did an evolutionary speedrun.

[Exalt]

Oct 11, 2023 22:46:12 GMT 5 zoograph said:

 placoderms (if they aren’t paraphyletic)

Why might this be the case? Is there a possible descendant species?

Also, while looking for that, I noticed that you did cover bony fish being around for most if not all of the big five, oops.