Going through the DLG for reasons and just, it is Quite Fun in places.
Like, yes, darlings, it is very cool that corals lasted a good 500 million years on Pern, and that there are fossils of them. In fact I don't know that you know how cool, given 500 million years is just a little less than the time between now and the end of the Cambrian Explosion. These corals lasted three times longer than nonavian dinosaurs roamed the Earth! Fucking Pern corals are just built different!
But, but, maybe I'm just getting ahead of myself on that one. Maybe that little bit is just phrased a little off and between that and it being at the end of the discussion of archaeology from the exploration team that first recorded the planet. Maybe they're talking about fuckers that are still around and just have been a good 500 million years. That would put them about in line with the appearance of the first ancestors of corals here on Earth.
There is a bit here saying there's evidence of animal life "as early as 100 million planetary years before" [The Dragonlover's Guide to Pern, pg 4], which doesn't line up with shit unless they're talking terrestrial animal life in which case Pern was way behind us on getting that done. For context 100 million years ago Earth already had well-established monotremes. Ants were new. Spinosaurus were starting to pop up. Terrestrial animals were over 200 million years old.
"At the thirty-five-million-year mark, widespread evidence of tree-fern fossils suggested a carboniferous landscape." [The Dragonlover's Guide to Pern, pg 4]
For context, we got our tree-ferns in our Carboniferous Period about 350-298 million years ago. An easy 10 times earlier than this seems to imply, though, again, I could be jumping the gun.
There's a lot of focus on the plants lacking silicates, which feels like we're meant to take it as something relating to Thread (which, given there's some areas where it seems like folks couldn't decide what Thread eats and doesn't eat both in the DLG and the books...) but in the end... I don't know, it's also very possible that Pernese flora just evolved to use something else in it's biomineralization. Maybe that's what the boron is doing, it's replacing the silicates.
Or maybe you want to make note of how apparently the Pernese equivalent of Pangea only started breaking up 100 million years ago, apparently. For comparison ours did about 200 million years ago.
Or you could hit on this right here-
"The most interesting casts were of a large creature with four limbs and two wings, big lizardlike creatures, and some gigantic snakes taken from a site north of the body of water that would one day be called Drakes lake" [The Dragonlover's Guide to Pern, pg 4]
Do you see this, my loves? Do you know what this means? Firelizards and/or wherries had a 'large' relative somewhere in there between 100 million BC and 200 BC. That is- I love that, there's potential in there. How far back is this fucker? What's it's relation and to who? Is it related to anybody? Could it be just a case of convergent evolution? Who knows!? Not me! But the potential is there!
And honestly that mirroring of the '100 million' number is very intriguing isn't it? I mean more than likely all of this is just folks not knowing what they're talking about but- But if we ran with it, it is intriguing.
Because here's the thing, we have notable aquatic critters 500 million years ago. Despite this, we don't have notable land critters until 100 million years ago, not showing up until the big continent starts breaking apart. The creatures we do get described to us are a lizard-like fucker, some big-ass snakes (when the DLG further describes for modern tunnelsnakes "Similar snakes that grew up to elephantine size lived in the rivers and seas." [The Dragonlover's Guide to Pern, pg 12]), and a large winged bastard.
Some plausible aquatics and a flier.
Fuckers are only showing up on land when the continent breaks apart.
That would lead to a lot more water access.
Has Thread been harassing Pern longer than we think? Long enough to impact the evolution of large land-based fauna, push it back until the breaking up of the main continent allowed for better water access and therefor animals to get larger alongside increasing in number and range, all of which would allow for better odds of fossilization?
But then we have the ruminants. "An extensive tar pit revealed fifty-thousand-year-old fossils of ruminants, flat-toothed cattlelike creatures that ate only vegetation." [The Dragonlover's Guide to Pern, pg 4] What's going on there? Common parlance is that surely this is when Thread showed up but if we entertained the 'Thread's been around a damn while' theory (which, if the whole silicates mess is supposed to be about 'oh Thread eats that shit' then Pernese terestrial plants evolving to not be eaten would explain shit and "The "grass" those extinct creatures chewed contained no silicates and was visibly triangular in cross section, like most of the modern vegetation." [The Dragonlover's Guide to Pern, pg 4] which shows that Pernese vegetation has had this trait since before the point these creatures ended up in the pit) then that would mean these guys just, died out. Which does happen. They suggest an Ice Age or axial shift in The Survey: P.E.R.N., and they're right in that it's very possible that even if we've had a recent extinction event it wasn't Thread related (I've written before about how, logically, with the way Thread works it should be stripping the terrestrial regions of planets bare, not 'over time' but in the first Pass, it simply covers too much ground over too long a stretch with too little buffer between Falls). Fuck, the story wasn't published until '93, the Alvarez Hypothesis for the K-T Extinction Event was only about 13 years old, would Anne even have thought of the potential for an asteroid impact? There's a lot of 'oh it's so mysterious i
-annnd here's my mom coming in to go 'or the ruminants were put there by another attempt to colonize the planet that failed', so, ya know, we've got that option now. Thanks, Mom. There is that possibility- after all just because Pern wasn't known to humans and their allies doesn't mean it wasn't known to anybody. And I'll be real 'folks looked at a nice plot of land, started their own colonization procedures, and then fucked off when the Man-Eating String attacked' makes more sense and is more interesting to me than 'some third party started attacking a so far as we know uninhabited planet for some unknown reason, failed despite the fact shit should be a done deal, and then just fucked off'.
Just- Yeah. Shit in the DLG is fun and interesting and there's potential to play with that 100% was not intended but it's here and more canon than any WoG so may as well!
vaporwave
2087
theartofmadeline
