As it’s been happening for the last 15-20 million years the planet has been slowly cooling down, and now, 30 million years after the Anthropocene mass extinction, it has finally reached a point when it can be defined as in a true ice age, and now we have reached the Campleocene epoch.
In the heart of Eurasia, extending all the way back in North America, an environment resembling the Pleistocene mammoth steppe has started to flourish again in the glaciers’ shadow, inhabited by vast herds of herbivores, whose grazing and stomping, along with the high aridity of the biome, didn’t allow for many plant taller than a bush, with only a few isolated trees scattered across the plains. This environment, the borroth steppe, named after one of its most charismatic inhabitants, hosts an incredible biodiversity in both fauna and flora, helped by the mountain ranges, the Altai, the Pyrenees, the Carpathians, … , and the patches of forest that fracture it and result in plentiful reproductive barriers.
The most common grazers across these plains are lagomorphs and even-toed ungulates. Heers (the deer like descendants of Eurasian hares) , and to a lesser extent jackalopes (similar to the former but more browsing and horned), more common in forests. They travel in small gender-specific bands, ten to twenty individuals at most.
The even-toed ungulates that inhabit these steppes are quite varied in niche and size, going from animals reaching a ton in weight to lanky 20 kilos runners. Most of them come from African ancestors, descended from grysboks or dik-diks, although there’s many Eurasian locals too, with saiga descendants, Saiginae, now having become almost llama or camel like and are a common sight from Spain to British Columbia, and feral goats descendants, previously only found on mountains, now having come down to the lowlands thanks to a more favourable climate for them.
The smaller mammals populating the steppe are mostly rodents and lagomorphs, relatively unchanged from the Holocene, with lemmings, voles, mice and hares being quite common, and the only real addition being ratjacks (Rattopus descendants), jumping rats that like goats came down from the mountains thanks to the change in climate.
There’s a wide variety of birds inhabiting these plains. Other than passerines the most common birds are fowl, both gamefowl and waterfowl, along with cranes, who are most common around marshes around the borroth steppe, but were able to exploit the variety of low growing plants and expand into it.
Some of the largest herbivores of these lands are giant hyraxes, part of yet another lineage originating in the mountains, who now sport on their snout a pair of, usually straight, horns that they use to fight amongst themselves. Weirdly enough, even though they live in a grass rich environment, most species in this lineage seem to prefer eudicot plants, with many being functionally browsers of low bushes
The largest animals here, though are the borroths, holophants part of the tribe Borrothini, there’s currently five species of them, two mountain ones, the Himalayas (Cryoborrothus orientalis) and Caucasian borroths (Plioborrothus pygmaeus), and three steppe ones, the Mediterranean (Euborrothus meridionalis), Common (E. vulgaris) and Beringian borroths (E. cryophilus).
They’re extremely generalist herbivores that are willing to eat most plants they encounter, grass, bushes, trees, moss, lichens, etc… , though, similarly to their ancestors they prefer the carbohydrate and lipid rich foods, like tubers and berries. Another similarity to their suilline ancestors is their social structure, as sows and farrows live in close knit family groups, while males live in bachelor groups, though they tend to part ways as they age, especially during breeding season, as they become extremely territorial, especially in resource rich areas, in order to attract female herds.
