Mad Scribbles & Nonsense Words

Smallmouth Salamander (Ambystoma texanum), family Ambystomatidae, western WV, USA

…I hadn’t heard about a new Future Is Wild project, and now I’ve looked it up I’m so so disappointed.

Because the “titan dolphin” makes no anatomical sense.

[source: The Future Is Wild VR]

It appears to have been designed purely for looks, with no real regard for how either dolphins work or just animal anatomy in general. (Or, worse, it looks like somebody drew an “alien dinosaur” concept and then just slapped the “dolphin” ancestry onto it after the fact to try to make it more interesting.)

Why is its vestigial tail fluke vertical instead of horizontal? Why do its teeth seem to go right around the corners of its weird-looking lips? What possible use are such long thin fragile fangs? Why does it have lizard scales? Why is it so lumpy?

And where are its organs? If its legs are derived from forelimbs, then the “body” around them has to be pretty much entirely its ribcage. This thing is literally just the front half of an animal with no space for a digestive system!

I’ve been thinking about how I’d do my own version of a “land dolphin”, too, and I actually ended up taking it in a pretty similar initial direction, using the tail for weight-bearing.

(I just… might have gone a bit weirder with it.)

Their ancestors are dolphins who develop the behavior of driving their prey up onto the shore to catch it, beaching themselves in the process and then wriggling back into the water – similar to the way some modern dolphins beach themselves while hunting fish, along with how orcas hunt sea lions.

They gradually get better and better at maneuvering themselves on the shore, going from flopping to a more sea lion-like bounding motion using strengthened and more flexible flippers and their powerful tails. Instead of just beaching fish they start outright preying on terrestrial animals on the shore, too, in a sort of ambush predator niche.

Eventually they start using their tail as a tripod pseudo-leg, curling it beneath themselves so they can use it to propel themselves forwards. They don’t really run, instead leaping along in an almost frog-like motion to chase terrestrial prey.

They’re still semi-aquatic at this point, spending most of their time lurking in the water, but from here they can become more and more terrestrial.

Their melons reduce because echolocation doesn’t work as well for hunting in air, but they keep the dorsal fins for now as visual display structures. Instead of regaining separate digits their limbs develop tough hoof-like keratinized pads, and they take the vestigial hairs they still develop as embryos and fully grow some sensory whiskers.

They grow some big tusks, too, because they’re bad-tempered pig-like things that like to fight each other.

Then some of them reactivate the genes for body fur, and get kinda hairy, too. They develop elaborate bony crests on their snouts (like a more ridiculous version of some extinct beaked whales), and so their dorsal fins start to become less prominent.

With longer limbs and stronger hooves, they end up as big carnivores somewhat convergent with entelodonts.

Though if all goes well, and they’re able to re-specialize to a terrestrial lifestyle, there could be a fair amount of diversity that they could attain. Perhaps wallowing hippo-like herbivores or unicorn-like predators as mentioned…or perhaps even a small, omnivorous “raccolphin”…

I love that raccolphin! I can imagine them being obnoxious little troublemakers, and making up for their lack of grabby hands with some corvid-like tool use.

And, yeah, land dolphins would definitely need a lack of terrestrial competition in their ecosystem, so I figure they’d probably happen in an isolated island ecosystem without any other land mammals.

#Spectember is still very far away, but I couldn’t resist going nuts with this concept.

So without further ado:

The Delphinus Archipelago.

An isolated archipelago that arises in the Pacific Ocean an undetermined millions of years in the distant future, the Delphinus Archipelago is soon teeming with life, filled with expanses of grassland, dense forested areas and rich coral reefs around its coastal shallows. An abundance of crustaceans swarm on its beaches, flocks of unique endemic birds settle in its forests and shores, and insects, other arthropods and even small reptiles that rafted onto the archipelago eons ago have now made home in the islands’s rich ecosystem.