KEKulative EvoLOLtion

"Oh, the post-humanity!" Meet the Blimpers (my fan-made descendants of the Striders from C.M. Kösemen's All Tomorrows) (tl;dr = Striders had airbags for safety, they evolved into Hindenburgs and avoided the dino-chickens.)

One might not see any family resemblance between these balloon creatures and their lanky ancestors, but the curious evolutionary path between the two was inadvertently put in place by the Qu themselves. The first Striders were notoriously fragile, often unable to recover from a fall, even on their low-gravity world. In response, the Qu made one final adjustment to the Striders' anatomy: air bags. These gas-filled chambers were not obvious at first glance, but their strategic placement at certain points on the Striders' body afforded a softer landing in the event of a fall. But evolution, through trial and error, found another purpose for these bladders. Over just a few million years, some lineages of Striders had been naturally selected to fill their more vertically-located air bags with hydrogen gas, giving them more stability and allowing them to grow to even greater heights.

 Although the flammability of hydrogen severely limited the biomes in which they could thrive, these balloon-assisted Striders kickstarted an ecosystem revolving around this feature. As each generation grew successively taller, predators evolving alongside the Striders also began to exploit the abundance of hydrogen gas in their prey for their own gravity-defying evolutionary features that gave them that predatory edge. Never enough of an edge to completely wipe out the Striders, but more than sufficient to deter all competition from the descendants of terrestrial poultry, when those predators began to spread across the planet. The ballooning Striders did not have to fend off the dino-chickens alone; they had an entire ecosystem resisting the outsiders.

Over the course of tens of millions of years, the Striders needed less sturdy appendages for walking, as their support increasingly came from above in the form of their huge gas bladders. Eventually they ceased walking entirely, becoming the Blimpers, drifting through the high treetops alongside many other organisms that followed suit in this evolutionary arms race of buoyancy. Although the Blimpers and their many evolutionary offshoots could never leave the treetops and rocky outcrops for long due to the risk of static electricity, they were in no danger from their ancient feathered foes that squawked far below.

The absence of the Qu, who had turned the various planetary colonies of humans into (mostly) non-sapient beasts, gave many such lineages the opportunity to re-evolve sapience and develop civilisations that reached out to their long-lost kin across the Galaxy. Thus the Second Galactic Empire gradually formed, in which each planetary civilisation (or collection of civilisations, if unification across a single planet wasn't happening) was represented visually by a flag incorporating aspects of their way of life, values, history, and/or even their physical features.

The text in the 3rd panel reads:

"Upon what acts of defiance this people�s forebears committed to earn this fate one can scarcely speculate.

With their eyes, ears, and taste buds gone, all they had besides the ability to physically feel their way around with their vestigial arms and shrivelled legs was a heightened sense of smell owing to their nose now comprising the majority of their anatomy. To add further indignity to their torment, the Nosefolk were left to languish on a desert planet plagued by dust storms and pollen outbreaks from the majority of the flora, the most nasally-edible type of which was a legume that gave these otherwise noble creatures severe gas.

In spec evo, there's a concept known as the "seed world" (or seed planet), a thought experiment where a planet capable of hosting life (usually from earth biology) is "seeded" with a few select organisms (and other starting conditions), and potential evolutionary-timescale outcomes of this are then speculated upon. For instance, what if there was a planet that was basically Earth as we know it except there's no vertebrates, and then someone adds a bunch of ducks? What niches would the ducks diversify into? Would any of them evolve into cool megafauna? What would it take for ducks to evolve into avian moles? Interesting stuff. But not what I'm doing here today.

Many of you will say that I was so preoccupied with the starting assumption that McDonaldland characters are species rather than individuals that I didn't stop to think if I should, and I agree. Anyway this is my seed world - "McDonaldland" - about 50 million years after a terraformed earthlike world was seeded with classic McDonaldland characters for an advertising stunt, part of a promotional tie-in with a movie about alien planets or something (records from this era are spotty at best). This stunt directly led to increased sales of McDonald's products for many Earth-years, but once the promotion was over the planet was filed away and forgotten about for around 50 million years.

We've got a towering therizinobirdie having a snack, a bunch of western lowland gorilmaces hanging out on a nice warm rock, and some apex predator descendents of fry kids fighting over a burgersnake, which we can tell is unhappy to be considered a meal. A trio of hamburlugos glide among the treetops, eyeing up the other burgersnakes as they slither away. Sadly, none of the lineages descending from clowns made it this far.