#aelurion

Aelurion Fossorius is a small mammal-like creature that existed 79 million years ago on Aiur. Nobody knew these small, agile critters existed. That is, until 2478 A.D. a group of Terran archaeologists found a strange fossil embedded in a rock. They examined it by looking at the shape and size of the fossil and then started to study it further.

It took 30 days of man-hours to work on carbon dating and discovered that this lost forearm bone was around 79 million years ago. At the time, this specimen existed during the time of the dinosaurs on Earth light-years away from its alien homeworld of Aiur and labeled it as "a missing link between reptile & mammal".

Till five months later after the discovery of the specimen, local Protoss villagers found a skull and mistaken it to be a child's, but some of them believed that this skull is older despite it being well preserved after being in a cave for millennia. Both human & Protoss scientists have to work together to analyze the skull and discover that the skull and the arm belong to the same unidentified species. To the Protoss this skull has no jaws or mandibles like most faunas on Aiur they made a conclusion that the specimen may be a distant relative of the Protoss before the Protoss ever existed 79 million years ago.

Paleontologists and anthropologists did some DNA analysis by using tiny bone fragments to grind them up and placed them in a small container. One of the Protoss took a sample of her blood and everyone waited for the results. It took a week for the analysis to be revealed. And to everyone's surprise, the DNA of the specimen, matches that of the Protoss as they both shared an evolutionary lineage with each other despite the physical differences between the two.

After this remarkable discovery, scientists and paleontologists are having a little bit of a struggle with coming up with names for the small ancestor of the Protoss. "Aelurion Fossorius" is decided by one of their teams. "It may translate to "burrowing digger"." one of them said. Now everyone began to speculate about the Aelurion's lifestyle and daily struggles of its survival.

Notes: Aelurion Fossorius, existed 79 million years ago, height 1 foot tall and weighed 10 lbs, agile and elusive, her kind is the strange synapsid organism that lived in burrows, dens to remain hidden from large predators to avoid to be eaten. Aelurions despite being small and skittish, are very social with other members of their troops, similar to today's primates. They have posable thumbs and fingers with retractable claws to climb up on small to medium size trees in their homes. They built nests to sleep, and basked in the sunlight. These Aelurions are photosynthetic like their distant Protoss descendants in the next 69 million years from then. However the climate changes as Aiur begins to face an ice age. The Aelurion cannot survive the change. They went extinct 77 million years ago, after existing on Aiur for two million years of evolution.

The Aelurion Fossorius died out, but its descendants lived on. Moving out of their burrows & tree tops, new species of these Protoss-like ancestors began to move forward of evolution and walked upright. Like how Australopithecus is distantly related to us humans, the next generation of these sentient aliens changed through time and time again, till the first Protoss 10 million years ago, made his first steps onto this alien world they call home.

Aelurion Fossorius © PredWolfXX121