#urukril

The specimen pictured above would be actually quite a valuable animal. Animals with pure colored elytra are known to be of luxury and purebred stock. The markings seen on the elytra have been painted on by someone wanting to make their mulebug look nice.

The name of this blog came from the last world-building thing I actually attempted before making the blog. I was trying to imagine what a bridle and other tack would look like on an animal with a completely different cranial anatomy.

This is what I came up with. I do not have background in animal husbandry so I had to do quite a bit of research. The basic idea tho (that I kinda already had figured) is that you want an animal to be comfortable. An uncomfortable animal is a dangerous animal.

Designing tack for a mulebug turned out to be way simpler than I initially thought. The bridle is basically the same as a horse's but without a bit as the mouthparts aren't really able to accommodate such a thing. Instead there is a thick large pad of material situated just under the cranial horn with a strap wrapping all around the animal's 'chin' (there is going to be a lot of anatomical info in quotation marks. do you know how hard it is to make big bugs and a way to talk about them?). This connects to a medial strap that rests under the 'brow' plate. The connection between the two is where one may attach by some method reins. The medial strap attaches at last to another wraparound strap that rests in front of the 'cheek' plate. This whole arrangement allows for lots of leverage which I imagine is important for the animal and the driver.

I imagine that people tie hanging lanterns from the thoracic horns of mulebugs for when it gets dark. The end of the horn from dorsal view looks a little like a Fleur-de-lis.

The saddle lays on top of the thorax behind the horn. If it were on the abdomen, it would probably impede the animal's ability to 'vocalize'. I imagine these animals would retain their ancestral trait of making sounds by rubbing their elytra together quickly or hissing air thru them. If the saddle or any other part of the tack was on the abdomen, it would proably not make the animal very happy since it would use its vocalizations to ward off predators =:(

The stirrups hang at an angle and have foot rests at the ends. A mulebug is very wide so sitting with your legs completely open like on a horse would be uncomfy.

Finally, not pictured is the yolk for pulling carts. This would be on the 'shoulder', in front of the thoracic horn, where real-life scarabidae beetles put loads of pulling force. Other than that it would likely be pretty similar.

Hi sorry I haven't been up to much </3 But I did think about two ways that I believe to be somewhat feasible for lighter-than-air animals to evolve. They will be referred to as the Ground First Method and the Aerogenesis Method respectfully as tentative names unless someone shows me that someone else already came up with names.

Ground-First Method

Basically the idea behind this is since random mutations occur all the time, I believe it to be believable for an animal to evolve to store light gasses in an organ perhaps as storage before disposal. And maybe this organ gets bigger or grows a pocket specifically for the gas. And the buildup of gas eventually gets to the point that it affects the animal's weight. The animal might be extremely light on its feet and so harder to detect by sound. This makes the mutation beneficial and sparks it to spread thru the population. The pocket of gas might grow bigger and they might not dispose of it as much or find a way to recycle it. At first they will be able to glide around in perhaps a forest environment or a very rocky environment and survive great falls, until they are able to control their take-off and landing and propulsion thru various methods achieving true flight thru a lighter than air method.

Aerogenesis Method

This method assumes a thicker atmosphere than Earth. Much thicker. On Modern Earth, there exist Cyanobacteria and Microalgae within the atmosphere. These organisms are extremely EXTREMELY small. I imagine that in a denser atmosphere, it would be easier to live in the atmosphere exclusively and also to grow bigger. These bigger airborne organisms would be able to get super diverse and populous perhaps growing into macropredatory niches and filter feeders on the other vast swathes of aeroplankton. How big they grow would of course depend on the density of the atmosphere but certainly a similar organ as described in the Ground-First Method would be advantageous to increasing size. Maybe someday these organisms would spread and learn to live on the land? Producing an air-to-land takeover rather than Earth's water-to-land takeover.

In the year 2983, The United States is long gone from living memory. Although its legacy lives on in pockets, folk songs, campfire stories, old heroes. The language of that Empire isn't lost but lives on in scientific jargon and the mouths of those who chose to invest the time into speaking it.

The western end of the old country is a loosely-tied conglomerate of states united by similar languages. This language has its roots in an old dialect of Imperial English that once had its choking vines in nearly all others but now lives on with a reputation of rurality.

The population that once lived primarily on the coast of the continent all moved inland to escape the increasingly violent storm systems. most of the people who live here are concentrated tightly in four major cities.

At once, across the galaxy, all the 741 sapient races were greeted by a powerful, nigh-godly species. When they arrived, they taught the people that they had came to them before in different forms. Some sapients had only just discovered electricity, and were taught aerospace engineering in order to be able to keep up with the rest, and all were given technology to access the rifts, cracks in the galaxy that with the proper method, can allow one to travel lightyears in mere hours allowing all the galaxy the freedom of the stars.

Millennia ago, A continent far from the reaches of most was found by a group of people who nurtured the land they had found to an almost supernatural ability before one day disappearing. The love for their land manifested into a deity powerful as the people who worshipped and created them, but when the people disappeared, the deity began to grieve. In their anger and loneliness, they created an eternal storm surrounding the island that would allow any to enter, but none to leave. This would make anyone who landed on the island by happenstance to have to keep them company. Although the deity still had to wait many decades before the arrival of the first new wave...

This island has been separated from the mainland for millions of years. The flora and fauna are like none seen anywhere else. The 'plants' are actually photosynthetic fungi evolved from the vacancy of true plants. These fungi take many colors both passively and through bio-luminescence. While invertebrates were able to evolve the right characteristics to allow them to occupy megafaunal niches. They evolved active respiration and stronger chitin. From ant pursuit predators to giant grazing beetles, the land would be foreign to any newcomer.

My elevation map is rough and not necessarily super robust, its just a vague sloping that I came up with on the spot since I don't have (and don't really care about making) a tectonic map for the world this is in

I also just don't care about making any maps for the rest of the world, which makes being able to accurately map out wind and ocean patterns hard, probably why my first version ended up being different from this version which I now consider Canon. But hopefully this new redo will be more accurate. (Keep in mind this planet is retrograde compared to Earth's rotation)

Here's a few versions of a map I made for the dialects within Basinish

Both of these versions include towns with less than 1k population, then I made another version that doesn't that is my current most recent version