HOME | DD

Clawedfrog In reply to Zippo4k [2015-09-12 04:16:18 +0000 UTC]

I've had a few ideas for speculative snouters, but the only way I could see them making any sense is if they were groups that went extinct before the islands were discovered. I doubt that every family of rhinogrades had a living representative, so I imagine there were probably some weird and bizarre macrosnouters that lived back when the archipelago was much larger. A few I thought up were the Sword-nosed Sniffler, Subterranean Snoutsnake, and some kind of ambush predator that uses its stiffened nasarium to club prey to death. I'd be interested to see your ideas though!

👍: 0 ⏩: 1

Zippo4k In reply to Clawedfrog [2015-09-12 11:34:36 +0000 UTC]

I had an arboreal one that constricts prey with a serpentine nose and an aquatic polyrrhine that catches aquatic invertebrates and small fish with it's tentacle-like noses (a little bit like a squid, but with a body like a platypus).

While Barlowe and Dougal Dixon introduced me to speculative biology, Steiner's work showed me how an academic spin can make speculative biology both more believable and more humorous. I *love* that book intensely and wish more people knew about it.

👍: 0 ⏩: 2

Boverisuchus In reply to Zippo4k [2015-11-09 06:28:26 +0000 UTC]

I had an idea for a whole separate archipelago filled with Snouters, but I hadn't considered the canon. If we consider the fossil snouters that have been invented by some paleontologists (they were featured on Tetzoo blog), it is possible that Snouters had a wider distribution. If we invent the idea of a separate set of islands that were even more poorly documented than the Hi-yi-ya, perhaps colonised by the most primitive snouters at some point, there could be a whole convergent clade of new Snouters.

👍: 0 ⏩: 0

Clawedfrog In reply to Zippo4k [2015-09-12 15:18:52 +0000 UTC]

Yeah, I feel the exact same way. Its funny how nobody really nose about it. I like your ideas by the way! I think they would both make sense as prehistoric snouters.

👍: 0 ⏩: 1

Zippo4k In reply to Clawedfrog [2015-09-14 22:19:35 +0000 UTC]

Oh, by the way, are you aware of some of the later snouters that other people have added? I'm not crazy about the marine ones, but there are some wood-boring species that have been "discovered" recently.
www.futura-sciences.com/magazi…

👍: 0 ⏩: 1

Clawedfrog In reply to Zippo4k [2015-09-14 23:16:20 +0000 UTC]

Oh, I'm familiar with the post-Steiner snouters, and I personally don't believe that they make sense as rhinogrades / animals. I mean, I can't make any sense of the damn drawings, and why are there snouters at the bottom of the sea in Antarctica? It's like a five-year-old came up with them. But nasoperforator I enjoy! Most particularly the faux taxidermied one that doesn't look like the drawing of it. Still a cool design though.

👍: 0 ⏩: 1

Zippo4k In reply to Clawedfrog [2015-09-14 23:46:33 +0000 UTC]

Yeah, I think the marine ones are sort of a play on anatomical simplification in much the same way as the rhinotalpids, but the execution was... weird. Just not very believable (not that the platyhelminthe-like rhinotalpids are very believable if you know more about flatworms, but the book was meant as a joke any way). The images look so poor I think in part just due to the resolution of the image files, unless you've seen the original publication elsewhere.

Regardless, I wish it were easier to find more information on the nasoperforator (that and I wish I understood French).

👍: 0 ⏩: 0