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[[folder: Fridge Brilliance ]]

* The apex predators of the Amazon grassland are giant flightless birds? [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorusrhacidae Well, it wouldn't be the first time South America was dominated by such animals...]]
* Many seemingly random evolutionary processes are veiled references to real ones. The eerily human-like savanna South American monkeys recall the moving of baboons ''and'' hominids from the jungle to the grasslands; once dominant mammals being reduced to one species in far away Oceania after 100 million years can be compared to the tuatara, bony fish becoming extinct in the medium they were dominant while becoming dominant in an entirely different one (''air'') seems a reference to birds, neotenic crustacean larvae replacing fish recalls theories about the origin of vertebrates as neotenic arthropods or echinoderms, and so on.
* The Flish are descended from cod, which don't seem like the obvious ancestors for flying fish. But then you realize that cod are deep-sea fish, and animals that live in the deep ocean are more likely to survive mass extinctions!
* All we see of Antarctica 100 MYH is a rainforest inhabited by the highly diversified descendants of a few species of birds and insects - in other words, what Hawaii was until recently.

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[[folder: Fridge Logic: ]]

* Some of the evolutionary roads are a bit strange. The ocean phantom is a descendant of the Portuguese man-o'-war, which itself is a composite creature, meaning each creature making up the man-o'-war evolved together into the phantom. And some species and even entire families that are well-known for their ability to adapt, like bats and rodents, just up and die out completely for no rational reason.
** A Portuguese man-o'-war is a clonal colony -- its individual organisms aren't independent beings that happen to come together, they're produced by budding from a single original zooid. It's functionally like a colony of eusocial insects, just with even closer cooperation. There's nothing preventing them from evolving like any other animal.
** Well, there are various species of colonial animals today; they're called [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphonophorae siphonophores]], each species of which is actually a bunch of several smaller animals. Just as one example, the man-o'-war has a smaller, cuter, and certainly less dangerous relative, called the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velella by-the-wind sailor]]. It's not farfetched to think more species of colonial animals would evolve as a single colony into new, "collective" species.
* They explain why mammals die out. The world grows more and more warm and humid, conditions where mammals are at a disadvantage against birds and reptiles. Yes, we are in the Age of Mammals, but Earth also went through an Age of Trilobites once, so…
** What advantage would birds have over mammals in a warm climate? If anything, birds are even more endothermic than mammals.
** Birds lay eggs, so they don't have to worry about overheating fetuses during pregnancy.
** Though an existing ''phylum'' taking over the old dominant phylum when the previous one still exists (as cephalopods do here) hasn't happened since animals first evolved. And was there actually an age where trilobites were dominant or just where they were very common?
** "Dominant" as in covering [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilobite nearly all niches]] occupied by modern day marine arthropods ''and'' fish.
** But the world was warm and humid like that. It's called "Eocene period". Guess which group of animals came to the top (hint: not insects).
** The show's world is warmer than the Eocene and seems rather inspired by the Carboniferous. Mammals also suffered during the peak temperature at the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum]], with many groups evolving smaller sizes, moving north, or becoming extinct, while birds and reptiles were seemingly unaffected. Mammals diversified after the peak temperature, helped by the vacant niches left by other mammals and the still recently extinct dinosaurs, but they were still not what most people would call dominant. [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambulocetidae Whales]] aside, the largest vertebrates in the early Eocene were actually [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastornis birds]], [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pristichampsidae crocodiles]], and [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palaeophis snakes]].
** Even if mammals lost "dominant megafauna" status, wouldn't they retain a fair amount of diversity? During the dinosaur age mammals were fairly diverse: there were arboreal squirrel-like forms, burrowing gopher-like forms, carnivorous badger-like forms, and aquatic otter-like forms, to name a few. The idea of the poggle remaining the sole mammal species is unlikely, save for a cataclysmic event that kills literally every mammal ''except'' poggles.
* Also: how do the bumblebeetles mate? They only live for a day, and as far as can be told they do not have some special mating ceremony like, say, california squid.
** According to the book, they're sexually mature and mate as larvae ("grimworms").
* The Deathbottle spreads its seeds by luring Bumblebeetles into its inner cavity, where the seeds stick onto the insect. It does so by imitating a dead Flish. But earlier on, the program made it clear that Bumblebeetles don't even crawl into ''real'' Flish carcasses either; they just land on them, and it's the larvae that dig themselves into the meat.
* Apparently silverswimmers evolved to replace fish, which are said to have become extinct 100 million years ago. So how come they coexist with sharks, which, in every sense of the word, are definitely fish?
** Tetrapods are extinct 200 million years in the future. Bony fish are still around, but very rare and primarily sky-based. Cartilaginous fish are basically the same.
* Also, the show states that the silver swimmers evolved from ''larval'' crustaceans. How did the ''baby'' version of an animal evolve into something?
** Neoteny -- a well-known evolutionary process by which adult animals retain more and more infantile traits. Humans are neotenized apes, and furthermore vertebrates are descended from sea squirt larvae.
* Why would squid become the next major life form when octopi are more intelligent and adaptable?
** Because octopi were randomly caught and killed in one of the mass extinctions that happened between 100 and 200 million years AD.
** They call them squid, but it's implied that they're actually descended from the Swampus.
** They are not. Megasquid have 10 legs, including 2 manipulating tentacles like a squid. The Swampus has 8, like every other octopus.
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[[folder: Fridge Sadness ]]

* In the 200 million years timeline, birds have gone extinct. Given that birds themselves are the only surviving dinosaurs, this means that the dinosaur lineage would finally have ''truly'' been wiped out for good.
* The poggle is revealed to be the very last mammal, before going extinct because of the 100 millions years mass extinction: that means it was also the very last surviving synapsid species, mammals having been already the last synapsids since the extinction of tritylodontids (the very last proto-mammals) during the early cretaceous.
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