Blog / Hamster's Paradise

Been spending most their lives, living in a hamster's paradise.

Hamster's Paradise is a Web Original Speculative Biology project by Reddit user Tribbetherium, inspired directly by Serina with a similar premise of a planet seeded with Earthly life but allowed to evolve in its own terms.

Indeed, this project is practically the same as Serina, save for two things: it, as its title suggests, uses hamsters (specifically the Chinese Dwarf Hamster, Cricetulus griseus), and its worldbuilding, while well-developed and written, contains a fair amount of tongue-in-cheek shout-outs to popular culture, as Tribbetherium has frequently done in previous works prior to the project.

Originally based on a series of crude black-and-white sketches originating from 2017, the project has since received a major overhaul and remaking, filled with simple but colorful artwork and written commentary. The project is currently in progress, and can be viewed on Tribbetherium's Reddit here and on their Tumblr here. (However, due to apparent technical difficulties it is now only active on Tumblr.)

Compare with Amphiterra and Spec World, the latter of which also features some amusing pop culture references.

This work contains the following tropes:

• Adaptational Backstory Change: The pterodents came from a species of tree-dwelling hamstheropod in the original sketches while current project instead has them evolve from a species of mountain dwelling podothere.
• Adaptation Deviation:
  • In the original sketches the harmsters arrived about 90 million years after the foundation of the planet, but the current project has only their ancestors the ripperoos living at the 110-million-year mark. The Harmsters themselves don't appear till the 115 million point.
  • In the original sketches, the chimpmunks were a unique species that the original baywulves tamed. In the current project, the chimpmunks are simply an apelike group of the larger lemunky family. Something similar happened to the roddolphs, which were the third sapient race to appear in the original sketches but are simply a group of cricetacean in the current project. Furthermore, both groups appear earlier in the timeline than their original iterations (the Middle Glaciocene as opposed to the Middle Temperocene for the chimpmunks, and the Late Glaciocene as opposed to the Late Temperocene for the roddolphs).
• Adaptational Name Change: Some names were changed from the original 2017 post, such as the cricetaceans originally being called "hwhels", the podotheres originally being called "hamstheropods", and the rattiles originally being called "ratptiles".
• Adaptation Expansion: The project began as a series of black and white sketches that chronicled 500 million years of evolution from the seeding of life to the ultimate extinction of all life in the end. However, after positive reception, the author has given the project far more detail, skipping regularly at intervals of 10-15 million years at a time to chronicle the development of life, as well as featuring individual continents with their own unique flora and fauna.
• After the End:
  • The Earth organisms were seeded onto the planet by humans in the distant future, with the intention of creating a new colony. The hamsters were initially introduced as an experimental test subject, but after humanity was forced to prematurely abandon their terraforming project the planet was left to the hamsters for millions of years, with humanity's fate left unknown.
  • The Fault In Our Wars: The Extinction of the Harmster talks about the immediate aftermath of the Harmsters' extinction. They turned many ecosystems into wastelands and drove many species to extinction such as the rakatusks or the plurodons, but the remnants of their own civilization were quickly erased by the march of time.
• All Flyers Are Birds:
  • Averted with the ratbats, who, while filling avian niches, are quadrupedal like bats and pterosaurs and show no other avian features. Conversely, they expand into ecological niches never taken by either bats or pterosaurs as flightless penguin-like swimmers, terror-bird like predators and ratites, so it's more like "all former flyers are birds".
  • Two lineages of flyers have since joined the current canon, each bird-like: the pterodents (which while mostly pterosaur-like do in fact have bird-like traits like bipedality, flexible necks with multiple vertebrae and even feather-like hairs) and a brand new clade of flying ratiles with feather-like scales that essentially resemble draconic hummingbirds.
  • The original sketches play this straight with the ratbirds, which are bipedal with perching feet, evolved from theropod-like ancestors, have incisors modified into beaks, and even lay eggs, or at least a loose mammalian analogue of them.
• Alien Kudzu:
  • Saberleaf grass is sharp and abrasive and grows at an overwhelming rate, causing it to become highly invasive when it arrives onto Nodera.
  • Coast Kudzu is an aquatic grass that spreads just as fast as its terrestrial, Earthly namesake and grows several feet per day and requires frequent grazing from herbivores to keep the plant in check. It becomes quite successful in the warm, shallow seas of the Thermocene and its rapid growth allows large marine grazers to thrive and proliferate on a scale not possible in Earth's oceans.
• Alien Sky: The planet HP-02017 has two suns, Alpha and Beta, and two moons, Pyramus and Thisbe. The former allows for a time of day called "Beta-twilight" that casts the sky a golden orange when only the redder sun is up.
• Always a Bigger Fish:
  • One chapter features a bayver (a sea lion-like aquatic hamster) hunting a shoal of fish-like shrardines, only to be attacked by a megaprawn, a giant two-meter predatory crustacean. However, at the last moment the megaprawn itself is devoured by an even bigger predator— the six-meter long mosasaur-like leviaham.
  • The sarchon is a species of phorca that specializes in hunting other phorcas. Essentially an apex predator designed to eat other apex predators.
• Amazing Technicolor Wildlife:
  • The theropod-like walkabies come in brilliant vivid colors used for display and communication. They get their bright colors from pigments in their diet. For the species in cold climes that hibernate in winter, their colors actually fade when they go without food for a long period of time.
  • A lot more commonplace in the Temperocene era, as the proliferation of more colorful plants favored the evolution of good color vision among hamsters, especially the lemunkies and the tetracorns, which have colorful patterns and displays. There are also the wingles, which are much more like butterflies in coloration.
• Anthropomorphic Shift: Compared to its ancestor the great oof, the greater oof has evolved into a biped as a result of its feeding habits selecting for taller trees, and is noted to walk in a very anthropomorphic manner. However, the greater oof also inverts this, as it's also even dumber than its ancestor.
• Ant Assault: The hook-jawed pirant is an ant species that forms floating masses from their own bodies, which they use as rafts to travel over water and attack other ant species.
• Antlion Monster: The desert earbill is a species of burrowing shieldear native to the Arcuterran desert that specializes in hunting small surface animals. It finds a good spot where it pokes the tip of its snout through the sand with only small sensory hairs exposed, if a small creature triggers these hairs then the sharp keratinized plates on its ears and lower jaw immediately fly open and snap shut on it.
• Apocalypse How:
  • By the time the NO-SIHTT plague causes their extinction, the Harmsters have already killed off many other species, including the also-sapient Splintsters, the Rakatusks, and all seavers except for the derelict seaver. Life does eventually recover, though.
  • In the Downer Ending of the original sketches, the Mousey Micks, the very last sapient species to evolve, dies out in a Class-3A-Class 4, as they die out along with many other species due to nuclear war and unchecked industrialisation. Tragically, however, the Mousey Micks, in their death throes, permanently damaged the planet’s atmosphere beyond repair, and the resulting final apocalypse is a Class-6, as all remaining life on the planet eventually goes extinct due to unstoppable Global Warming.
• Art Evolution: The earlier drawings were smoother and more simple but the animal textures and backgrounds have gradually become more detailed and the lighting has also improved. It's best exemplified here.
• Artistic License – Biology: Several examples:
  • Most notably, the bright colors produced by a group of theropod-like hamsters known as the walkabies, which received criticism regarding the keratin of mammalian fur having more difficulty in refracting bright colors. It's been Hand Waved by Word of God that the pigments are accumulated into their skin and fur via their diet. It is worth noticing that mandrills can achieve red and blue via structural coloring.
  • It is noted that podotheres have acquired more neck vertebrae. This is a phenomenon extremely rare in mammals (which nearly all have seven neck vertebrae) due to genetic modules, which leads to individuals born with an atypical number of neck vertebrae dying horribly. The narration does notice that this is a heritage from their more sloth-like ancestors - sloths being among the few mammals that managed to pull this off - but the reason sloths have many neck vertebrae is because they have slow metabolisms and low cancer rates. Many podotheres have since become highly active. The text does explain that the extra vertebrae are simply repurposed thoracic vertebrae, an exaggeration of how the giraffe's flexible first thoracic vertebra functions much like an eighth neck vertebra, making it less of a developmental aberration. It's also mentioned that they have a specialized immune system that makes them resistant to certain cancers.
  • Megaprawns, giant two-meter predatory crustaceans, would be very unlikely to achieve macro-apex predator status due to the presence of an open circulatory system and the need to moult, with such a large creature likely to die if it lacks bodily support with a soft exoskeleton right after moulting.
  • The rattiles are described to have lost their mammary glands as they no longer nurse their fully-independent young. While not entirely improbable, as many mammals do give birth to hyper-precocial young, it does bring about the issue on the offspring lacking gut flora and antibodies from milk, which is Hand Waved by the text as acquiring them while passing through the birth canal, and in the case of the herbivorous shingles, eating their mother's droppings.
  • The original sketches had two notable examples.
    • The mousey micks, the final sapient species to appear, are humanoid. The design of an intelligent humanoid drew significant criticism, enough for Tribbetherium to agree to redesign them in the remake.
    • The "ratbirds" live and breathe artistic license. First acquiring bird-like beaks and egg-laying to save weight (bats have done neither in their +60 million years of existence, with beaked jaws potentially heavier than toothed jaws in some cases) to shifting from a pterosaur-like wing to a bat-like one (nevermind that both have radically different membrane and bone structures).
  • This one-shot entry depicts a gynandromorph pterowrist, showing a patchwork of male and female features. So far, such a biological anomaly has never been documented in mammals, primarily in birds and insects instead which have a different chromosomal sex determination. It is possible, however, for an embryo to develop an XY chromosome at first, but have a duplication during meiosis/mitosis (XXYY) split unevenly, resulting in a mosaic of cells with only an X (female) or an XYY (male) set of chromosomes.
• Artistic License – Paleontology: The pterodents are intentionally designed after more outdated pterosaur depictions, being bipedal, having bird-like flexible necks and talons and launching awkwardly from the ground (unlike the ratbats, which like pterosaurs can launch using the forelimbs, while pterodonts are forced to launched bipedally like birds). They initially have a niche partitioning with ratbats similar to how pterosaurs and birds might have co-existed in the Mesozoic, the former occupying larger niches with no overlap or competition with the latter.
• Ascended to Carnivorism:
  • Several hamster species become predators, such as the Thylacoleo-like carnohams and the saber-toothed daggarats.
  • The loupgaroo are a species of predatory podothere that descended from omnivorous ancestors who in turn, evolved from the herbivorous drundles.
  • The graptor and the lipgrip are two species of the normally omnivorous rhinocheirids that have become full blown predators thanks to the isolation of the South Easaterran continent they live on. The former are somewhat heron-like in their lifestyle and use their long trunks to grab small animals while the latter feed on larger prey and have shortened their trunks but enlarged their fingers so they can get a grip on their prey's neck.
  • The varats of the Midland Archipelago are a group of the herbivorous shingles that have become carnivores after finding themselves on the islands where no other predators lived, losing their armor in exchange for greater speed.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Invoked with the stagotaur grimhogs, particularly the clusterbuck. Their elaborate antlers certainly look impressive but they are so fragile that they are useless as a defense mechanism and may even be an active hinderance in heavily forested areas but females find them attractive which may be worth the evolutionary price.
• Big Bad: The sagas of the sophonts have their primary antagonists:
  • The harmster saga has Pi-pipipupu, the Bruterider warlord who unites the factions on a great conquest that brings about a harmster world war.
  • The calliducyon saga has Ashfall, the pack leader of a band of Outlanders known as the Firethieves, being the primary antagonist as he invades the tribes of the Baywulves and the Highbrows.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Some of the shrish living in the seas grow to considerable sizes, with the largest being the two-meter megaprawn. However, they can only reach those sizes due to living in water and aren't able to get much bigger than the megaprawn thanks to their inefficient circulatory systems.
• Bilingual Bonus: One species of beelzeboar is called the neinschwein, literally "nope pig" in German. As its continent's largest predator, it definitely lives up to the name.
• Binary Suns: The planet, HP-02017, orbits Alpha, the yellow primary of a binary system, while its red companion, Beta, orbits further away, occasionally illuminating the night sky in "Beta-twilight".
• Bioluminescence Is Cool: The galvaprawn is a deep-sea shrark that produces red light from its body. Unlike many examples of the trope, this light is not used to lure prey but to help the galvaprawn itself hunt, as no other deep-sea animals can see the color red.
• Bittersweet Ending: How the Harmster saga ends. The titular species dies out, freeing the planet and its lifeforms from their cruelty. However, they destroyed some of the world's ecosystems and drove many unique species to extinction, including the gentle, sapient Splinsters. However, there are still a good number of other species who did survive their reign and can take the place of the ones who were killed off.
• Bizarre Alien Limbs:
  • The rhinocheirids are a group of herbivorous bipeds that developed a nasal trunk like an elephant. Due to rodents having split upper lips, it facilitated the evolution of a dexterous tri-lobed trunk resembling a three-fingered hand. The fisshors have developed a second trunk on their lower lip to get a better grip on the sticks they use as tools.
  • The cricetaceans swim like whales but lack a tail, so their hind flippers are similar to a fluke and they propel themselves by undulating their spines.
  • In the Temperocene, some species of burrowurm develop a toxin derived from their skin glands that causes severe allergic reactions and delivers it into the bodies of prey and predators through their front limbs which have been turned into fanged pinchers. One marine species, the sterpent, had moved their pinchers directly behind their heads and effectively turned them into a second set of jaws now that they no longer needed to use them for terrestrial locomotion.
  • The daggoths are a cave-dwelling molrock descendant that has developed seven tentacles on their faces that they use to hunt insects. They've also greatly reduced their legs and scurry around on sixteen elongated toes. It goes even farther with their troglofauna descendants. With greater space and oxygen after their tunnels expand their digits become more erect and effectively become legs with some species repurposing their fingers into long feelers and their aquatic member turning them into eight pairs of flippers.
  • Wingles are a form of flying rattile that formed wings not out of limbs, but out of movable armor plates that can flap quickly thanks to modified erector pili muscles that allow them to fly much like an insect. Since these wings are basically highly modified hairs, some species are even capable of shedding and regrowing them.
  • The searrels are a small species of hamatee that have developed a claw on their front flippers and have turned their hind flippers into a backwards facing pincher that they use to climb through the mats of coast kudzu that they live in.
• Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism:
  • The early Temporcene tetracorns of South Easaterra have become highly dimorphic with males growing significantly larger than females while also developing vibrant color patterns and elaborate horns as a way of attracting mates.
    • One species in the middle Temperocene, the fourform fourhorn, does something unusual with this. The normal state of the species is that of a larger, more colorful male pairing off with a small drab female during the mating season with the male using his greater size to protect his mate and young from rivals and predators alike. However, several million years earlier, a mutation in their chromosomes resulted in the usual dynamic being flipped around, with large brown females and small yellow males. Rather than split into distinct species, they will usually form pairs that consist of a standard male and a large female since the offspring of such pairings usually have a higher survival rate while the smaller ones make do with each other and form larger herds to compensate. Since these couplings typically have a roughly 50/50 number of normal to mutant calves, this means that the species effectively has four sexes.
  • The apex predators of North Westerna is a pterodent known as the pterowrist. The males are condor-like flyers that specialize in small animals and carrion while the females are over five times their size and are flightless cursorial hunters that target large animals though both sexes are very similar at birth. It's explained that that this developed so that they don't compete over the same food sources and came about due to the larger female pterodents becoming even bigger when they made it to the island. Their descendants, the pterowrex, take this even further. The females can weight up to 700 kilograms (around 1500 pounds) while the males are described as stork-like but still flight capable.
  • The wingle females are both significantly larger than the males but are also much more brightly colored, unlike many real-life species which have large but drab females and small but colorful males. The reason for this is because it's only the males who care for the offspring so they require better camouflage while females only contribute their genes so they become vibrant as a way of attracting a mate.
  • The male nightgazer ratbats differ from the reddish-brown females by being a solid black color with inflatable yellow cheek pouches resembling eyes that they use for intimidation and display. This plays into their parental behavior to best protect and camouflage their young: the dark colored males hide their nests at night while the females hide them during the day and Beta-twilight.
  • Female squoads are typically green colored as a form of camouflage while the poisonous males are brightly colored. The most notable thing about this however is that many squoads start as females and change into males at a certain point in their life, with the male's toxins coming from those of the venomous insects they've eaten over the course of its life.
• Book Ends: In the original sketches, the very last species still alive 500 million years later, long after the world has turned to desert, is the omegaham: a small desert-dwelling rodent virtually identical to the very first hamsters to be introduced to the planet.
  • The saga of the calliducyons opens with a narration from Pale-Beard, telling of how the "story-telling hunt-beasts" endure through their oral tradition. In "Reign of Fire: The Firethieves' Siege", Pale-Beard performs a Heroic Sacrifice to save his grandchildren from an Outlander attack, and closes on a narration of how he will endure beyond his death through the stories he told and left behind.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The badgebears are an unspecialized group of carnohams that resemble badgers as the name suggest which doesn't make them stand out when compared to some of the other fauna of the Temperocene but this flexibility combined with their omnivorous diet has allowed them to become one of the more successful animals of the era, with the more carnivorous members of this genus becoming the top predators of Gestaltia.
  • The cragspringer's internal anatomy is quite unique among mammals but it's outward appearance and lifestyle is nothing spectacular. While one lineage became large flyers, the basal members are still successful and at least one species now lives in Mesoterra's forests as the woodspringer, a tree-dwelling hunter that is virtually unchanged from its ancestor aside from the coloration.
• Butt-Monkey: The aptly-named big oof is a subversion: it's described as being a complete evolutionary failure, being slow, defenseless, naive, overly-specialized and very, very stupid, but the text then notes that this is in fact also an evolutionary win, as it is able to survive on an island with little nutritious food.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Comparatively downplayed compared to other speculative evolution projects, but it happens. The flying hamsters for example are known as "ratbats", despite being neither rats nor bats.
• Canis Latinicus: Many of the ficticious binomial names are quickly cobbked together vaguely Latinate words, if they're not a sly reference to pop culture.
• Carry a Big Stick: The branchstaffer, a species of fisshor that uses branches both as feeding tools and self-defense.
• Cerebus Syndrome: The project starts out lighthearted enough, rather like a nature guide, with even subversions of Predators Are Mean and portraying them with a softer side. And then the harmsters appear, and everything gets a lot darker.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • The grimhog first appears when it is only briefly mentioned in the Mesoterra entry but it later turns up again when it's revealed that it was one of the species that managed to cross the land bridge into Arcuterra and evolves into a large browser to replace its extinct drundle relatives.
  • The cragspringer is briefly depicted as just another odd animal living in high mountain altitudes with unique adaptations for its lifestyle. Then fast forward 10 million years, and it's revealed the cragspringer has given rise to a new clade of flyers, the pterodents, with the exact adaptations the cragspringer had for mountain living now making the pterodents more-efficient flyers than the ratbats.
  • The saddled baskerville was mentioned as just one animals in an entry that had similarities to their calliducyon relatives and their place in their culture. They play a larger role later on when the firetheives start capturing and training them to use in their war against the other southhounds.
• Canon Foreigner: Many, many new species were added in the remake that was not present in the original, such as the sapient, trunked Splintsters as a seventh additional sapient species.
• Contrasting Replacement Character: The fangaroo could be seen as this for the ripperoo as they are both loupgaroos that have adapted to become Mesoterra's top predator. Unlike the ripperoo before it which evolved to eat its prey alive, the fangaroo has developed long saber teeth to kill its prey quickly which means that they lack in high intellect and innate sadism of the bygone ripperoos. Additionally, when faced with more efficient carnivores, the ripperoos coped by becoming smaller, smarter and faster breeding while the fangaroos became the way they are because of competition with other predators.
• Crafted from Animals: The ungulopes have a tough and elastic esophagus that makes it nearly impossible for predators to eat but some southhounds have learned dry it in the sun to make tools such as rope. Some have will even attach thorns to it and wear the throat around their vulnerable neck as a protective collar.
• Crapsaccharine World:
  • The pebblefruit forests are constantly in bloom, creating a pastel-colored rosy landscape filled with an abundance of flowers and fruit. However, it is not without its dangers, as predators like the ohami and the crimson bossum capitalize on the abundance of fruit-eating species.
  • Despite being called "Hamster's Paradise" and very fairly lush and wonderous with most megafauna being cute, this world has an astonishing number of brutal organisms in it, culminating in the hyper-violent, genocidal harmsters.
• Crippling Overspecialization: A lemunky known as the big oof is this: it's specialized to feed on low-nutrient plants, and thus has completely sacrificed its energy-hungry brain but at the cost of being so incredibly dimwitted that it can do little more than pluck leaves and has virtually zero behavioral flexibility.
• Crown-Shaped Head: The stagotaurs are a branch of large grimhogs that use elaborate horn displays as a way of attracting females. Of particular note is the ringed torus, which has two horns that come together to form a ring-shaped structure with branching spikes, causing it to resemble a crown.
• Cthulhumanoid: The daggoth is an example of a Cthulodent, being a blind, cave-dwelling mole-rat like molrock with seven facial tentacles like a star-nose mole but more hypertrophied.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: This is how the second outlander attack goes, but not in their favor. The baywulf, plainmane, and darkears packs have spent enough time together to consider each other allies and learn one another's skill. So when the outlanders launch their second assault, the others are ready for them and use their greater numbers and weapons to form a battle formation that leaves no weaknesses for the outlanders to exploit or overpower. Not a single individual of the defending packs are lost and the outlanders are forced to retreat and lose several members in the process. Even the fearsome Ashfall is left genuinely terrified after seeing the aftermath.
• Death World: The saberleaf savannas may look like an ordinary grassland, but the razor-sharp saberleaf grass will slice up any creature that tries to eat or even just walk through them without specialized adaptations.
• Denser and Wackier: While just as developed as any other speculative evolution project, the names of the species are clearly puns and pop-culture references, lightening the tone even if the subject matter is still serious.
• The Dog Bites Back: When the Bruteriders attack the Decadents, the animals they had caged and starved for their bloodsports were able to escape and start eating them. The highly intelligent ripperoos in particular deliberately go out of their way to seek revenge on their captors.
• Downer Ending: The original sketches feature the end of all life on the planet after a sapient race of humanoid hamsters end up destroying the planet's atmosphere, destabilizing the climate and gradually heating up the planet beyond what all life can endure.
• Dramatic Irony: Hit or Myth is about a Plainmane elder telling some pups a story about the origins of meatmoss. There was once a beast called the All-Eater which walked on two legs, had sharp teeth, and a face similar to the 'hounds, that didn't respect the balance of nature and killed everything in its path. The suns and the moons tried to kill the All-Eater, but could only destroy its spirit, making it as mindless as a plant. The pups ask the elder if this story is true, and the elder says it could be. By this point, the readers have probably caught on that this is a distorted folk memory of the harmsters.
• Eaten Alive: The maniacal ripperoo doesn't have the jaws of other predators like carnohams and daggarats, so they instead evolved hooked claws and piercing teeth to hold on to their food and gruesomely tear it apart and eat it while they're still alive. The smaller animals caught by them are more fortunate, as they are quickly ripped to pieces while larger animals are slowly picked apart as a longer-lasting source of food.
• Eats Babies: Several species, which is not really surprising given that hamsters are known for doing this. Notable is the maniacal ripperoo, whose breeding females eat the offspring of nearby breeding females to reduce competition for their own young.
• Explosive Breeder:
  • It's stated by Word of God that the herbivorous podotheres give birth to litters of smaller, more independent young similar to pigs. Species living in areas of higher predator densities can have around 8-10 offspring at a time.
  • In contrast to their smaller, mainland wingle ancestors who can only bare one offspring each pregnancy, the fallen nephtile is able to have litters of up to 40 young at a time thanks to their much greater size.
• Expy: The arboreal cat-like treegers, and their descendant the tigerilla, are expies of the striger from After Man: A Zoology of the Future.
  • The giant rabbit-like rabbeasts, deer-like bambunnies and wolf-like predatory scabbers of Isla Centralis in the Glaciocene also resemble the predator rats and the rabbucks from the same book.
  • The armored rattiles known as shingles resemble the rattleback from The Future is Wild.
    • The shrish are similar to the Silverswimmers of FIW, being crustacean fish-analogues.
    • The original sketches depict the omegaham as the last of the hamsters, somewhat similar to the Poggle.
    • Some of the ratbats are outright compared to the deathgleaner.
    • The silver soarer is very similar to the great blue windrunner, also being an alpine flyer with adaptations against UV radiation.
    • Some of the freshwater skwoids of the middle Temperocene are an obvious allusion to the swampus, especially the squoads who have become outright amphibious.
  • For that matter the ratbats may be an allusion to King Kong (2005)'s flying rodents.
  • The rhinocheirids could be one for the tentacle birds of Serina, given that they are a lineage of theropod-like animals with dexterous facial appendages and reduced forelimbs. One carnivorous species in the early Temperocene even goes on to resemble the grapplers thanks to its short, robust tentacles used for hunting. They also bear a strong resemblance to the snouters from The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades do to starting out as a small mammals living on an Archipelago with bizarre and complex noses.
  • The thorhorns, giant elephant-sized herbivores descended from the deer-like ungulopes, closely echo the Gigantelopes from After Man.
• Eyeless Face: The cave-dwelling daggoth has lost its eyes entirely as an adaptation to perpetual darkness.
• Fantastic Fauna Counterpart: A lot.
  • In the first geological epoch of the planet, the Rodentocene, the hamsters begin filling niches of other rodents and small mammals such as the arboreal squizzels (squirrel-analogues), the carnivorous hammibals (hunting other small hamster species like shrews or weasels) and the grazing hamtelopes (mara/agouti analogues) and cavybaras (capybara analogues).
  • Megafauna begin evolving in the next epoch, the Therocene, where the cavybaras give rise to two-tonne buffalo-like grazers called mison, the hamtelopes become tall browsers called girats (as the name suggests, giraffe analogues) and the hammibals give rise to Thylacoleo-like predators, the hamyenas and the saber-toothed daggarat.
  • After the girats and hammoths are hunted to extinction by the Harmsters, the giraffe role gets filled by the altolopes, a tall browsing ungulope in Gestaltia and by a tall horned podathere in Arcuterra while the multiton herbivore niche is taken up by the piggalo, which resemble an elephant without a trunk.
  • The planet's oceans in the meantime are populated by shrish: descendants of krill that came to fill the niches of fish and are found in numerous forms such as the shoaling shrardines and the predatory shrarks with one group becoming freshwater piranha analogs. There are also the notiluses, swimming sea snails that converge on cephalopods. The Glaciocene adds a second group of fish-analogues: free-swimming sea slugs called pescopods.
  • The blubbats are essentially quadrupedal penguins, as they're a semi-aquatic descendant of the planet's then-dominant flyers that lives in arctic waters. One species however, the arctic blubbear, developed into a polar bear-like predator.
  • Basal molrocks are equivalents of naked mole rats, but the derived surface dwellers fill lizard niches. The biggest species, the giant armadile, is basically the rodent version of a Komodo Dragon. The descendants of these surface molrocks evolve into the even more lizard-like rattiles, which fill niches similar to geckos, iguanas, skinks, chameleons and water monitors. The basal shingles are similar to tortoises as large, armored herbivores while the varat is even more like a komodo dragon than the giant armadile.
  • Even the insects are subject to this trope: a choice few insects were seeded to the planet to act as pollinators and decomposers. As such, they evolve to fill empty niches: spooders are flightless moths that trap their prey in silk like spiders, with some coming to resemble tarantulas and water striders; caterpedes are neotenic caterpillars filling the niche of millipedes and centipedes; parasitic beetles fill the niche of fleas; and the draclets are wasps that have evolved to resemble dragonflies.
  • The small, long tailed furbils have the appearance and niches of small mammals and other rodents like shrews, mice and rats.
  • Subverted with the burrowurms, a group of rattile with long flexible bodies and reduced limbs. They can't develop fully into a legless snake-like animal because they are constrained by several aspects of their mammalian anatomy, like their two lungs and lack of the proper abdominal muscles with some species even being herbivores or insectivores rather than obligate carnivores. Although some do play it a bit straighter by the Temperocene by developing a venom-like secretion on their front claws for defence or hunting.
  • Marine snails have filled many niches of aquatic invertebrates as of the Glaciocene. Small swimming sea slugs called pescopods fill several fish niches, quillnobs are sessile snails resembling barnacles, asterisks are starfish-analogues, and the skwoids are snails that heavily converge on cephalopods save for having stalk eyes and only six arms. Some of the skwoids of the middle Temperocene take on some very unexpected niches. The skwiders are essentially marine spiders who catch food in webs made of mucus, especially the brown reef skwider which hunts larger prey and then cocoons them for later consumption. Meanwhile, some of the freshwater skwoids become similar to small crocodiles, such as the aptly-named, marsh croctopus, as they hunt prey by ambushing them when they come to the water's edge by camouflaging themselves while keeping their eyes above the surface to see them. Then there's the squoads, who have developed into frog-like creatures that move via hopping and catch small invertebrates by flicking out their radula like a tongue, they specifically adapted to fill an amphibian-like niche due to it being previously empty.
  • The lemunkies are an obvious monkey analogue with most of them being similar to more primitive primates like lemurs and tarsiers while the chimpmunks are larger omnivores with more terrestrial lifestyles, reduced tails and flatter faces, making them similar to apes like chimpanzees and gorillas. Some more unusual lemunkies include the midnight howler, in particular, is similar to chimps in its preference for hunting smaller tree dwellers, but unlike chimps is an obligate carnivore, the greater oof, similar to ground sloths and pandas, and the aquatic merangutan, which is basically a primate-analogue version of a manatee.
  • The pterodents, a clade of flying podotheres in the Temperocene, fill the niches of large avians: the silver soarer is similar to a crane, the ratavult is a scavenger like a condor, and the wandergander is a sea-dwelling migrator akin to an albatross. A later species, the glassy brushbeard, is analogous to the flamingo, being a species that feeds from desert brine pools that cause it to accumulate color pigments, albeit red instead of pink.
  • The phorcas are a macropredatory offshoot of the dolphin-like cricetaceans much like killer whales. In the Temperocene, the largest species, the sarchon, develops armor on its face and its teeth become large shearing plates, turning it into a mammalian dunkleosteus.
  • The wingles are flying lizard-like mammals but their size and niches make them more similar to flying insects. Most are somewhat butterfly-like due to their colors and tendency to sometimes drink nectar but others take on different niches. The splitwing bumblezard is a long bodied four-winged hunter of small flying insects similar to dragonflies while the hovering gallibee is a tiny species that can hover in place, feeds solely on nectar and mimics the appearances of stinging insects as a defense mechanism, basically a rodent take on the hoverfly.
  • The searrels are an interesting example. They're a small aquatic mammal that feeds on the vegetation that they climb on but have a particular taste for the plant's seeds, which they gather and store in dens. This means that they fill the niche of a terrestrial rodent but in a marine ecosystem.
  • The treebums of the Temperocene take on several recognizable arboreal niches. The slender noodlenose is similar to new-world monkeys with its more prehensile appendages (with the lemunkies of the eastern hemisphere being more like old-world monkeys) while the black-bellied vertigoth is a slow-moving, upside-down leaf eater like a tree sloth.
  • The different baskervilles are reminiscent of different social canine species. The southern species are analogous to wolves as they are shaggy and muscular pack hunters that live in nuclear families and live in a cold, tundra environment. The northern species are similar to dholes, being sleeker with red coloration, larger social groups and more omnivorous diets due to their warm, lush homes. The northern baskerville's sapient northhound descendants retained their social behavior but physically they're closer to maned wolves, being omnivores with long skinny legs and red fur. The outlander subspecies of southhound is reminsescent of captive wolves as they came about from members of the other southhounds who were forced together and developed an aggressive, dominance based group structure.
  • The ground ratbats of the Temperocene are analogous to galliform birds. Being omnivorous ground dwellers that are poor flyers and only take to the air to escape predators. One species in particular, the splendid aurickle, is similar to chickens as they have larger males with prominent visual displays that fight over harems of females. They also fight using an enlarged outer claw much like the ankle spurs used by roosters.
  • The greater zeebeedee brings to mind the various species of flightless island birds. It's size, stunted wings and brown, shaggy coat is most similar to emus.
  • From the end of the original draft, the saharats are similar to Lystrosaurus, being small burrowers who thrived in an age of global desertification.
• Fearless Fool: The greater zeebeedee has virtually no sense of fear due to the lack of predators on their island homes, especially younger males. This means that they frequently get into violent fights that seriously injure both parties and have no caution when encountering unfamiliar things, regardless of the potential danger.
• Feeling Their Age: Pale-Beard was a skilled hunter but after his remaining children dispersed and his mate died he was unable to properly hunt in his advanced age, forcing him to feed off of bugs and other easy to find food until his son invites him to stay with his pack.
• Festering Fungus: The shroomor is an organism that feeds on rotting carcasses while also breaking them down for the ecosystem and spreads by "spores" produced by ballooning growths that are transported by animals. The twist is that it is actually a type of highly derived transmissible cancer that was born from harmster cells, making it a mammalian fungus. Ironically, this new organism is much more harmless and ecologically beneficial than the animal it spawned from since the harmsters destroyed everything in their path.
• Flower Mouth
  • The lipgrips are a family of predatory rhinocheirid that has enlarged their facial lobes as a way of grabbing onto the necks of prey for a lethal bite. These lobes can open up to expose their mouth, and some species have bright colors and patterns on the inside of these lobes as a means of displaying to rivals and mates without compromising their camouflage.
  • The mandibled tendriltooth is a carnivorous daggoth that has repurposed six of their facial tentacles into lobes similar to the lipgrips, and for the same reason. A major difference however, is that these lobes also have teeth-like spikes lining them for even better damage.
• First Contact Faux Pas: Subverted with the northhounds when the southhound refugees first encounter them. At first, they even doubt their sapience, assuming they are another non-sapient species only mimicking voices (as some rattiles and zingos do) but eventually come to recognize them as fellow beings and accept them, teaching them their language.
• Fluffy the Terrible:
  • Pi-pipipupu, the murderous harmster warlord, and "Berry-Eyes Snow Clump", the deadly, cannibalistic albino Frazetta.
  • The most violent and cruel of the Outlander southhounds and The Starscream to their leader Ashfall is named...Dungstain.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: This one-shot depicts the fearsome Big Bad Ashfall as a newborn pup, being nursed and tended to by his mother.
• Fun with Acronyms: The deadly disease known as Severe Infectious Harmster Transmissible Tumor (SIHTT) and its more virulent strain, Neuro-Ocular Severe Infectious Harmster Transmissible Tumor, or NO-SIHTT.
• Gentle Giant: Downplayed with the sarchon. They are ten-meter-long oceanic apex predators that eat other large carnivores but they typically only hunt every few days and spend the rest of the time just lazily floating at the surface. They also don't harm the Baywulves as they're too small to be seen as prey to the massive predator. In fact, sarchons will sometimes inadvertently protect the Baywulves from smaller phorcas that do hunt them which leads the Baywulves to mythologize them as kings of the ocean.
• Genre Shift: Hamster's Paradise is largely a speculative evolution project, with most entries written in the form of a nature guide. However, it starts veering into Xenofiction Low Fantasy when describing the sapient species. The Harmster saga covers the species from a grand scale, following the progression of tribes and nations, while the entries featuring the calliducyons veer into Xenofiction are more personal, focusing on individuals or the folktales they pass down.
• Giant Flyer: Pterodents, due to their efficient respiratory systems and lightweight structures, are able to grow far larger than ratbats, with the biggest species, the silver soarer, growing as big as a wingspan of five meters while the largest ratbats barley exceed two meters in wingspan.
• Gigantic Adults, Tiny Babies:
  • Rakatusks are the largest land hamsters of the Glaciocene Era, rivalling prehistoric Earth's Paraceratherium at five meters at the shoulder and weighing over 20 tons. However, due to constraints of the mammalian placenta, their young are born proportionately very small, making them vulnerable to predators and making their parents extremely protective.
  • Somewhat inverted with the wingles, who are so small that the females can only carry a single, proportionately massive infant about a quarter of her weight. The pregnancy takes so much out of her that she immediately needs to leave in order to find food once she gives birth and leaves the father as the sole caretaker.
• Glacial Apocalypse: The Therocene is ended by a massive ice age that wipes out about half of all life on the planet and starts the period known as the Glaciocene.
• God Guise: A somewhat unintentional example. The Ripper Sisterhood have come to view the ripperoos as some kind of death god and will try to placate them with sacrifices. Being highly intelligent animals, the ripperoos have noticed that this group will give them free food and have learned not to attack them which only encourages the Sisterhood's belief.
  • Ashfall, the leader of the Outlanders, is half white-eye: a species of elusive, mysterious southhounds that the rest view almost like gods or nature spirits. As such, he gains status and power as a sort of "demi-god": something that The Starscream of the Outlanders, Dungstain, resents him over as an "unworthy" leader.
• Grotesque Cute: The chernadog family shown finishing off the wounded Pi-pipipupu are strangely adorable, with the pups shown play-fighting with her intestines while one of the parents gently licks another pup clean of the blood covering its face.
• Had to Be Sharp:
  • The plants of HP-02017 have to deal with the fact that all the planets' herbivores are rodents whose sharp incisors and constant gnawing would present a challenge for them. Citrus and stone fruit who depend on animals for germination had to develop small hardy seeds in their fruit so that at least some of them would make it through the digestive system intact. The grasses would gain different defensive measures to make themselves harder to eat: weedwood developed woody stems and waxy leaves to make themselves more difficult to chew, bleedweeds developed a foul-tasting blood-like sap to discourage and sicken grazers, and saberleaves evolved serrated edges to slice up the mouths and throats of animals that attempted to eat it.
  • This is the reason why the maniacal ripperoo is both so vicious and so intelligent. They evolved in the Mesoterran Badlands where food is scarce, and competition is high which favored the ripperoos that were more cunning and bloodthirsty, and it doesn't get any better when they spread to more fertile regions due to the already strong predator competition present.
  • The southern Baskerville lives in the harsh Austral Tundra and this has forced it to become tough, adaptable and intelligent, much like the ripperoo that came before it. Unlike the ripperoo however, they also adapted to become more cooperative and altruistic which allows them to both hunt larger prey and anticipate the actions of others.
  • Inverted with the northern Baskerville, whose warm, hospitable homes allow them to be more experimental and social than their southern cousins while being just as intelligent.
• Handy Mouth: The southern Baskerville is highly intelligent but is also a quadruped with no opposable digits so it has to use its mouth the handle what tools it can make or use.
• Hermaphrodite: The various derived aquatic snails are hermaphroditic much like their more basal ancestors, even the more active and complex ones such as the skwoids and the pescopods. In the latter's case, they have developed a retractable barb that they use to try and stab one another in mating battles due to the higher metabolic costs of producing and carrying eggs over sperm. In the case of the squoads, it's stated that it's different depending on species. Some have both sex organs, others start as females and become male if they're more competitive or need to gather toxins, and others start as male and become female if they need to be larger to hold more eggs.
• The Hedge of Thorns: A variant: due to constant pressure from herbivores, one species of grass, the saberleaf, develops sharp blade-like leaves to deter herbivores. In saberleaf savannahs, only animals equipped with tough skins and hard hooves can thrive.
• History Repeats:
  • The boingos where the main grassland herbivores of the Therocene thanks to their highly efficient hopping locomotion but were reduced in the Glaciocene and mostly succeeded by their walking podothere descendants. However, in the Thermocene, one group of podotheres known as the rebounders would redevelop energy efficient hopping and become the most abundant grazer on the prairies of Gestaltia, outcompeting the last of the hopping boingos in the process.
  • The hammoths were the largest land animals of the Glaciocene until being hunted to near-extinction by the harmsters, with the only survivors on North Westerna being no larger than sheep. After the arrival of the pterowrists, some grew larger to better fend them off, prompting some pterowrists to grow larger still, becoming the massive pterowrexes. To cope with their new predators, some hammoths grew to an enormous size comparable to their ancestors, with the maustodons being the third largest land animal of the Middle Temperocene.
  • The seavers were reduced to a single surviving species when the Therocene transitioned to the Glaciocene but said survivor would go on to produce the largest members of their species at the time. When the harmsters wiped out all but the derelict seaver by the Glaciocene's end, they would also diversify afterwards and produce largers animals by the Middle Temperocene, with the polar marked whaleberg being the largest animal to live on the planet thus far.
  • The tundra harmsters would start a war against the rest of their kind for control of the planet in the Glaciocene. During the middle Temperocene, the outlanders under Ashfall would also start a war against the other southhounds for rulership of their lands. Additionally, the bruterider harmsters would use their own less intelligent brute relatives as weapons to overwhelm the other tribes, the firetheives would do the same with the saddled baskervilles as a way of countering the other southhounds greater weapons.
• Hive Caste System: There are multiple species of eusocial insect native to the planet. Most of them are what you'd expect, but there are a few more standout examples.
  • The orange treeroyal is a species of beetle that developed a eusocial lifestyle and what caste they are depends on how much they were fed as larvae with most being small minor workers, larger major workers and soldiers and queens which are born seasonally. They also have male drones that leave their birth colony to join others and mate with their queens but unlike ants and bees, the males don't die after mating and will instead become the queen's personal harem as well as help cool the colony with their wings.
  • The hook-jawed pirant has the standard castes seen on most ant species but they have one unique to themselves with the rafter caste, these ants have hairs on their feet that allow them to propel their colony across the water's surface similar to a water strider.
  • The bombermite is a species of termite that has several different warrior castes as a way of dealing with the armored giraards that feed on their colonies. One called the biter with large pinching mandibles, sprayers that shoot noxious chemicals at their attackers, and the bombers which explode in a show of sticky, toxic secretions.
  • Mermites are a species of shrish that are specialized to live in large forests of coast kudzu and have adapted to live in eusocial colonies of up to a thousand members. The males are most similar to traditional free-swimming shrish as they'll leave their colony of birth to join another. The crawling females, however, will fill different castes depending on their age, younger females are workers who maintain their homes and gather food and most become sterile soldiers when they get older who defend the colony with their large claws, the single queen releases pheromones that keep the other females from reproducing.
  • The social molrocks of the Temperocene have colonies with three distinct castes. The large breeding queens who keeps the other females sterile using hormones. Infertile females who fill the role of workers that dig tunnels, maintain their nests and forage for food, it's possible for a worker female to become a queen either by filling in after she dies or by being separated from her hormonal suppressants. Finally, the males who have larger teeth serve as both soldiers and mates for the queen. In one species however, the red-rust holmstock, both the females and males serve as soldiers since they kidnap the pups of other species to serve as workers, to the point where they aren't capable of feeding themselves without assistance.
• Hunter of Their Own Kind: Several predators specialize on preying on their close relatives:
  • The arctic blubbear is specialized to prey on other species of blubbat as they're the most abundant thing on Glaciocene Peninsulaustra, though they are willing to eat the ratbats and bayvers that occasionally end up on the frozen continent.
  • The phorca, a type of large marine cricetacean, is known to hunt smaller cricetaceans as well.
  • Some carnivorous ratbats prey on other ratbat species not unlike hawks and falcons hunting smaller birds.
  • The hook-jawed pirant is a species of raftant that specializes in hunting raftants alongside other aquatic insects. They even possess adaptations that allow them to better control their movement on the water's surface so they can chase after them.
  • Loupgaroos become predators of other, related species of podotheres.
  • The smooth cannibal is a species of whistlard that is specialized to hunt smaller species of whistlards by imitating their calls.
  • The sarchon is a phorca that eats smaller phorcas and even develops keratin armor on its head to protect against their bites. They are willing to eat things like seavers and whaleruses however and its likely they started killing other phorcas to remove competition for these food sources before discovering the phorcas themselves made a fairly substantial meal.
  • The midnight howler is unique in that its a lemunkie adapted to hunt other lemunkies. It has several distinguishing traits from other lemunkies such as nocturnal vision to attack at night when their prey is more vulnerable and have digitigrade legs to better run them down. They're so successful that they forced South Easaterra's previous lemunkie specialist, the tigerilla, to become more terrestrial due to competition.
  • The tyrant helix is a species of notilus specialized to hunt other notiluses, having a modified radula that allows it to drill into their shells and inject them with paralytic venom and pull it out of their shell. They're also highly cannibalistic and have spikes on the back of their shell specifically to prevent attacks from other helixes.
• Hybrid Power: Zigzagged and ultimately averted with the dreadmaus. This hybrid of the bear-like red broun and arctic tibear is larger and more aggressive than either parent species, enabling it to successfully compete with them, but is infertile. Since the dreadmaus drove out the other two species but cannot reproduce, all three end up going extinct.
  • The Outlanders are a genetic hybrid of the various southhound subspecies, with their leader, Ashfall, being a hybrid of a white-eye (an entirely separate southhound species) and an Outlander. Their skills are also a combination of the other groups, forcing the other tribes to unite when the Outlanders antagonize them all.
• Introduced Species Calamity:
  • When Borealia collided with Nodera, species from both continents crossed the landbridge before a rising mountain range once again isolated Borealia. The most damaging of these crossings was the Borelian saberleaf entering Nodera, its prolific breeding outcompeted native grasses and its sharp edges prevented native herbivores from eating it, leading to multiple Noderan herbivores going extinct or being forced into other areas. However, an inverted case occurred with the ungulope, they were adapted for feeding on saberleaf and their eating of it allowed native grasses and the herbivores that fed on them to recover.
  • It's later revealed that carnohams arriving in Borealia wiped out the native flightless ratbats but after the mountain range separated it again the continent is now the last refuge for the carnohams after they were themselves wiped out everywhere else by the ice age and other predators.
  • Averted when the subcontinents of Fissor, Borealia and Mesoterra connect to the mainland in the mid Glaciocene. Unlike on Earth where creatures from isolated continents like South America were outcompeted by mainland species, the podotheres, rattiles and rhinocheirids are able to thrive on these new lands due to being so different from the mainland animals that they can fit niches that the others haven't exploited.
  • Downplayed and ultimately averted during the Temperocene when Mesoterra merged with Isla Centralis. While some displacement happened such as the extinction of the local walkabies due to thomper feeding habits, they ultimately adapted and partitioned their niches and how coexist as a functional ecosystem with the wingles that were accidentally blown in not disrupting anything due to how different they are from the rest of the wildlife. This is almost completely averted when Peninsulaustra fused with South Easaterra into Austro-Easaterra, the animals of both landmasses mixed surprisingly well due to the natives of the former being highly generalized while the inhabitants of the latter were highly specialized.
• In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves: In the original sketches, all the sapient species that arose either slaughter each other or meet ignoble ends, most notably the mousey micks who end up destroying not only their civilization but the very habitability of the planet itself. Tribbetherium has expressed regret for such a pessimistic Central Theme and stated intention to rework it.
• Irony:
  • On Earth, the dominant grassland herbivores are ungulates, while kangaroos are relegated to the isolated southeastern continent of Australia. On HP-02017 during the Therocene, the hopping kangaroo-like boingos are the dominant grassland herbivore on most of the planet except for Borealia, an isolated continent in the northwestern hemisphere where the deer-like ungulopes are the dominant herbivores.
  • In the original sketches, there is a time period called the Mousozoic Era where dinosaur-like hamsters rule as the dominant species—yet it is started, as opposed to ended, by an asteroid impact that only the reptile-like clade and theropod-like clade survive. The animals that preceded them also resembled modern Earth animals but came before them rather than after.
  • The hermit slugs are marine snails that evolved to lose their shells, only to go back to shell-living by borrowing discarded shells like hermit crabs do. One species, the homewrecker, actually eats other shelled snails and then steals their shell afterwards.
  • In the original sketches the second sapient species to arrive was the baywulf, an intelligent canine-like species that would domesticate a species of primate-like animal. Effectively the reverse of humans taming wolves.
  • The pterodents are more bird-like in their anatomy compared to the more pterosaur-like ratbats but avoid competition with them by taking advantage of their biology to grow larger and fill niches the smaller ratbats can't reach. Effectively the opposite of how some paleontologists believed pterosaurs avoided competition with birds during the Cretaceous.
  • The big oof is stated in its intro to be a borderline evolutionary "failure" that basically doomed itself to Crippling Overspecialization. Yet many millennia later, in the Middle Temperocene, the big oof is still alive and well despite new species arriving to its island and has even produced new descendants like the bipedal greater oof.
  • On Earth, the desert locust is regarded as a plague thanks to its ability to decimate crops and are typically associated with famine. However, on HP-02017, the drysanders regard swarms of sand cricklings (beetle analogues to the desert locust) as a blessing and associate them with abundance as they feed on the cricklings themselves and even have a story about a swarm insuring their survival in a time of hardship.
• It Can Think:
  • The maniacal ripperoos may be bloodthirsty monsters, but they are also highly intelligent. They can temporarily put aside their differences when hunting, know they can use large animals as living larders for future consumption, and will chase prey into traps or even make their own. It's stated that they are adapting to become even more intelligent due to competition with other predators and one population of them ends up evolving into the fully sapient Harmsters.
  • The fisshors are a group of rhinocheirid that have adapted to use sticks and even bait as a way of catching shrish and freshwater skwoids, at first they just used them as clubs to stun them but some individuals figured out they could sharpen them into spears and this skill would be passed to their children. Their more terrestrial relatives are just as innovative, the ornate probesnout using rocks to break open insect hives and sticks to gather them and the branchstaffer which use tree branches as weapons to fight off predators or settle disputes between rivals. It's stated that they have reached a level of sapience comparable to chimps and elephants. Unfortunately, they started reaching this point at the same time as the even more intelligent and highly aggressive Harmsters. One species of rhinocheirid eventually does become sapient, the splintsters, and manage to reach a sophistication comparable to the Neanderthals, but sadly are invaded by the Pyromaniacs, a group of harmsters that immigrated to Gestaltia, and are quickly wiped out.
  • The greater baskerville is a large zingo that has intelligence comparable to the ripperoo with problem-solving capability, advanced coordination and the knowledge to use traps to catch prey. However, they lack the ripperoo's sadism and are deeply empathetic with each other, it's mentioned that part of the reason that they'll still care for the elder members of their packs who can't hunt anymore is because they can still impart their knowledge onto the younger members, the other reason is their emotional connection. Their descendants, the southern and northern baskervilles, take it even further with simple cultures unique to different packs and even tool use, albeit theirs is somewhat hampered by their quadrupedal anatomy which forces them to use their mouths.
• Jack of All Trades: The triathler ratbats respond to the increasingly crowded Temperocene biosphere by adapting to feed on and navigate the beaches, skies and oceans. They're outperformed by animals that are more specialized for each individual terrain but the triathlers are still competent in running, swimming and flying which allows them to remain quite successful despite this. This also makes them quite intelligent as they're adapted to feed from many different food sources and inhabit many different environments.
• Joke of the Butt: The rumphumps have large, brightly colored posteriors inspired by those of fat-tailed sheep and have names like scarlet caboose, twotone tush and black booty.
• "Just So" Story: A frequent theme among the calliducyons.
  • Many instances and one-shots focus on both natural phenomena that occur in their world, and how calliducyon culture interprets it, such as a claw-shaped fruit being told in their folklore as being the claws of a monster that descended from the sun and was slain by the spirits of nature, or animals born with the malformation of cyclopia due to teratogenic plants being failed incarnations of a one-eyed demon imprisoned in the plant itself.
  • The plainmanes revere lightning as a sacred force, as it causes brushfires that provide them with the fire that keeps them warm and protects them. As such, fulgurites (rock formations that are in essence solidified paths of lightning) are considered holy and sacred items to them.
  • In a loose example of Dramatic Irony, a folktale states the origin of shroomors as having once been an evil beast that was "stripped of its soul" and reduced to shapeless living flesh that still hungers in its current state. While entirely coincidental, this heavily echoes the shroomor's true origins, as a free-living tumor derived from, and responsible for, the extinction of the Harmsters 40 million years prior in the Glaciocene.
• Kangaroos Represent Australia: Inverted: the kangaroo-like boingos are found everywhere during the Therocene except the Australia-analogue continent, Borealia.
• Killer Gorilla: The tigerilla is a predatory treeger that has evolved to hunt on both land and the ground and has developed a gorilla-like body as a result since they walk on their knuckles to avoid dulling their claws. Their descendant, the ruffed rath, is even more gorilla-like in bodyshape. The tigerillas of the Mid-Temperocene have gained a reputation as hateful demons in the cultures of the calliducyons due to their tendency to kill them and leave their bodies uneaten.
• Klingon Promotion: Hamazon alpha females are succeeded only when another female in the tribe kills them, usually when they're sick or injured.
• Kraken and Leviathan: The giant skwoid, a species of squid-like snail, and its primary predator, the plurodon, largest of a family of pliosaur-like predators called leviahams.
• Land Down Under: Inverted with Borealia, even referred to in text as the "Land Up Over".
• Last of Their Kind:
  • When the Glaciocene begins, it whittled many families down to a single surviving species such as the mison, seavers, leviahams, girats and boingos. However, these species end up becoming the first of entirely new familes.
  • The derelict seaver, as the name suggests, is the only species of seaver to survive the reign of the Harmsters. It was able to survive by virtue of being both small and by inhabiting remote arctic waters that the Harmsters had difficulty reaching. It still remained small even after the Harmsters died out due to the warmer climate of the Temperocene being less conducive for plankton growth and competition with hamatees. Although that has changed by the Mid-Temperocene as the hamatees which entirely to grazing which increased global plankton growth and they develop into multiple different species, with the arctic marked whaleberg reaching colossal sizes.
  • In the original sketches, the very last species on the planet long after all other life has perished are the omegahams, small rodents closely resembling the original founding hamsters.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: The small mouse-like furbils are able to shed their tails if grabbed, though this is a tactic that can only be used once in the animal's life. One species, the fuse-tailed dynamouse (amusingly given the scientific name Fragmacaudamys cabuum), is able to break off its tail in segments, resembling a dynamite fuse gradually burning away.
• Long Neck: Like all mammals, most of the species of hamster have only seven cervical vertebrae. The girats have enlarged their vertebrae much like giraffes but the drundles have elongated their necks by moving their ribs back and repurposing three of their thoracic vertebrae at the cost of a shorter, more rigid spine. Their descendants, the podotheres, have gone even further than that by developing two more and ending up with a total of twelve neck vertebrae.
• Loophole Abuse: Most active mammals can't develop more than seven cervical vertebrae without developing severe cancer but the podotheres got around this by repurposing five of their thoracic vertebrae.
• Low-Tech Spears: This is Zigzagged in how it is used. Spears as a whole are actually used as an indicator of intelligence and advancement as any animal that uses them is noted to be exceptionally cunning, but amongst the sapient species, how the spears are crafted are used to show how advanced they are. With the first sophont species, the harmsters, the savannah and mountain harmsters use simple spears made by chewing a point into a piece of wood or animal bone, whereas the tundra harmsters are able to craft much more complex weaponry, including more advanced spears made with flint or ivory. This greater level of advancement allows the tundra harmsters to conquer and destroy their relatives.
• Luring in Prey: The smooth cannibal is a species of the highly vocal lizard-like whistlards that mimics the calls of female whistlards of smaller species in order to draw males into striking range.
• Malicious Monitor Lizard: The giant armadile is basically a Komodo Dragon crossed with a naked mole rat and is the top predator of the isolated continent of Fissor in the late Therocene.
• Mammoths Mean Ice Age: The mammoth-like hammoths are the dominant megafaunal herbivores of the Glaciocene period.
• Meat Moss: Shroomors are fungus-like decomposers descended from the transmissible cancer that ended the Harmsters that grow on animal carcasses and are spread by scavengers. Later on, they manage to find their way into Sub-Arcuterran Cavern System where they form a symbiotic relationship with the native chemosynthetic bacteria that allows them to completely separate themselves from animal carcasses and grow on the cave walls and ceilings like actual moss. The literal name for this organism even is meatmoss.
• Meaningful Name: The hammibals are basal Rodentocene hamsters that prey on other hamsters.
  • The asterisks are a clade of snails that mimic six-armed starfish.
  • Two of the Therocene Era continents are known as Fissor and Lacero, Latin for "broken away" and "divided".
  • The sarchon, a Dunkleosteus-like predatory cricetacean, gets its name from "sarco", or flesh, and "archon", meaning lord, overall meaning "lord flesh-eater", a fitting title for the Temperocene's top apex marine predator.
  • The big oof is a giant lemunky that, similar to koalas and pandas, has evolved Crippling Overspecialization and a complete lack of intelligence. The term "big oof" means a regrettable mistake or a bad decision, which in a superficial, evolutionary perspective is what it seems to have done.
  • Many of the calliducyons' individual names have descriptive traits. Strange-Eyes the baywulf has heterochromia, with one blue eye and one brown eye, his eldest son Switch-Eyes has the same but with the eye colors reversed. Ashfall, the leader of the Outlanders, has an ash-white marking on his face and also wields fire stolen from the Plainmanes, while his defiant underling Dungstain has a brownish coat color and also has a vile and unpleasant personality. The plainmanes are an exception to this, as Narooo-a explains, their names have no meaning beyond a name.
• Meek Mesozoic Mammal: While all the vertebrates are mammals, the original draft features an era called the Mouseozoic that resembles the Mesozoic. The largest animals at the time resemble dinosaurs, but there's a group of small hamster-descendants that have changed little from their ancestors called neomice, that were mostly noctural and low on the food chain. They're among the few lineages to survive the ice age that ends the Mouseozoic.
• Mimic Species: The mimicking falsehound is a species of the canine-like lycanines that mimic the appearance of their distant, sapient relative, the northhound, as a way of deterring predators like the tigerilla or other lycanine species. They do this because many of these predators will avoid the northhound due to the latter's capacity for weapon use and planned retaliation, the falsehound will even mimic those behaviors by carrying sticks in their mouth even if they can't use them as a weapon like the northhounds can. Some individuals will even use their appearance to steal from the northhounds' food caches by gaining their scent from their latrines and passively imitating their behavior to sneak past. They're usually foiled when the packs start using a password system, which the non-sapient falsehound isn't capable of understanding, and are chased off. Most northhounds only see them as a nuisance and are content to simply drive them away, but the more xenophobic drysanders see them as trickster demons and attempt to kill any that try to sneak in, a practice that sometimes gets foreign northhounds lynched when they don't understand the drysander's dialect.
• Mix-and-Match Critter: Quite a few, justified by convergent evolution.
  • The bumbaas resemble a cross between a capybara and a wild pig. Their carnivorous descendants the beelzeboars take on features of babirusas and entelodonts.
  • The hamtelopes, with some early primitive forms resembling Patagonian maras or Hyracotherium and later forms converging on giraffes. One giraffe-analogue, the giraard, becomes an insectivorous aardvark-analogue.
  • The leviahams resemble mosasaurs crossed with sperm whales and orcas. Later on, they grow to resemble mammalian pliosaurs.
  • The rhinocheirids descended from kangaroo-analogues that evolved theropod-like walking as a side effect of their browsing diet, that evolved prehensile trunks to grasp branches. Most unusual of these is the greater snoa, a creature that is best described as a combination of kangaroo, elephant, mallard duck and therizinosaur.
  • The bayvers resemble earth pinnipeds and one branch evolves into the cricetaceans, which are similar in appearance and niche to whales and dolphins, but their lack of a tail means that they use their rear flippers as a fluke.
  • The drundles have a body shape similar to theropod dinosaurs but fill a niche more like that of a camel. The forest dwelling species fill a browsing niche similar to a ground sloth.
  • The ungulopes resemble deer and antelope but have singular hooves like a horse and flexible, bending spines like a rabbit.
  • Blubbats resemble a cross of bats, penguins and rabbits.
  • Molrocks are reminsescent of naked mole rats and lizards, while their descendants the rattiles are more explicitly reptile-like along with some pangolin- and shrew-like features.
  • The whistlards are lizard-like rattiles, but they repurposed their check pouches into inflatable resonating chambers in order to make loud calls for the purposes of attracting mates and scaring off rivals and predators, much like frogs. During the Temperocene, one species evolves to hunt other whistlards by mimicking the calls of a receptive female, similar to the hunting strategies used by some species of firefly.
  • The plurodon is a pliosaur-like leviaham that has jagged filtering teeth like a crabeater seal, dives to great depths to hunt squid-analogues like a sperm whale and has a coloration and face shape somewhat resembling a beluga.
  • Marewolves, as their name would imply, are a group of large zingos that resemble canines with equine heads and manes.
  • The periodic glowing herald is similar to fireflies, as they are flying beetles with bioluminescent abdomens, but with lifecycles more similar to cicadas. They stay in their larval stage for years at a time and metamorphose into adults when conditions are right.
  • The thorhorns are a species of the deer-like ungulope that have evolved into a large ox-like animals but are described as living in matriarchical herds and are intelligent and empathic enough to mourn their dead, making them behaviorally similar to elephants.
  • Severe Infectious Harmster Transmissible Tumor (SIHTT) is a Mix and Match Disease, being a contagious cancer akin to the Devil Facial Tumor Disease affecting Tasmanian Devils, but also having the neurological symptoms of toxoplasmosis as well as rabies.
  • The beachpeach is a plant variant. They are a type of coastal stonefruit that is salt tolerant and has elevated roots like a mangrove and germinate using large, buoyant fruits that are carried by oceans currents to new beaches and islands like coconuts.
  • The large browsing descendants of the grimhog podothere has the same theropod bodyshape but also fills a giraffe-like niche and some species have branching horns that are regularly shed and replaced like a deer's antlers.
  • The thompers are descended from the large rabbit-like bungus and now resemble a three-way hybrid between a giant rabbit, gorilla and ground sloth. It also shares traits with chalicotheres in that as its also a relative of the ungulate-like hamtelopes.
  • The daggoth resembles a naked mole rat but has facial tentacles like a star-nosed mole and is blind and albino like a cave salamander.
  • The greater baskerville has the colors and intelligence of a spotted hyena but have empathy and social dynamics closers to wolves with their vocalizations and jungle dwelling habits being similar to dholes.
  • The pterodents are long-necked bipeds with grasping feet and hollow feather-like fur similar to birds but have wings consisting of a membrane supported by an elongated digit like a pterosaur.
  • The wooly marmoth is a small, burrowing mammal that resembles an earth marmot in look and niche but it is actually a descendant of the dwarf hammoth and still had its tusks which it uses for digging. It also has some similarities with the Diictodon.
  • The treegers are cat-like arboreal predators that have developed primate characteristics like opposable thumbs and more flexible joints. The tigerillas are a larger, more terrestrial offshoot that has a bodyshape similar to great apes, one species in particular, the ruffed rath, looks just like a gorilla with the claws, digitigrade legs, colors and head of a tiger.
  • Wingles are rattiles that mostly resemble gliding lizards, but have long feathery scales like a Longisquama, are true powered flyers akin to hummingbirds and have colors resembling those of butterflies.
  • The pterowrist is a sexually-dimorphic pterodent where males are flying scavengers similar to condors, while females are large flightless land predators similar to terror birds.
  • The rumphumps have brightly colored faces and hindquarters like mandrills but are long-necked desert dwellers with large fat stores (the aforementioned butt cheeks) similar to camels or fat-tailed sheep, albeit much smaller.
  • The big oof combines features of ground sloths, gorillas, geladas, pandas and most notably koalas. Its bipedal descendant the greater oof echoes early hominids, but minus the intelligence.
  • The merangutan, an aquatic lemunky, resembles a cross between an orangutan and a manatee, with webbed back feet and a paddle tail similar to a beaver.
  • The squoads resemble octopi crossed with frogs. They are, however, actually snails.
  • The porcuswine is a genus of of the pig-like bumbaas that is protected by quills like a porcupine. Their relatives, the boarochs, also have quills but are similar in size and niche to bovids, with their tusks even resembling the horns of various cattle.
  • The red spig is a species of mostly ground dwelling ratbat that have a flattened snout and rooting behavior similar to pigs.
  • Certain species of whistlards are able to mimic voices and copy the words of the sapient calliducyons, making them akin to parrots. The calliducyons even start keeping them as pets.
  • The aptly-named narwalrus looks like a walrus with a narwhal tooth.
  • The greater zeebeedee is similar in niche and appearance to flightless island-dwelling birds such as the dodo but have a head similar to equines and somewhat zebra-like stripes.
  • The herald beetles are bioluminescent like fireflies, but spend years as underground larvae like cicadas.
• Monstrous Cannibalism: Female midnight howlers are social but they shun the males of their species (especially during birthing season) due to the their cannibalistic tendencies.
• Mook Horror Show: The firetheives' second attack against the other southhound is shown from their perspective in contrast to their first attack which was from that of Strange-Eyes' pack. It goes into the fear they feel when they see that their enemies have united against them and have crafted weapons that exceed anything they have and how they are unable to even harm them. The image accompanying this description shows several terrified outlanders looking at Strange-Eyes, Star-Watcher, and Narooo-a snarling at them while brandishing weapons and their pack members behind them being depicted as Sinister Silhouettes with only their glowing eyes and weapons visible. It also shows the aftermath and the firetheives own fearsome leader Ashfall feeling genuine fear upon learning what happened.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Averted. None of the animals on the planet have more than 16 teeth (consisting of 4 incisors and 12 molars) because that was the number the original founding hamsters had. However, the leviahams and rattiles simulate this by having multiple sharp points on their molar caps and the rattiles will even regularly shed their caps to grow new ones.
• Multicultural Alien Planet:
  • The first sapient species, the harmsters, come in four distinct species (there used to be more but most were killed off fighting each other) with their own differing customs, it's also mentioned that each species have different ethnicities with branching cultures.
    • The savannah harmsters are the most widespread of the four species due to their nomadic lifestyle and have four distinct cultures. The largest of these are the Arcuterran Nomads, who use trophy hunting as a way of gaining status. The Pyromaniacs use large grassfires for hunting but also like to burn things out of sadism. The Blood-Sun Zealots are an offshoot of the Pyromaniacs who worship the red Beta sun as a deity and burn other harmsters alive as sacrifices to it. Finally, there are the Raft-Raiders, a seafaring people who subsist on either hunting sea life or by raiding others of their kind.
    • The matriarch harmsters live in on the subcontinent of Mesoterra and are the most barbaric of the four as well as the most physically distinctive, with larger and more aggressive females controlling smaller and more numerous males. One group of these are the Hamazons, who live in the jungles of the landmass and view the ripperoos as vermin in need of extermination. By contrast, the Ripper Sisterhood view the ripperoos as death gods and placate them with sacrifices. Then there are the Badland Bandits who live in the barren Mesoterran badlands, giving them an extremely pragmatic worldview with little room for spirituality.
    • The mountain harmsters are the smallest and most primitive species but also lack the sadism and bloodlust of their peers, they are divided into two cultures. The Mountain Cavehams mostly lives a hunter-gather lifestyle in the mountain ranges and the Pastoral Herdsters who live in grasslands and farm bumbaas for meat.
    • Finally, there are the tundra harmsters who are the most technologically advanced species that live in large clan societies that have all been united through conquest. Later on after the tundra harmsters annihilate the other harmsters species, they themselves split into multiple different cultures.
  • The splintsters are a peaceful, vaguely elephantine species with strong empathy for one another and long memories. Unfortunately, they develop sapience around the same time the harmsters entered Gestaltia and they are hunted to extinction by the Pyromaniacs.
  • The Middle Temperocene sees the rise of multiple sapient canine-like calliducyons fron two separate genera: the wolf-like southhounds and the fox-like northhounds.
    • The northhounds are a more sociable and varied omnivorous species, with eight subspecies arranged in three species.
    • The southhounds are a more nuclear-family oriented carnivorous species, with five subspecies and a sixth, the white-eyes, being a separate subspecies.
• Names To Run Away From Very Fast: Many predators: beelzeboars, neinschwein, dreadmaus, ripperoos...
  • The dark mauler.
  • The harmsters. Also doubles as Punny Name.
  • The sarchon, or "lord flesh-eater".
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: The giant pliosaur-like leviahams mostly die out by the end of the Glaciocene, but a few small freshwater species survive, where they fill the role of crocodile-like ambush predator that hunts the migrating herds of wildebeest-like skullions.
• Nested Mouths: The trap-jawed grabora is a variant: it forms a set of jaws from keratinized extensions of its lower jaw and its ears, forming three clamping pincers that it uses to seize its prey.
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: A variation. The art one-shot depicting the golden dune stellasnoot points out that its hairless skin, fleshy lobed snout, and enlarged and highly mobile digits make it a very bizarre animal by the standards of the surface fauna. However, it also states that its downright tame when compared to its far more derived, cave-dwelling molrock relatives, who don't even look like earthly animals anymore.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Strange-Eyes gives one to his mate Sharpstripe after she continues to so unwarranted hostility towards the peaceful plainmaine pack. After she says that their pack can't trust "them", Strange-Eyes says that this kind of "us vs. them" talk makes her sound just like the outlanders who attacked them. This horrifies her enough to stop antagonizing them but she still kept her distance for a while.
• Not So Similar: The greater baskerville has some similarities to the maniacal ripperoo. Both are highly intelligent predators that use traps and complex tactics to catch prey but that is where the likeness ends as while the ripperoo is a sadistic beast that only works in groups as a way to benefit itself and will gladly kill members of its own kind, the baskerville is a highly empathetic animal with strong social bonds and only hunts for survival. There are also the physical differences, the ripperoo is a biped that looks like a mammalian theropod while the baskerville is a quadruped that resembles a mix between a wolf and a hyena.
• Odd Name Out: Most of the eras in the project follow a naming convention featuring a suffix that ends in -cene and generally sound scientific (even the comically named Rodentocene). Then in the original sketches, there's the Mousozoic era, which is simply a pun on "Mesozoic" and an English word.
• Older Than They Look: The calfmimes are a species of small tetracorn that has evolved to resemble to calves of larger tetracorns even as adults as a form of protection from predators by hiding out in their herds.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Wingles are a type of shingles (pangolin-like ratiles) that became true powered flyers, losing their armor aside from two sets of modified scales. In essence, they're fairy dragon hamsters.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: The midnight howler is modeled after werewolf lore and pop-culture. A member of the primate-like lemunkies that has evolved to become a nocturnal predator of other lemunkies, much like stories of werewolves hunting humans. Its physical appearance also takes after common werewolf archetypes, still having a more monkey-like face and body but with dark fur, sharp claws, digitigrade legs, a short bushy tail and Hellish Pupils.
• Piranha Problem: Averted. The shrompers are a freshwater group of shrarks that have evolved into a piranha-like species that can skeletonize large carcasses when swarming, but much like real piranhas, they are fairly timid creatures that flee in the presence of larger animals and typically feed on small animals and opportunistically scavenge.
• Polar Bears and Penguins: The icy continent of Peninsulaustra is home to both the penguin-like blubbats and the polar bear-like arctic blubbear. Justified that the blubbear itself is a species of blubbat that evolved to prey on its distant relatives which may also make it a leopard seal analogue in a way.
• Predators Are Mean:
  • Played completely straight with the maniacal ripperoo. Not only is it designed to rip its prey apart and start eating without killing it first, it also likes to sadistically play with its prey and becomes more excited when it hears the pained cries of injured animals; they enjoy the act of killing rather than merely doing so for survival. There's also the fact they have no loyalty or empathy for one another with males and females alike killing any potential competitors and the pups eating their own siblings isn't uncommon, which their mothers actively encourage.
  • Averted with the pliosaur-like plurodons - despite being the largest apex predators of the sea, they are portrayed as having a gentler side, mating for life as bonded pairs and cooperating to care for their young for several years until they become independent.
  • Averted too with most other predators, which are of course simply animals doing what they do to survive. The ripperoos are an exception as they are highly intelligent and thus are capable of true malice, as are their descendants the harmsters.
  • The sarchon is a marine apex predator in the Temperocene that resembles a mammalian Dunkleosteus, that preys on other top predators and other giant megafauna as well. However, the text notes that it is, surprisingly, usually a very placid creature: as its diet is very nutritious, it only needs to hunt once every few days and spends most of its time resting, placidly lounging at the surface, or allowing its body to be groomed by parasite-eating sea ratbats.
  • Averted with most of the calliducyons: they are carnivorous, but, being sapient creatures capable of morality, refrain from unnecessary killing and simply hunt for survival. The exception are the Outlanders, a group of the southhounds, who are violent and xenophobic and aggressively expand into other tribes' territories.
• Pregnant Reptile: The rattiles are scaly cold-blooded lizard analogues but they still give birth to live young due to their mammalian heritage. However, they have lost their mammary glands and give birth to highly precocial young because the mothers either won't care for their offspring at all or will only put in a token effort to feed and protect them before leaving so she doesn't eat them when her maternal hormones run out.
• Prehistoric Animal Analogue: One branch of of the kangaroo-like boingos develops into a lineage of walking animals called podotheres which resemble mammalian ornithomimid dinosaurs. One group goes on to become raptor-like predators while some even evolve into bird-like flyers. It goes even further in the original draft, when after a mass extinction they become even more like dinosaurs with some becoming similar to sauropods, tyrannosaurs and hadrosaurs. At the same time some members of a clade of scaly lizard-like hamsters grow larger and evolve to resemble armored dinosaurs like ceratopsids, stegosaurs and ankylosaurs.
• Punny Name: Lots, such as hamtelopes, hammoths, leviahams, hamatees and hamadillos.
• Portmanteau: Many of the names are a combination of a rodent name and the animal niche it occupies, such as the mison (mice + bison), girat (giraffe + rat) and the panthster (panther + hamster). The shrish are similarly named, such as the shrardines (shrimp + sardines) and the shrarks (shrimp + sharks). The carnivorous podothere called the loupgaroo, a play on "loup-garou" (French for werewolf) and "kangaroo".
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: To further up their depravity to Moral Event Horizon levels, the tundra harmsters were described as having done "breeding experiments" with drugged, lobotomized, and abused prisoners of war, which only gets worse as they're bred into non-sapient Brutes, that some factions such as the early Frazettas still can and did mate with.
• Raptor Attack: The carnivorous loupgaroos are compared to mammalian dromeosaurs and the maniacal ripperoo are similar to many pop culture depictions of raptors by being sadistic and highly intelligent predators with hooked claws and kill for pleasure.
• Reality Is Unrealistic:
  • The bipedal trunked walkabies may look silly, but they are quite similar to the Paleogene mammal Leptictidium.
  • Large marine arthropods several meters in size may seem like something that violates what we know of animal biology but before fish became the ocean's dominant lifeforms large arthropods known as eurypterids swam the seas, with the largest being the Jaekelopterus which reached 2.5 meters in length.
• Reference Overdosed: At least one creature per page, and frequently the page itself, is named some sort of pop-culture or meme reference. However, they are not treated as joke entries or given contrived behaviors to stretch the reference further (as Spec World could be guilty of) but described as realistically as any other animal in the project.
• Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: The two moons of HP-02017 are called Pyramus and Thisbe.
• Red Sky, Take Warning: Subverted: there indeed is a bright red sky when the planet's secondary sun Beta is alone in the sky during Beta-twilight, but it's no more dangerous than day or night and many crepuscular creatures even exploit the relative safety of this time period. Played straight when the Blood-Sun Zealots are involved, as they are murderous cultist fanatic harmsters that worship the red sun Beta and even offer harmster sacrifices to it.
• Rodents of Unusual Size: All the megafauna on the planet certainly qualifies, with the largest being the aptly named herbivorous hammoths.
• Sapient Cetaceans: One of the sapient species in the original sketches. The roddolphs, dolphin-like hamsters, develop a crude civilization but are unable to progress further due to their aquatic environment and their lack of prehensile appendages.
• Sensory Tentacles: The daggoths possess seven of them on their faces, in an exaggeration to the nasal tendrils of the real-life star-nosed mole.
• Serial Escalation: The saga begins mundanely enough in the Rodentocene, with species mostly recognizable and reminiscent of typical rodents, but as it progresses to the Therocene some begin taking megafaunal forms resembling wolves and ungulates and bats and bison. As the timeline progresses to the Glaciocene, even stranger species emerge like trunked bipeds and reptile-like species, eventually reaching a point where a dromaeosaur-like predator gives rise to hamster Nazi-analogues with War Elephants that bring about a full-scale Zombie Apocalypse. And the Temperocene only promises to be even weirder.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism:
  • The original sketches, in comparison to Serina, lean more on the cynical side. Serina depicts its sapients as capable of cooperation and reflection and able to do great things despite their looming extinction. The original sketches of Hamster's Paradise, on the other hand, have a more dismal outlook on its sapient races, who meet inglorious ends or bring about their own destruction. The original harmsters destroy themselves with weapons of mass destruction shortly after achieving industrialization; the original baywulves are outcompeted by other predators when their toolmaking chimpmunks die out; the roddolphs have no means to advance society and get wiped out by an asteroid; the sapient rattiles and ratbirds wage war on each other without peace being seen as an option, with an ice age happening short afterwards that is far too severe for either species to survive; and finally the apelike mousey micks destroy not only themselves but also the very planet itself. It is worth noting that the author has since regretted the cynical take and said the current iteration would be "optimistic".
  • The current project's Harmster saga is also mostly cynical. The harmsters prove incapable of coexisting with each other and the world around them. Instead they exploit the environment past the point it can sustain them and unceremoniously eradicate the peaceful splintsters without even considering they might also be sapient. The mountain harmsters, the one species that aren't inherently violent, are also wiped out completely by the tundra harmsters, and yet this is merciful in comparison to the twisted experiments and descent into nonsapience the tundra harmsters subject the savannah and matriarch harmsters to. Eventually, the entire species goes extinct after a world war fought for bloodshed and glory, as a result of a transmissible cancer exploiting their lack of medical care and cannibalistic tendencies. That being said, the tundra harmsters' ability to cooperate is what leads them to be the most successful of the four species, and the transmissible cancer, itself technically the harmsters' descendant, does manage to find a sustainable place in the ecosystem as a fungus-like decomposer and as a producer for a cave ecosystem.
• Shout-Out: Tribbetherium is very fond of these.
• Shown Their Work: In an art one-shot depicting the stillbirth of a horn-herder calf with cyclopia, the dead calf is shown to have foal slippers, a type of rubbery tissue present on the feet of newborn ungulates that prevent them from injuring their mothers' uterus with their sharp hooves.
• Skull for a Head: Invoked by the male skullions, wildebeest-like ungulopes where the males sport bony helmets that resemble a skull worn atop their head.
  • Also invoked by the white-eyes, a species of southhound with a pale facial marking. Other southhounds know them as "skull-faces", and a half white-eye Outlander named Ashfall is referred to as having a "face like a symbol of death".
• Snowy Sabertooths: The daggarats are predators that have an enlarged fang-like upper incisor that they use to pierce through the thick hide of their prey. The largest species, the slayber, inhabits tundras and taigas during the Glaciocene and prey on the mammoth-like hammoths.
• Spared by the Adaptation: In the original sketches, the ratbats go extinct once they were outcompeted by pterodents. In the current project, the ratbats continue to thrive after the evolution of the pterodents due to the latter initially growing larger in the process of niche partitioning. However, it's repeatedly noted that the pterodents are increasingly pressuring the ratbats for niches as they continue to diversify.
• Starfish Aliens: Well, aliens in the sense that they're hamsters brought to another planet, but the subterranean descendent of the daggoth now truly resemble eldritch horrors barely recognizable as rodents, their fingers becoming multiple limbs and their faces full of tentacles. Some even look like actual starfish.
• Starfish Language:
  • It's been stated that the Harmster languages consist of shrieks and rodent chirping. It also mentioned that the Splinster language sounded like trumpeting.
  • The greater baskerville resembles an earth canine but it communicates using a complex series of chirping, whistling, squeals and purring. About the closest sound to an earth canine is a call they make to show territorial boundaries and affirm family bonds, making analogous to a wolf's howl. However, it is described as more like a deeper, louder version of a guinea pig whistle.
• Stealth Pun:
  • One colorful pheasant-like walkaby is known as the phlebian.^note  A pun on "peasant" and "pheasant", and "plebeian".
  • The continent of Mesoterra is where a battle very similar to the Battle of Pelennor Fields takes place during the Second Great Harmster World War. Mesoterra literally translates to "middle earth".
• The Symbiote
  • The meat moss came about thanks to shroomors forming a mutualistic relationship with chemosynthetic bacteria in the Sub-Arcuterran caverns. The shroomors get a source of nutrients that allows them to live independently of carrion while the bacteria gets an anchored place to live.
  • The redclaw tree shrab has a mutually beneficial relationship with a type of tree-growing grass called the plumepool. The shrab uses the water holding center of the plant as a safe place to raise its aquatic larvae while the grass gets a protector in the mother shrab who prevents herbivores from eating its seeds and flowers.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: The grasses and grazers of the Therocene savannahs have this kind of dynamic. Mison are able to eat the hardy weedwood due to their powerful jaws and grinding molars, the boingos can eat the toxic bleedweeds thanks to their reduced ability to taste bitterness and ability to excrete the poisons out through their urine and the ungulopes can feed on the sharp saberleaf because of their thick saliva and rubbery tissue lining their throat and stomach. When the herbivores in a given area deplete their grass of choice they move on to a new area and a different grass grows in to replace it, which in turn, draws in the grazer adapted to feed on it and the cycle starts anew.
• Take That!: In the original sketches, the mousey micks taking industrialism to the point of destroying the planet may be a Take That towards the increasingly notorious Disney company caring only about profit above all else.
• Taking You with Me: In the original sketches the planet’s final sapient species, the mousey micks, do this with all life on the planet. The mousey micks eventually destroy themselves with climate change, nuclear war, and overpopulation. But, tragically, no other species would ever take over, as in the process of causing their own extinction, the mousey micks caused irreversible damage to the planet’s habitability, causing unstoppable global warming that eventually becomes far too severe for even the toughest microbes to survive, causing the final extinction of all life on the planet, leaving it a dead rock.
• Theme Naming: The unicone species we're shown are called the chewnicorn, dunicorn, moonicorn, and punicorn.
• Token Aquatic Race: In the original draft of the story, the third sapient species to evolve on the planet was a marine dolphin-like creature known as the roddolphs that developed intelligence thanks to their sophisticated language skills and ability to teach information like seasonal change over the generations. However, they were limited by their anatomy, which lacked grasping appendages, and their aquatic home which prevented the use of fire. They spent about two million years as nomadic hunter-gatherers before going extinct in an asteroid strike.
• Toothy Bird: Invoked by the albatross-like wandergander. It has an elongated hairless snout that resembles a bird's beak but it catches aquatic prey using sharp multi-cusped teeth.
• Transplanted Aliens: The premise is that human colonists terraformed a lifeless planet by introducing enough organisms to form a stable ecosystem, and then some Chinese dwarf hamsters as test subjects. For reasons unknown, humans didn't end up living on this planet, so life was left to evolve on its own.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Ashfall, the Big Bad of the Calliducyon saga, was once but a small, frail and innocent pup, but, implied to be through his mother's fanatic guidance, grew into the fearsome warlord that led the Outlanders into battle.
• Vegetarian Carnivore:
  • The rockscraper is a unique example. They are adapted to feed on the meatmoss growing on the cave walls but since said moss is literally made of meat this means that it is a grazer that is also an obligate carnivore.
  • The carnivorous northern baskervilles supplement their diets with fruit and other plant matter thanks to their abundant ecosystem and their northhound descendants take this further by becoming full-blown omnivores who eat significant amounts of berries, fungus and other plant-based food.
  • Most of the Temperocene carnohams are obligate carnivores like the earth felines they resemble, but an exception exists with the bobtailed cliffheath, which is an omnivore whose diet consists of at least 10-15% plant matter. Much of their protein also comes from insects rather than just mammal meat.
• Vertebrate with Extra Limbs:
  • Cave-dwelling daggoths have shortened limbs but long digits, functionally granting them sixteen separate legs. Later species digits become even more like actual legs.
  • The wingles, rather than developing wings from their forelimbs, instead develop four wings from movable scales while still having four legs.
• Vestigial Empire: The Decadents were once a Harmster superpower but now are little more than hedonistic aristocrats.
• Vocal Dissonance: The throttling lipgrip is a large, intelligent hunter that is taking over the top predator niche in Austro-Easaterra but one of the noises it produces for its territorial calls is a raspberry made by flapping its facial lobes.
• Weakened by the Light: The troglofaunal hamsters of the Sub-Arcuterran Cavern System have no eyes but do possess patches of skin that can detect light, when they do sense light they'll immeadiatly flee back to the darkness as this means they are getting too close to the surface where any potential predators would have an advantage over them thanks to their eyesight. Some of the beetles and fungus in their ecosystem start to take advantage of this by developing bioluminescent lights that scares them off.
• Whale Egg: The original sketches depict a species of bird-like hamster during the Mousozoic Era that reverts to an egg-laying mode of life, by birthing its young prematurely like a marsupial and the offspring continuing to develop externally in an amniotic pseudo-egg of sorts.
• Wham Episode:
  • Story-Telling Hunt-Beasts: A New Dawn not only formally introduces the northhounds and southhounds, but it's also the first entry told entirely from the perspective of one of the world's sophonts.
  • Reign of Fire: The Firethieves’ Siege is about the Outlanders attacking a group of Baywulves and Highbrows, forcing the latter to flee across the mountains, where they meet the northhounds for the first time.
• Wham Line: In Riplets, Believe It Or Not: The Arcuterran-Mesoterran Land Bridge, turning what initially appears to be a simple biome update into the beginning of the first sophonts' saga:

  "...the riplets would discover the use of fire."

• Wham Shot: Just Like Cold Times: The Austral Tundra of South Ecatoria initially appears to be a simple biome update. However, the end of the entry talks about how the southern Baskerville's cognition and cooperation could be the beginning of a new intelligence, ultimately culminating in a picture of an adult Baskerville and two pups using a sharpened branch to catch some shrish.
• When Trees Attack: By the time of the Temperocene, multiple species of plants have developed aggressive means of dealing with competition or herbivores. One example of the former is the mace-bud destrotor, a species of grass that is covered in spines and grows in spirals, tearing out and uprooting any competing plants in a close radius. An example of the later is the stinging barbriar a taller plant that is covered in spines that inject any would-be grazer with a deadly cytotoxin that causes internal bleeding, organ failure and even tissue liquification making it a venomous plant, larger herbivores are left with nasty swollen scars while smaller ones are dead within minutes.

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