Behold, a world ruled by frogs.
Amphiterra is a Speculative Biology project by Roxy Valdez.
In our timeline, the Earth was dominated by the dinosaurs during the Mesozoic era, and by the mammals afterward. But what if life on Earth took a slightly different route? What if instead of mammals and reptiles, the planet was reigned by an age of...frogs?
Amphiterra takes place on a parallel timeline that diverged from our universe at the start of the early Triassic. Instead of a dry climate that favored the dehydration-tolerant reptiles, the climate remained warm and moist, an ideal place for Triadobatrachus: the first frog, and its many descendants to dominate the world.
The site for Amphiterra can be viewed here.
Compare Serina, another speculative evolution project following the evolution of a group of animals over hundreds of millions of years.
This work contains examples of:
- Amphibian at Large: Basically the entire premise.
- Artistic License – Biology: As a graduate art project, Amphiterra plays a little fast and loose with the science.
- The Early Triassic wasn't really very conducive to a moist environment, as all the continents were fused into Pangaea: a single large continent that couldn't really be reached by rainfall coming from the ocean and thus would be mostly arid desert. This was what allowed archosaurs and synapsids, which were far better adapted for water retention and thermoregulation than amphibians, to take over. Strangely, the text repeatedly states how inefficient some traits of these amphibians are compared to mammals, such as their ectothermic physiology, their bizarre physiology making their body types limited, their specialized reproduction, or their sensitive, permeable skin, but it never explains how amphibians, despite these shortcomings, dominated over proto-mammals and reptiles, which have none of these problems.
- Triadobatrachus isn't really a true frog, but rather a common ancestor of both frogs and salamanders. Amphiterra originally was supposed to have salamanders take on whale and crocodile niches, according to concept art, but it seems to have been scrapped.
- Several megafaunal lineages seem to cross the Triassic-Jurassic and Eocene-Oligocene boundaries. There's no indication the mass extinction events in these eras don't happen. In our timeline, these mass extinctions coincided with dramatic changes in the world's dominant groups of animals, but that doesn't seem to have happened in this timeline.
- The author uses a skeletal of Triadobatrachus created by the notorious crank Peter Davids, whose so-called scientific studies and anatomical illustrations are unanimously rejected or ignored by the professional paleontological community as unsupported hogwash.
- Nearly all of the descendant species still retain strongly recognizable frog-like features (particularly their faces), even hundreds of millions of years hence, despite radical changes in size, habitat, and ecological niche. Comparing to the incredible diversity of dinosaurs or mammals, for the original frog-like ancestor to still look frog-like in nearly all its descendants from the Early Triassic to the present day is very unlikely.
- The Tree Frixel is depicted as being graceful in the trees swinging only using its back legs, which is said to be extremely efficient. However, it's not clear how such a front-heavy animal can swing like this while also holding its huge head up (unlike all other arboreal tetrapods which use both front and back appendages).
- It's stated that despite hundreds of millions of years, even in this timeline amphibians remained ectothermic. Despite this, there are polar, tundra-dwelling animals and fully sapient frogs. How they can remain ectothermic despite living in a frigid cold environment with no insulating integument (it's one thing for an animal to retain heat, but it doesn't explain where the heat came from to begin with if the animal has no way to generate it) or evolve human-level intelligence despite large brains being metabolically intensive organs is never explained.
- The work makes the common mistake of confusing sentience (simply being self-aware) and sapience (actually having human-level intelligence); the Temperate Freeple are described repeatedly as sentience when in reality all the creatures would be sentient.
- It's stated one threat of the Eon Toad is that trees sometimes take root on its body when it hibernates. However, there has never been any evidence of plant parasitism on animals (with the exception of a handful of red algae that parasitize sea sponges), never mind a whole tree growing on an animal's back in the chill of winter.
- The amphibians still have permeable skin despite evolving to be wholly terrestrial and often very large. However, this is very unlikely because once amphibians get too large, the loss of water through permeable skin would be a death sentence as the amount of water lost would be impossible to regain consistently past a certain size, even in a moist environment. It's no coincidence that all the largest amphibians both modern and prehistoric are all almost entirely aquatic animals.
- It's stated off-handedly in this timeline, fungi competed with plants and there are many huge fungi species. How this is so is never specified, never mind how fungi compete with plants because fungi and plants are nothing alike ecologically, the former being largely heterotrophic decomposers and the later almost entirely being autotrophic producers. Saying fungi and plants "waged war" just because they're both immobile eukaryotes makes about as much sense as saying sea turtles and corals "wage war" by both being hard-shelled animals that live in the ocean. Also, how fungi become big enough to create jungles and fungal "trees" so big entire towns can build on them, is never explained considering mushrooms only appear briefly in a fungi's life cycle and they subsist almost entirely on decomposing organic matter.
- Despite all the amphibian species shown being completely terrestrial, all of them still have aquatic tadpole larvae. Why none of them evolved to forgo this stage even in hundreds of millions of years, is completely unexplained; even in our timeline there are many hundreds of amphibian species which don't metamorphose from tadpoles.
- The Arctic Fraggon is said to insulate from the cold because it's evolved an insulating coat... of blood-filled dermal papillae. This is a horrible adaptation for an arctic ice age animal because having so much blood close to the skin is a great way to lose heat quickly, not keep it. Hair and feathers work as insulation because they're inert, so it doesn't matter if they become cold as long as the skin underneath doesn't.
- Similarly, both the Arctic Fraggon and the Foaming Squander have a portion of their body covered by insulating matter (the aforementioned dermal pillae and a coat of foamy mucus, respectively), but insulating integument isn't very effective if it only covers a small portion of the body, because the heat would simply dissipate through the rest of the body.
- Some of the largest Fraggon species are absolutely gargantuan, equal to the largest whales or sauropods in size. How this is so is not explained, because they have inefficient metabolisms, no mentioned adaptations for large size (for example, sauropods have pillar-like erect legs, rigid bodies, efficient digestive and respiratory systems, and high pneumatized bodies), and on top of that, they are carnivorous, despite no mentioned prey species being even close to their size.
- The Banded Suckerlump is a species which has a head twice as big as the rest of its body resting on top of its chest. Where its internal organs would go is never mentioned, since the skeletal shows the skull only rests about a centimetre at most above the spine (it uses the examples of flatfish and barnacles to try and justify it but neither barnacles or flatfish have massive heads dwarfing or sitting on their entire body).
- A similar anatomical issue plagues the Temperate Freeple, and to a lesser extent its ancestor the Tree Frixel. The Freeple only seems to have two short vertebrae between its pelvis and clavicle, raising the question where its major internal organs rest.
- The Inhabited Lorge has body features clearly based on the mata-mata turtle, such as its trunk-like nose and ragged lobes around its body. However, the Lorge is nothing alike to the mata-mata ecologically, which uses it trunked nose to breathe while still keeping its head underwater and its ragged skin flaps to disguise its body outline while hiding from prey.
- The design of all of the species incorporate the fact amphibians don't have rib cages, but this ignores the fact they may not have ribcages, they still have ribs which can easily develop into ribcages to hold their weight and rib cages were present in large prehistoric amphibians.
- Artistic License – Paleontology:
- The Cenozoic Era is referred to as the "Tertiary", which is a now defunct geological time period that was discarded in the late 20th century for being misleading; the more correct time periods should be the Paleogene and Neogene.
- The Foaming Squander is a species of tundra-living grazer that lives 53 MYA. However, this period was one of the warmest periods in the history of life on Earth; ice caps would not have existed at this time and glaciation would not begin for another twenty million years.
- Similarly, the Steppe Fraggon is said to have existed in a more arid time period than the Mesozoic, living 60 MYA; however, this could not be more inaccurate, as this time period would have been far warmer and more humid than the Cretaceous, with rainforests stretching from pole to pole. It wouldn't be another thirty million years before it would become arid enough for widespread grasslands and savannah, never mind cold enough to require winter hibernation.
- The introductory narration implies that reptiles only succeeded in place of synapsids because they were ectothermic; but we've known for decades this was not the case, since dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine reptiles, the three most successful groups of megafauna during the Mesozoic, were all mostly, if not entirely, warm-blooded animals.
- Pterosaurs (although they don't appear in the project) are implied to be awkward on land (which is used to justify the Tree Frixel's extremely awkward stance), but modern studies indicate most pterosaurs were adept on land, far more than bats, and some may have been capable of galloping.
- Many of the time periods for given species are drastically inconsistent, such as saying the Greater Moistboy lives 170 MYA and then stating that's the Early Cretaceous Period (it's actually the Middle Jurassic; the Early Cretaceous doesn't begin for another 25 million years), or stating the Common Eofrog exists 210 MYA and specifying it's the Early Triassic (it would actually be the Late Triassic). They're also referred to as "Eras" rather than "Periods".
- The text for the Splendid Fraggon suggests that therizinosaurs became herbivorous because they evolved from a carnivorous animal isolated on an island to justify how the Splendid Fraggon evolved. However, there's no evidence to indicate therizinosaurs originated from an island; it's known they evolved from a generalized omnivorous ancestor that eventually become specialized as herbivores, completely unlike the Splendid Fraggon evolving herbivory (or technically, fungivory) from a specialized hyperpredator hunting megafaunal prey.
- The text makes multiple comparisons to real life animals and evolution to justify the weird evolution of some its its own fictional animals but most examples are flawed at best and nonsense at worse, such as implying Tyrannosaurus died out gradually because of an ice age instead of a giant asteroid hitting the Earth, the aforementioned therizinosaurs evolving herbivory on islands, comparing the awkwardness of the Tree Frixel's design to pterosaurs, or the Gliding Alloo's upside-down impaling hunting method is similar to how flight evolved in Archaeopteryx.
- The Inhabited Lorge and the Colonial Gobolin are said to live on the "Indian Pennisula". However, they live 70 MYA, during the Late Cretaceous, when India had not yet collided with Asia. The landmass would have still been an island until near the end of the Eocene, roughly forty million years later.
- Similarly, the Splendid Fraggon is said to live on the island of Jamaica 40 MYA, but Jamaica would not even exist until the Late Miocene, around 10 MYA, never mind the fact a landmass as small as Jamaica would never be able to support populations of animals as enormous as the Fraggon (said to be 25 feet tall; for context, the tallest ever giraffe was only 19 feet tall).
- The Banded Suckerlump is said to live in "continental Europe" during the Early Cretaceous (140 MYA). However, Europe as a continent would not exist for over a hundred million years; during this period it would've appeared as a series of archipelagos in a shallow sea.
- The Common Eofrog, at sixteen inches tall, is stated to be the largest predator of its time (210 MYA). Why this is so is not explained, since far, far, larger predators would have already existed for tens of millions of years before it evolved and no mass extinction events are known which would have wiped them out.
- Reptiles are considered a "relatively new" group compared to synapsids and amphibians, but in reality the group is about as old as synapsids are, and both groups only appeared about thirty million years after the earliest amphibians. They'd only be considered "relatively new" if synapsids were also "relatively new" and appearing sixty million years ago was "new".
- Bizarre Alien Locomotion:
- The Tree Frixel and the Temperate Freeple walk on their front limbs, while using their hind limbs as arms.
- The Gliding Alloo leaps backwards off of trees, gliding upside down to spear small prey with spines on its back.
- Body Horror: The Inhabited Lorge, a hippo-like frog whose body is full of holes, which are the nests of wormlike Colonial Gobolin.
- Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": Technically speaking, all the "frogs" here are not true frogs, as they diverged from the descendants of Triadobatrachus before true frogs would have appeared. Even the superfically mundane-looking Common Eofrog is already far removed from the frogs of our timeline.
- Fantastic Fauna Counterpart: As frogs occupied the niches of many animals, this trope is in play quite often. Tree Frixels are frog-gibbons, Catastrophic Fraggons are frog-tyrannosaurs, Marbled Snapapples are frog-chameleons, and Foaming Squanders are frog-mammoths.
- Frog Men:
- The Temperate Freeple are a species of sapient frogs who have developed civilization and a fair amount of technology.
- The Foaming Trogglefolk, while not humanoid in form, have developed a tribal society, live in villages constructed from foam and even shaping their body foam into unique designs.
- Harmless Freezing: Eon Toads have adapted to the Ice Age tundra by being able to survive being frozen solid during the harsh winter months.
- Not Allowed to Grow Up: Many of the frogs retain neotenic tadpole traits. The herbivores retain the tadpole's grazing beak to aid in chewing plants, while the Bullpronk retains the tadpole tail as a signaling device when hunting in packs.
- Organic Technology: The Temperate Freeple, who find it difficult to use fire due to their sensitive amphibian skins, instead selectively breed plants and animals that can produce their tools and materials.
- Our Dragons Are Different: The Fraggons are a family of draconic-looking carnivorous frogs, with one aberrant species, the Splendid Fraggon, being a herbivore resembling a Qilin.
- Planimal: Subverted with the Eon Toad. The plants growing on its body are just those that seed onto it during hibernation, and in fact the deep-rooting trees can eventually kill it as their roots bore into its body.
- Ridiculously Cute Critter: The Foaming Trogglefolk. Especially when they stack up into a formation resembling a snowman.
- The Symbiote: The Colonial Gobolin lives inside the fleshy hump of the Inhabited Lorge, which provides them with food and shelter. In return, the Gobolins protect the Lorge from predators, as well as eating away the constantly-growing flesh of the hump that if left unattended will eventually grow too heavy for the Lorge to support.
- T. Rexpy: The Catastrophic Fraggon is a powerful apex predator that is basically the amphibian equivalent to T.rex, even reaching the same size.
- Vegetarian Carnivore: Unusually for the rest of the Fraggons, who are apex predators, the Splendid Fraggon is a herbivore, having evolved on an isolated island with no predators and very little prey.
- Vocal Dissonance: The Catastrophic Fraggon is a fearsome apex predator the size of a Tyrannosaurus...but its vocalizations are high-pitched wailing squeals.
