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[Supermikhail]

Well, of course, putting big quotation marks around "mouth", which is a sucker at the front of the body serving for holding onto prey and a sexual partner... So, yeah, it's supposed to be a continuous tube, but, I guess, nothing prevents its compartmentalization. Alternative solution would be to put waste disposal into one jet and reproduction into the other.

The rooted one, especially during the rooted phase, attained a system of circulation because the dangly part grew long and the root didn't get enough nutrition by itself. I don't know if this qualifies as a complex organ.

[Shoku]

So anything special about the jets that keep the water from flowing back through the system? It could get a really bad case of bloating if the water just went wherever.

[Supermikhail]

Very fit muscles... But anyway, that's the same octobrachius that had unwieldy arms and toppled end over end because of bad jet positioning, remember? It didn't really work out. I guess I should just drop it. Although the internal systems still could apply to Rhombus. It feeds on microorganisms, so I'm not sure it needs such a developed waste disposal system. So it could just excrete through skin surface.

Edit: I'm not sure what exactly I made here, but I feel that it looks pretty cool.

[Shoku]

After I'm done procrastinating I'll scan in some images for variations on octobrachius.

[Shoku]

Took quite awhile but here we are.

1: The top has the whole "front" shifted down to the underside and pointed at the rear.
2: This has a much more pronounced shell containing the whole tentacle portion that can open up.
3: We've got some fins that flap while the jets are rerouted a bit to the slits on the side. This allows for some easy passing of water over the young during earliest maturation. Not good to poo on babies though so waste leaves the same way it enters.

The rewiring of the body to produce these is rather extreme but there aren't really new organs systems and I meant to be fairly extreme in hopes of injecting some life into the project.

So, what do you think drove some ancestor populations to forms like these? Maybe you can think of some better behaviors than I did.

[Supermikhail]

Well, I don't know. Two of these designs appear to be similar to natural adaptations of our animals, that is, fish and jellyfish, although I'm not sure what's the third from the top on the left is supposed to mean. And for that matter, second, too. Is it an embryo of the first one? If so, where exactly is it? I thought on an arm, but what are the slashes, then? I like the jellyfish design, though, because it feels like not jellyfish. Although, its feeding method is not apparent to me. And the one with heavy shell - isn't the shell a bit too heavy? It depends, of course, on the critter's way of locomotion.

You know, it came to me... take video games - critters are designed during a not so short period of time, even if an approximate way they should look is known. And then their names are brainstormed by a number of people during a period of time. And that number of people, professionals, for whom it's the main occupation and a source of income, uses similar tools that we do here, that is, imagination and creativity...

[Shoku]

Oh, yeah, I guess my editing job took away the obvious borders between these.
The first image at the top is it's own thing.
The next three images are one creature. On the right we're facing it head on with the whole tentacle area open and extended. The top left of these shows the flap lifted up to expose the jets. I might have been thinking that the young could shelter in that flap but I worked this guy out before any digestive explanation.
The last two are pretty easy to recognize.

The small squiggles on the front are the feeding parts. I didn't change those on any of these but the second creature having that bit shell might take the effort to digest some more solid food. If the tentacles had some sharp bits they could carve little pieces off of flesh and if the clam shell bit were strong enough it might be able to crush smaller shells.

[Supermikhail]

What I meant last time was that this thread could really use some streamlining, some rules, some gadgets even maybe (about that a bit later). We aren't a team of professionals (at alternate evolution, at least), and I'm sure not paid to participate. To boost this thread (keep it from dying), the process needs to be concentrated, the essential activity isolated, non-essential activities "automated". To compound the issue, I've got some sort of writing crisis, and to solve it I could really use an alien world with a sentient species. But we aren't anywhere close to that.

About gadgets (not really). I thought that a relatively easy way to organise critters would be to create a collaborative document on the Internet, where critter icons and names would be kept, along with links to their posts for easy insertion. Of course, it would involve devising some naming conventions, and deciding on the way the icons should be done and what they should look (the tools, the background, the angle, the detail, and the size are the issues here).

About rules. I don't feel anymore that this Ark is any better than the Avatar's. The starting points are picked quite randomly, as are conditions, and the evolution doesn't look really scientific.

So, what do you say, as the OP?

Edit: On an unrelated note, and probably not so relevant to the thread, but still interesting - No explosive evolution of skeletal animals.

But possibly more relevant is this, according to which I sort of turn out to be right, and there is no scientific basis for evolution that we do here, because multicellularity, tissues, rapid movement are pretty major developments and prior to them no significant events were introduced.

[Shoku]

I don't know anything about collaborative documents.

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Yes, it is random. Mutation is random. Survival is the part that is not random.

Now what we don't have is refinement.This is largely because the trees only go three steps deep (burger, octo, those three I just posted.) We're filling up some niches right now which is a messy process. Now drawing lots of subtle variations would give us more of the gradual refinement angle but you haven't seemed willing to do that, in part thanks to the 3d methinks.

[Supermikhail]

Yeah, mutation is random. But without catastrophes most mutations just cancel out, or at least such radical mutations as we have in this thread.

And not due to 3D, but due to the nature of art in general. Art in large part is just trying to copy what artist sees, so what should I draw if nothing quite like it is supposed to exist, and even if it exists, you can only observe it through an electronic microscope which provides neither volume nor colour? Well, I guess I could draw everything in black pencil, trying to emulate microscope images...

One example of collaborative documents, which, I guess, you know and may even have an account for, is Google Docs. Now, I'm not sure what's best here - a spreadsheet or a word document. It depends for me on whether the spreadsheet format supports pictures, otherwise it would be the best one.

[Shoku]

There are not catastrophes so frequently. After we blow through four or five that apply to all life we've basically exhausted four billion years worth. Local ones we can do, and I intend to soon, but we've got exactly one environment going on right now because the last three or four prompts I've thrown at you have just been swept under the rug.

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That's an awful thing to say about art.
But I thought I had allowed non-art contributions so long as the verbal description was good enough that somebody else could draw it.

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Go ahead and set that up? If I'm left with nothing to do maybe I will eventually but with the mood I've been in lately I'm not likely to learn new programs remotely quick.

[Supermikhail]

Yeah... During the next one and half months I'm going to have little free time and be under a lot of stress, so my contributions are going to be very sporadic... Not to mention that I feel little drive to make evolution happen - some feeling of incoherence. I feel I'd much rather flesh out what we've already got.

Also, a suggestion, if you've got a prompt going, put it somewhere it's easy to see, like the first post, or the title, even.

[Shoku]

Thought of a reasonable variant of the jellyfish like one: The feeder tentacles are tucked back into a mouth cavity. It has to engulf its prey and pretty much press down on them so they can't thrash around, then it extends the feeder parts into them.

Thrashing is not a big deal for the earlier species but I happen to have introduced two things you could see whipping around. I don't picture this species being that much larger than the adults of those but adolescents would probably be swallowable.
Plus anything with much of a shell will be really at the mercy of this thing once swallowed as we don't have anything with full coverage shells.
I'm thinking it might want to reinforce the new body cavity with shell bits but I can't picture how very well.

[Supermikhail]

Yeah... And my mind is bent on establishing rules for some reason. Well, I'm reading Carl Sagan and he talks a lot about the evolution of brain, and brings up quite interesting ideas. But what I'd like to talk about is completely unrelated to it. That is, another way I think what's happening in this thread is wrong. I figure it out this way - small mutations happen all the time, as they are mistakes, brought about by various factors, occurring during the replication of DNA. They happen constantly and randomly. I think it's reasonable then, that their influence can be predicted statistically. So, I propose that with how our DNA came about, we had on Earth all the possible mutations, as far as natural selection influenced by changes to the environment allowed. Our Earth during its early days had a high variation of environments, which makes me think that for any planet similar to Earth, life explored all routes and took the only direction possible, at least before it could be influenced my any cataclysms. Earth had volcanic activity on land and under the sea, Earth had freshwater lagoons separated from saltwater seas by shallow rises.

So, basically, this drives my OCD insane. There is no reason, no statistical prediction for the forms that we have developed to occur, at least as far as we've identified the conditions in which they exist (that is, very Earth-like). Life should evolve like it did on Earth, at least until the first extinction or some other such event, or we should state how the conditions are different sufficiently to drive evolution in another direction.

Also, the more I read on the topic, the more I realise how little I know. What disturbs me is that I sure know a lot more about evolution than I did before I came to this thread, but my knowledge still doesn't allow me to invent sufficiently consistent creatures. So I think about potential new participants and how without special training they too would have to stumble in the dark for a couple of months, push themselves to learn, become discouraged because of inconsistency of their creations... and I become totally sad. And with this sadness, I'd like to add to the list of things that might get done, once one of us feels like it or has enough time and patience, or whatever... to add a presentation, a short edu-movie, or just an interesting post (by "interesting" I mean "as illustrative as possible", "as unlike a wall of text as possible", "as humorous as possible") with things that a new participant might want to know... Oh, well.

[Shoku]

No, there's something other than catastrophe that limits which mutations will stick around: the order of the mutations. Like I've said approaching a dozen times the first species that figures how how to do something has a great advantage, so great that they often close doors to other species that could physically fulfill the same role but just didn't do it yet. To mutate in the same direction means having to compete with the king of the hill and it's such a long arduous road to become good at something like that that species just don't. They either have to find some other place where they can do that thing or wait for some other time when they can do that thing.

I've explored this subject as a hobby and put in some serious effort to study the way life works- I wouldn't walk into something so fundamentally broken~
Probably.

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I always meant for species creation to be a fairly quick process. If I could hover over your shoulder in person I'd just have you sketch a hundred little things- LITTLE things -and just kind of tell you to steer away from certain things. From the last thing I drew you can see that I'm not exactly aiming for a high resolution 3d environment with super detailed creatures. This is more like laying down the skeleton of what would be there. After an epic or so we could draw out fantastic art pieces of what some biome looked like, or really any time beyond that when somebody feels like it.

But as for months of struggle it's going to be easier for other people simply because they'll be able to look at what we already did. After we've got some better branches for stuff besides burger I'll feel better about rolling it all up in a nice package to stick in the first post.

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I remembered another semi-prompt. I thought we might get more done if we left most of the behavior description off of what we present and let other people try to decide what the variation was useful for. Don't need to completely stay out of that after people have given some input but it ought to stir up at least a few of those interesting cross-person ideas that I'm fond of. What do you think those three I posted DO?