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[Supermikhail]

Well, I guess I shouldn't have written a reply while falling asleep.

[Shoku]

Like all things making poisons is more expensive than if you could just grow without doing so but poisons in particular are even more expensive. The obvious caveat is that a lot of the time you can't just grow and in particular with poisons you often open up some space you would have otherwise been crowded out of.

Barring allergic reactions the poisons that have the most extreme effects are also the most expensive to produce. You almost see them exclusively among mothers that have extremely large investment in their children. This is why the spiders that carry their children upon their backs tend to be more venomous. If I snake doesn't really need to protect it's eggs/children they can make a great living by just being large enough to choke their prey to death.
Likewise with plants a great deal of them produce compounds that negate the benefit to any animal eating them simply because certain soil conditions make growing more leaves a very arduous process.

Poison is more accurately the path to take when life is very hard, though accumulating the mutations for it isn't that much harder than anything else.

Unicellular life goes to great enough trouble to make those poisons and things that, paradoxically enough, they can't live in places without what they were poisoning. This makes more sense when you realize that if that particular neighbor isn't around something unaffected by the poison probably is and then it just out competes them, or if they actually lightly poison some host so that they can live in it.

[Shoku]

I've got the worm summary written up more or less. I gloss over a lot of detail as it is but this is probably pushing the limit for how long I can talk just to say how things are related to each other.

So worms branched out in a lot of directions early on. The good example for early eyesight is the flatworm.

The eyespots are pretty visible and thanks to those dark spots and the virtue of having two different eyes they can work out the direction light is coming from.

They're an early side branch though. It is the roundworms that are more on the path to the lifeforms that came onto land. Many of these lived in and ate mud. A digging tube is something we obviously know works for a worm body after all.

An interesting side branch produced a body similar to a caterpillar but the velvet worms are basically repeating segments with just a little change for the head.

But something much more attention grabbing arose. Centipedes. These are much more obviously segmented roundish tubes with a special front and back, probably very different organs arrangement in each segment.

Spiders and their relatives, as you should know, come from a different lineage than insects. These basically opted for shorter bodies and relatively longer legs early on.

Now if you remember that video from awhile back I've actually been talking exclusively about the mouth-first creatures.


On the other end of things you've got some more fleshy worms (acorn worms have an interesting shape,) while starfish are an interesting deviation frm the left/right tube shape and sea squirts contort the organs around so the anus and mouth point out of their top sides. The cephalopods also split off here to produce everything from clams to squid.

The wormiest creatures here are annelids which lead to the actual worms we're flat out the most familiar with. Polychaetes though, are the ones I want to bring up- they have shelly segments with very obvious paddles sticking off of the sides.
Also there's bryozoa which live in a tube and grab tiny foodstuffs with a fan structure.

The lineage that I'm really getting at is the one that developed a specific spinal chord-
ok, they didn't have spines yet so it wasn't a spinal chord but it leads into it.
elsewhere nerves were mostly decentralized and just formed a net and if anything there was a ring somewhere around the mouth. Some of these have cartilage types of skeletons but the bones that are so prominent in fish, reptiles, mammals, and birds show up after this, first as the vertebrae that go around the spinal chord, though this is a progression of the cranium that was an earlier protection for the widest portion of the spinal chord.

[Shoku]

Aaaaand I find out that one of the octobrachius variations that seemed unique was more plausible.
http://www.tarleton.edu/Faculty/dekeith/Lingula.jpg

Finer mouth parts though.

[Sorent]

Ah I found the ultimate explanation to all of this discussion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIfb-8ljXr4&feature=player_embedded

[Supermikhail]

Aaaaand I find out that one of the octobrachius variations that seemed unique was more plausible.
http://www.tarleton.edu/Faculty/dekeith/Lingula.jpg

Finer mouth parts though.

They are cute!

Err. I'm probably weird.

This made me realise something. Each new creature I've evolved could have had a little more effort put into anatomy. These Lingula are said to be primitive, but look at their anatomy - orders more complex than that of Octobrachius. With the latter's outward complexity, it could have dozens of weird organs which could have made its evolution a bit easier... So, I don't see how it is similar to Octobrachius. Octobrchius' core traits were jet propulsion and proboscis feeding.

I have come up with some formatting ideas, if you don't mind. All the "kind of", "though" and "more of" are unnecessary padding, especially in that worm summary. They might help your thought process, but they don't help readability, so for the sake of this thread I suggest that all three of us edit our posts for redundancies after we've written them. Some sentences after that might need rephrasing to keep emphatic content, and thus may become more concise.

[Shoku]

Looks like you visit this site as well: http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2010/11/nanowrimo-five-repeated-words-to-hunt-down/

I've already learned that lesson elsewhere but how well I recall it as I'm writing varies.
Edit: I only had six to cut out in that post (eight but I left two of them in). Thought there would be more.
-

One of the variations I drew. I gave it a clam shell up front that all the mouth parts and arms were inside of. Lophophore isn't a word you've likely encountered before but it's got some strong similarities.

I don't blame you for the simple anatomies. You haven't had formal education about that kind of thing and it isn't as if I have much experience guiding people into creating that sort of thing. I'm not really sure how close I was to adding "rows of hairs" type shapes to your toolbox but that was the last thing I had tried.
After all, we weren't even to the stage where one form became dominant and then turned into so many of these other things.

[Supermikhail]

No-no. I've never even heard of this site before. All pure self-criticism tipped possibly by what I believe bjlong said to me in the Writers Guild when I used an excessive "just" in my poem.

I remember that variation now... vaguely - that illustration was a bit confusing (your drawing). Do you know what "lopho" means, by the way? Also, how much do internal organs show and influence the shape of creatures? I've got some trouble deciding. I can see what the brain does.

Addendum. Also words "probably" and "possibly" where no statistics are involved or there's no meaning to it. "Pretty" and "basically" often don't mean anything. Additionally, I think we should avoid excessive use of colloquiallisms, and try to be more formal in longer replies. It won't feel like a casual conversation anyway, but will be less coherent (because casual speech is not very coherent).

I might be wrong but you seem to have taken my suggestion about formatting to an extreme with a new paragraph every two sentences. Well, that's certainly fancy, but this way you negate the very purpose of a paragraph - to separate a more or less complete point. Besides, regularly spaced short paragraphs aren't much different to the eye than regularly spaced lines.

Paradoxically, but in this thread, not just content and wording, but the look of the text, matter. Might as well start experimenting with different fonts.

[Shoku]

The timing seemed too close. Oh well.
You should have kept asking questions then.

Lopho doesn't have any non-anatomy meaning I think. Lophophores are named after there U shaped feeding parts with a bunch of hair shaped extensions. Sometimes you see barnacle-esque critters in an aquarium that look like they are bobbing this feather duster in and out of their shell. Well, you probably wouldn't even remember if you'd seen one.
You don't need to explain concise writing techniques to me. I know these things but I cannot do them. When I type these out it is my internal monologue unfiltered and when I try to write in some other way I shut down disastrously. I was good at writing back when my ego was bigger than it deserved to be.

The two sentence paragraphs in that particular case were just how frequently I was switching between creatures with an internal measure of similarity. I do it a lot on forums though as most screens are not a suitable width newspaper style blocks of text. It's much harder on your eyes tracking lines that are so wide and while some people do it very well (and catch on quickly when they are rereading the same line) but when people complain I've usually had to drop it to about this level to sate them. The intention really is to just give almost every sentence its own line break but some internal nagging in my head rebels against that unless the sentence is terribly long, in which case it isn't going to be very readable anyway.

If I were going to use a font other than the default it wouldn't be one that was actually available on the forum. Just switching between the common ones is almost as bad as using the premade slides in powerpoint.
Anyway if you want to trim back my posts yourself feel free to lob them at me via PM. I'll probably be willing to replace them like that.
Would probably be a maddening endeavor but I won't stop you~

[Supermikhail]

Uh. Err. I'd like to get paid for that trimming... So, for now we'll have to live with your wordiness.

Also, if you are on Linux, you might enjoy this program... and if you aren't, its description and screenshot might be interesting to you.

[Shoku]

No linux here but it seems like an easy way to get bilateral shapes.

With the three worm paths I feel like they all need more detail but I feel particular lousy about the mollusks :/

[Supermikhail]

Welp, I guess we already need trees again, because I can't remember the 3 worm paths. And any very mollusky critters here.

Also, where can I get a lingula for a pet?

[Shoku]

Lingula lives with just the tip of the shell sticking out of the sand and the tail roots it in place. The big difference from the thing I drew is obviously that the anus pokes back out the front of Lingula's shell.

-

Worms went three ways. The first split was if the little globe of cells grows a mouth first or anus first. Mouth first went on to centipede type body plans and then you've got insects and arachnids.
Anus first split to produce mollusks and a branch of worms that had the start of a spinal chord. The mollusks? Well I can't summarize them as easily because snails, cuttlefish, and clams kind of have a lot of different stuff going on.
Our branch started with a spinal chord with a fat spot up front that went on to make a brain, then the brain got a hard case and finally they developed bones around the rest of the spine.
*Ok, they started with this other chord and the spinal chord came after.

Oh, I also mentioned that starfish (also sea cucumbers and sea urchins) are on our branch and details like that spine thing all throughout.

I'm going to talk about teeth now for some reason. With fish you know well enough that they developed jaws and later teeth in those jaws (or beaks) but here's what the other two lines tend to use. All of those squid relatives really often have a thing called a radula. This is like a lot of scoop shaped teeth on a tongue that rolls and thus chops up their food. The centipede relatives basically just had two legs jutting off of each segment so on the head segment they have a nice recess they fit into and then end up grinding and chopping up food much like our teeth, except they are legs. Things like lobsters take this further having all sorts of different legs on different segments (a lot of segments up front fuse together.)

[Supermikhail]

Oh. Earth worms, not otherworldly worms. Okay. Although I don't intend skipping them when I get to them in my book.

By the way, I today read that Volvox became multicellular around the time dinosaurs went extinct. First, that's crazy. Second, I know now - Volvox ate all the dinosaurs!

[Shoku]

There's just a little problem with that: they're plants.

So a few plants eat animals but they're sticky or actually involve some kind of trap. Microscopic spheres could only possibly make the dinosaurs slip and fall down stairs, but puddles are only sometimes at the tops of staircases. No, this conspiracy must run deeper than just volvox alone!