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Description

On another Earth, half a billion years ago, a rotifer left its burrow and swam up into the water column.
The rotifer was a near-microscopic worm. From one end of its barrel-shaped midsection protruded a tail-like "foot." From the other, its head. The head was crowned by complexly-folded jaws, a unique adaptation. These everted from the worm's throat and paddling the tiny animal through the water, it was eaten by something snaggle-toothed and squiggly.
But there were more rotifers where that one had come from. A few eons later, those jaws (called together the "mastax") had grown enormously, forming a cage around the vulnerable body. On land, the "mastoid cage" protected the organs, folding and folding again to produce a nest of interlocking mouths, a quartet of origami limbs, and other structures for human biologists to give Greek names to.
Thus, the terrestrial, acladotrophic, mastaplestoid rotifer. It looks like a severed, four-fingered hand, made from tortoise-shell origami. The complex mouth is in the "palm," of this hand, with a pumping bellows for a "wrist" and a single eye between the two forward "knuckles." Now, flip that thing upside-down, so it can live in mangrove trees.
When the Ice Age hit and those trees died, one group of climbing rotifers were most inconvenienced. Those that survived were those that could dig wet burrows with one set of their nested teeth and plant mangrove seedlings with another. Even better, some could use their limbs to dig trenches through the mud, re-distributing the water in times of drought and mounding up dykes in times of inundation.
The groves of the canal-makers spread and met. War, conquest, slavery, and diaspora followed. Fire came, then ceramics and glass, stone and iron. Writing administered the interlocking cages of trade that prevented one clone-stock from exterminating another.
After much history but very little geology, this other Earth had been converted as much as possible to brackish swamp. The teaming billions that swung and burrowed through its artificial mangroves called themselves by many names, but all depended on the same body of law and commerce: the Regulation of Quotidian Affairs.

From Fellow Tetrapod: www.thekingdomsofevil.com/?pag…

Description

On another Earth, half a billion years ago, a rotifer left its burrow and swam up into the water column.
The rotifer was a near-microscopic worm. From one end of its barrel-shaped midsection protruded a tail-like "foot." From the other, its head. The head was crowned by complexly-folded jaws, a unique adaptation. These everted from the worm's throat and paddling the tiny animal through the water, it was eaten by something snaggle-toothed and squiggly.
But there were more rotifers where that one had come from. A few eons later, those jaws (called together the "mastax") had grown enormously, forming a cage around the vulnerable body. On land, the "mastoid cage" protected the organs, folding and folding again to produce a nest of interlocking mouths, a quartet of origami limbs, and other structures for human biologists to give Greek names to.
Thus, the terrestrial, acladotrophic, mastaplestoid rotifer. It looks like a severed, four-fingered hand, made from tortoise-shell origami. The complex mouth is in the "palm," of this hand, with a pumping bellows for a "wrist" and a single eye between the two forward "knuckles." Now, flip that thing upside-down, so it can live in mangrove trees.
When the Ice Age hit and those trees died, one group of climbing rotifers were most inconvenienced. Those that survived were those that could dig wet burrows with one set of their nested teeth and plant mangrove seedlings with another. Even better, some could use their limbs to dig trenches through the mud, re-distributing the water in times of drought and mounding up dykes in times of inundation.
The groves of the canal-makers spread and met. War, conquest, slavery, and diaspora followed. Fire came, then ceramics and glass, stone and iron. Writing administered the interlocking cages of trade that prevented one clone-stock from exterminating another.
After much history but very little geology, this other Earth had been converted as much as possible to brackish swamp. The teaming billions that swung and burrowed through its artificial mangroves called themselves by many names, but all depended on the same body of law and commerce: the Regulation of Quotidian Affairs.

From Fellow Tetrapod: www.thekingdomsofevil.com/?pag…