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mohd dandelion in Amenta
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Ooooooh. And how did they get onto land, did amphibians happen? 

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Their amphibians are not identical - fewer of them hang out in water as adults - but more or less!

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Neeeeeeeeat. Did that ratio change over time? Did the amphibians that hang out near water as adults evolve first? Oh, hey, did their mammaloids evolve out of their reptileoids?

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They do seem to have started that way but it was over here and over here there aren't very many permanent bodies of water, just a handful, so the ones that could deal with water availability being seasonal spread out more. The mammaloids did evolve out of reptiloids - the ones with teeth.

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In her world all the reptiles had teeth! Until, like, actual birds. There were even these giant flying reptiles with beaklike faces, and they had teeth. Mostly backwards-pointing ones to prevent fish from wiggling out of their grasp.

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He can go on for a while finding pictures of the not-teeth some reptiloids that evolved into birdoids had!

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That is so cool!!! Did Amenta ever have enormous animals like the dinosaurs? 

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Yes! Especially sea creatures but there were some very big mammals and toothless reptiles.

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What's the biggest animal alive today? On Earth it is the blue whale, which looks like so and is scaled thusly. 

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Theirs is more like a sea turtle. It is smaller than a blue whale though.

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About fifty feet long!

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So it's still bigger than, say, a sperm whale. Neat. 

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Yup. They eat these squidtype things.

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Sperm whales also eat squid!

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Maybe squidtype creatures are just good eating if you are real real big!

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Maybe! Anyway enormous turtles are really cool, they only get yea big on Earth. 

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Most Amentan turtles are not as big as the really really big turtles.

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That makes sense. 

What are some animals that are really wacky from an Amentan perspective? Earth has the man of war and the mola mola.

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Amenta's got some octopusish things (with only six tentacles) that squish themselves into weird shapes and have four uncanny-looking eyes, and some small long-bodied mammals with very weird faces and antlers that grow in all sorts of funny shapes, and these arctic birds that can achieve almost perfect spherehood when they fluff up.

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!!! Those spherebirds are too cute!!!

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"They've got one in the nearest zoo! Just one, the other died recently, they're looking to get a mate for it from another zoo."

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"Are they rare? That used to happen with, like, pandas, on my planet. --Pandas are an exceptionally charismatic form of megafauna whose numbers are dwindling in the wild but people think they're great so zoos in the country they're from have breeding programs but the country they're native to is possessive of their pretty prizes so there's some artificial scarcity on top of the natural scarcity." 

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"They're commoner in cold places, harder to keep here. More than one country has 'em wild."

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"It's a pretty big country!"

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