Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?
If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.
We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.
We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.
Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.
In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.
It worked.
The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.
It worked.
Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.
It worked.
The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.
The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.
This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.
Nothing less.
One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.
For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.
Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.
Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.
It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.
One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.
If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.
All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.
We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.
Probably a good idea to make something vaguely resembling a pinned post, so here we go.
Hey, I’m Molly, I like yapping about palaeontology and spec evo, and I’ve got a bunch of projects I’m working on across a few different universes (aka my brain can never focus on getting one thing done so it bounces around like a cricket on caffeine)
A not so empty universe: After a world war, a plague, and general societal collapse, humanity has made it to the stars, and realised that they’re not as alone as they had thought
-Funny space thing (name still a WIP): a slice of life thing about a bunch of university students on mars trying to survive their studies and each other
-Chimera: set at around the same time as FST, a new life-bearing world has been discovered. What’s unusual about it is that the life forms appear to originate from other worlds, including earth and the home worlds some of other sophonts
-Pasodau: set in the far future of this universe, a moon of a gas giant has been terraformed to house a species of lizards and 3 species of birds alongside various amphibians, fish, invertebrates and plants
A world without us: set after the extinction of humanity and the onset of a new glacial period, a community of sophont ravens have settled in the rusted hulk of a battleship on the plains of Doggerland. One of them named Graucraa has a great interest in the history of not on his own species, but the disappeared beings that came before them
Feorrlund: in a distant solar system, and old god known as The Architect brings life from Earth to populate a planet it has terraformed to live alongside life from its own home world. This planet is now home to the forgotten life of earth, magic, and far too many sophonts
Appalachi fae: fresh out of university, Dan Baker-Hewig makes the regrettable choice to sign up as a park ranger in a world where magic is very real and the forests are home to monsters, fae, and old gods, whilst also having to survive the other rangers.
Also the setting for a few short story things I’ve written and might post at some point.
So ye, feel free to ask about any of the projects, and hope y’all enjoy.
You like spec evo. I have decided that you are now a mutual. You are cool
Cheers!!
Messing around with some words, me and one of the Formid characters called Handra Kisund
Finally finished the most widely used Formid writing system. Be been working on the numbers for months now, and the alphabet for the past couple days.
At some point I’d like to make a conlang for it, but if I did that rn I would genuinely explode
(Also sorry the formatting is a tad shite, this has all been transcribed from a very messy stack of paper)
Heya, these are some very interesting ideas! I especially love the Feorrlund one (kinda reminds me of Kaimere). Seedworlds with a higher power are always interesting!
I wanted to ask if you make artworks/write stuff for your ideas? I am new to Tumblr, so I have trouble looking through your stuff (since there are reblogs and I am not used to those).
Do you have a tag you use specifically for your stuff?
Cheers!!
I’ve currently only posted stuff for funny space thing on tumblr, which I’ve tagged with #funny space thing
When I post for other projects I’ll also add tags, I’ll probably add a “my projects tag” too, just trying to learn how tumblr works lol
Meep morp (moots and whoever feel free to join)
Make YOU using THIS PICREW and tag 5 people!!!!
Yep, it's a chain!!!
@eyesofrhodochrosite @taaaaaaawnyfrogmouth @mikebeanz @ofthefrogs @kredena-dark
Tad late, was a bit busy
starting a new chain cause the old one was too long! tagged by @ethereal-bumble-bee <3
tagging @yourinfernaimajesty @annahanover @sweet-thangman @paranoid-radio @andieluvsduckie and @spectrophobiia but the more the merrier!!
Perspective is pain
Some say magic died when a hail of shellfire tore an ancient god asunder. Others say it died when the whistle of engines dragged an old world kicking and screaming into a new one. Yet more say it died when the wheels of progress ground the very building blocks of the universe apart into ordered lists and categories. It has been said it died when some long lost soul first harnessed the all consuming light of fire to keep away greater evils that haunted the shadows.
But magic is not dead.
If you venture long enough into the wild lands you can find it, scorched and scarred, battered but not broken. Ancient beings who’s rattling voices sing ballads of fall and fallow; Good People who ask for your name and offer you a deal; silent colossi passing beneath trees that reach to the heavens; beasts that stalked the flickering borders of ancient campfires, and kind travellers who no longer know how long they have wandered these lands.
If you follow the coast you can find it, hear it in faint songs barely distinguishable above the breaking of the waves; see it in the dark shapes that glide over the reefs and shoals; be told of it in epic tales as sailors boast of their victories, and if you stay you might overhear whispers of awe and dread of the rage and might of what dwells within pelagic storms, those spirits who never returned from the sea, and the unfathomable might of leviathans known only to the cachalot and those rare few glimpsing a shadow in the depths.
If you travel through the country you can find it, temples of corrugated metal and bricks; archaic machines held together with welds, duct tape and dimly glowing runes; laughing farmhands heaving clods of soil from the earth to lob at eachother; faerie rocks jeering from the centre of a plowed field; forgotten gods standing motionless amongst the wheat; long abandoned churches that never fall into disrepair; half forgotten sigils carved into fence posts to ward off the Things in the night, and the eyes that yet still burn like red moons between the stalks of corn.
In the cities you can find it, in the prophecies etched and sprayed upon the subway walls by robed sages and masked youths; in the pig iron shrines to gods of the forge tucked in every nook and cranny of a foundry; in the clubs and bars that you can only find when you are shown them or when a full moon looms above; in the figures kneeled in the light of the street lamps and the shapes that lurk beyond their reach; in the graffiti that can race and dance or slowly shift upon the faces of buildings older than countries and refuse to be removed; in the timeworn temples that had the city built around them; in the druids of lawns and weeds; in the mages that carve their baseball bats with symbols of power and fill their trench coat pockets with glador brewed in basements and lifted from stores; in the bards that busk at the city crossroads and send ballads streaking across the globe in a crackle of sparks and binary; and in the warlocks both of new gods with bones of steel, veins of fire and skin a tough as concrete, and of the old gods that seep out like moss from the pavement as they refuse to be forgotten.
So as you go about your busy days, give a swift greeting to the magpies that watch and wait from the roofs and branches; pass a murmur of respect to the faerie oak that stands like an island in a sea of concrete; ignore the shapes glimpsed from the windows at night but draw the blinds and lock the doors. And always remember. That magic is not dead.
Finally finished the most commonly found sophonts on mars (and those with main characters in the comic I’m planning). Gonna finish the character reference sheets now
NOT HALF A FOOT LIKE 4 INCHES, I’M TIRED AND DONT’ USE IMPERIAL MUCH
@ mutuals rb this w how tall you are i wanna know
i’m 4’11