Month: October 2025

Spectember/Spectober 2025 #08: Alphabugs

One last entry for this year!

Dwoll suggested “a family of creatures that have evolved to look like every letter of the Roman/English alphabet”:

A digital sketch of a speculative treehopper bug. It has a large elaborate "helmet" crest on the back of its neck forming a shape that resembles the letter A.

Grafficimex dwolli is a domesticated species of treehopper closely related to the neotropical genus Cladonota.

Its wild ancestor, the now-extinct species Grafficimex ignotus, had an elaborate pronotum “helmet” with a close resemblance to the English letter F. It proved to be surprisingly easy to raise in captivity, being docile around humans and happily using common houseplants such as Monstera as hosts, and it was also quite morphologically variable. Varieties resembling letters such as E, C, and U were quickly developed, and hobbyists began competing to breed more and more new shapes.

Now, after centuries of selective breeding, the English alphabet has been completed, along with a couple of recently-developed breeds with bulbous protrusions that resemble question mark and exclamation mark shapes.

An "alphabet" of speculative Grafficimex treehoppers with crests that resemble the letters from A to Z, along with a pair that resemble a question mark and an exclamation mark.

(Breeds resembling the alphabets of other languages are also in development.)

At about 2cm long (~0.8″), Grafficimex dwolli is rather large for a treehopper, and much like the domestic silk moth it has almost entirely lost the ability to fly.

Along with being kept as novelty pets, often carefully lined up on plant stems to spell out amusing messages, these insects are also quite popular with beekeepers – the honeydew produced by Grafficimex nymphs and adults can be harvested by bees to make dark strong-flavored honeydew honey.

Spectember/Spectober 2025 #07: Kelp Yourself

An anonymous submission asked for a “live bearing bird”:

A digital sketch of a speculative aquatic descendant of moa birds, shown swimming in a kelp forest. It has a small head with a turtle-like beak, a long neck, no wings at all, a streamlined body, and large flipper-like webbed feet. Clumps of long ribbon-like feathers run down its back, vaguely mimicking the appearing of kelp fronds.

Rimurimuornis ovovivipara is a future descendant of the broad-billed moa, in a timeline where these Aotearoan birds weren’t hunted to extinction.

About 2m long (~6’6″), this fully aquatic bird grazes in kelp forests and seagrass meadows. It’s a rather slow swimmer, propelled solely by its large flipper-like feet – because like all moa it completely lacks wings.

Its ancestors’ laid incredibly thin-shelled eggs, and a combination of reducing the hard shell away even further to a more leathery state, then increasing egg retention time inside females’ bodies, has led to this lineage evolving an ovoviviparous form of live birth at sea.

It also has long ribbon-like feathers along its back that mimic the appearance of seaweed fronds. While terrestrial moa have few large predators to worry about, Rimurimuornis has to contend with sharks, orca-like whales, and leopard seal-like pinnipeds, and if its camouflage fails its primary tactic to discourage attacks is defensive defecation.

Spectember/Spectober 2025 #06: A Curiously Charged Choristodere

The Dark Master requested: “Maybe a speculative Placodont or choristoderes. Feel free to do anything, just if they had continued to evolve and survive”

A digital sketch of a speculative descendant of choristodere reptiles. It's an aquatic lizard-like animal with a wide flat head with long narrow jaws, a long neck, four webbed paddle-like limbs, and a long eel-like tail.

In a slightly different timeline to our own, the last surviving choristodere Lazarussuchus didn’t go extinct during the Miocene. Instead it survived in European waterways until the Messinian salinity crisis, and dispersed down into northern Africa when the Strait of Gibraltar closed up.

During one of the “Green Sahara” humid periods its descendants made their way further south, and now Keravnodraco dominusobscuri is found in lakes and rivers throughout the rainforests of West and Central Africa.

About 1m long (3’3″), it hunts small fish and aquatic invertebrates in dark murky waters, using a unique set of electrogenic organs in its elongated neck to actively sense the bioelectric fields of prey in dark murky waters – and also generating electric shocks that can stun its targets or deter predators.

Spectember/Spectober 2025 #05: Strangels

We’re continuing into Spectober with another anonymous request, this one asking for: “Hominids that evolved with 6 limbs, 2 of which are wings. Limb placement is up to you.”

A digital sketch of a speculative six-limbed hominind, pictured in both tree-climbing and gliding poses. It has a monkey-like face with very large eyes, opposable thumbs and first toes, no tail, short fur over its body – and an extra pair of "arms" hanging just behind its shoulders that end in stubby fingerless hands and support a large gliding membrane. In the aerial pose it's shown grabbing hold of its wing-limbs to hold them in place for gliding.

Living several million years in a possible future, Anomalangelus anthropogenis is a bizarre case of a six-limbed primate.

Its additional pair of upper limbs originate from a heritable form of notomelic polymelia, similar to the Developmental Duplications condition seen in our time’s domestic cattle. It has a rather chimeric genome that appears to contain ancestry from several different hominid lineages, suggesting that this strange little creature actually descends from something that was originally genetically engineered.

It’s a tiny dwarfed species, only about 25cm long (~10″), with a highly arboreal omnivorous loris-like lifestyle, spending most of its life clambering around in trees. Although its extra limbs can’t move independently, lacking a lot of functional musculature and nerve connections, they’ve been exapted into brightly-patterned display structures and also serve as attachment for a large gliding membrane – Anomalangelus uses its forelimbs to grab hold of these “wings” while airborne, spreading them out and stabilizing them to form a composite wing.