The Age of Awakening

The Cambrian seas are crowded with forms that will never again walk the Earth. Some are tiny. Some are grotesque. A few are already hunters large enough to terrorise the animals around them.

The strange seas

Trilobites crawl across the bottom in countless shapes and sizes. Some scrape food from the mud. Others burrow beneath it. Some scavenge. Some hunt.

Between them move stranger things. Hallucigenia picks its way across the seabed beneath a crown of defensive spines. Five-eyed Opabinia searches the sediment with a long, flexible grasping organ.

Above them swims Anomalocaris, one of the first great hunters of open water. Its enormous eyes scan the sea ahead while paired grasping limbs close around soft-bodied prey.

The long-shell hunters

As ages pass, the seas grow richer still. Reefs spread across warm shelves. Shell beds gather beneath the waves. Fishes become more common.

Then enormous cephalopods appear.

Great straight shells move through the water like living towers. Beneath them hang grasping tentacles and watchful eyes.

In the most isolated seas, monstrous members of these lineages survive as the Giant Orthocones of later legend.

The sea scorpions

In the shallows, another lineage appears: the Eurypterids.

At first they are only one more strange arthropod among many. In later eons some will become formidable hunters.

Rare supernatural bloodlines will eventually produce creatures such as the Bluetip Eurypterid.

The cephalopod line continues

The straight-shelled cephalopod lineages of these seas continue to diversify. True ammonoids are still in the future: they appear in the Early Devonian from later cephalopod ancestors. Their distant descendants will become some of the most recognisable shelled creatures in Earth’s history.

In Lost World waters, monstrous descendants survive as the Ammonites of later ages.

Ice over the world

The change is not instantaneous. Earth cools during a long Late Ordovician climatic shift; changes in the carbon cycle and ocean productivity contribute to a colder world. Gondwana lies across the high southern latitudes, placing vast continental ground where ice sheets can grow.

By the Hirnantian, cooling has become full glaciation. Water that once filled shallow continental seas is locked into ice on land.

Then the seas fall.

Great ice sheets spread across Gondwana. Shallow marine habitats contract dramatically as water is locked upon the continents. Reefs wither. Whole branches of marine life disappear.

It is one of Earth’s first great mass extinctions. The crisis comes in major pulses: first cooling and falling sea level strip away warm shallow-water habitats; then changing circulation and oxygen conditions punish survivors as the climate shifts again.

But the survivors inherit a world with a new frontier.

Beyond the water lies land—but it is not empty. By the Late Ordovician, primitive land plants and fungal communities already occupy wet terrestrial surfaces; the Silurian will expand a frontier that has already begun.

For most earlier animal life, dry land has seemed like a wasteland—but by the Late Ordovician that is no longer true. Green stains already established before the extinction now spread more widely along wet ground. Spores ride the wind. Rhizoids, microbial films and fungal threads work into stone and sediment. Tiny animals follow.

The first living ground

The first terrestrial landscapes are nothing like forests. Low plants cling to wet ground. Fungal hyphae and microbial films work through damp sediment, weathering minerals, recycling organic matter and forming symbioses with some early plants. Myriapods and arachnid relatives move between patches of vegetation and exposed mud.

There is no grass.

No flowers.

No birdsong.

Only wind, water, spores and crawling things.

The Fungoid awakening

Among Earth’s already ancient natural fungal ecosystems, a few magically altered networks develop something unprecedented.

Some colonies begin to share more than food.

They share warning. Memory. Sensation.

The spores between them become a language.

These are the oldest known Fungoid peoples of Earth. They are exceptional; most fungi remain ordinary, non-sentient Earth life. Silurian magical fungal fauna also includes the Ascomoid, a predatory spore-creature rather than part of one universal fungal civilisation.

Their settlements are not towns of stone. A colony is itself a living community: chambers beneath the ground, fruiting groves above it and great hidden webs carrying thought from one body to another.

The Demon Queen finds Earth

Fungi are already ancient when Zuggtmoy finds them.

She comes from the Abyss not as their mother, but as their corrupter.

Where her influence takes hold, fruiting bodies swell into predatory growths. Spores carry madness and obedience. Networks once used to share nourishment become paths by which domination spreads from colony to colony.

Some corrupted lines become ancestors or distant kin of the Fungoids and Myceloids known to later ages.

The Spore Wars

The Fungoids fight by cutting themselves apart.

Infected networks are burned or buried. Whole colonies sever their deepest connections. Survivors retreat into caverns where corruption cannot travel so easily through the living earth.

The pillars

As the Silurian gives way to the Devonian, strange columns rise over landscapes still dominated by low vegetation.

They are Prototaxites.

Some tower several metres above the ground, branchless and silent, standing where no true forest yet exists.

For generations scholars of later ages call them giant fungi.

They are stranger than that.

Their surviving structure belongs comfortably to no known fungal lineage, and perhaps to no living branch of life at all.

By the close of Eon XXVIII, the continents are still harsh, open places—but they are alive.

The next age will give that life height.

The Devonian is a world divided between two revolutions. In the water, jawed fishes become rulers. On land, vegetation rises into the first true forests.

The armoured lords of the sea

The seas belong to armour. Here the defensive experiments of earlier jawless vertebrates culminate in jawed placoderms: fishes whose skull and forebody are encased in heavy bony plates, including some of the most formidable predators Earth has yet produced.

Placoderms patrol reefs, rivers and open water with their heads enclosed in plates of bone.

Some remain small.

Others become giants.

Among them rises Dunkleosteus.

It hunts without ordinary teeth. Sharpened plates of bone close together like blades. Few animals of its world can meet such a predator without becoming prey.

Sharks and the lobe-finned bloodlines

Early sharks spread through the waters alongside ray-finned and lobe-finned fishes.

Among the latter are the ancestors and ancient kin of the Coelacanth.

Their descendants will survive the fall of the placoderms and carry one of the oldest vertebrate bloodlines into later seas. The Devonian also sees the first true ammonoids appear, finally fulfilling the coiled-shell lineage foreshadowed by older cephalopods.

The forests rise

Meanwhile, the land changes beyond recognition.

Plants that once hugged the ground become tall enough to cast shadows. Simple tree-like forms gather into Earth’s first forests. Later come great woody plants with spreading crowns and deep roots.

The old pillar world disappears beneath them.

Roots split rock and bind riverbanks.

Soils deepen.

Fallen plant matter gathers upon the ground.

Rivers change course around living barriers.

For the first time, an animal on land can move beneath a canopy.

The fin-to-limb threshold

In weed-choked shallows and slow river channels, some fishes begin doing something new.

Their paired fins become stronger.

They brace against mud, submerged roots and the bottoms of shallow pools.

Tiktaalik can raise its head on a mobile neck and force its body through water too shallow for ordinary swimming.

It is still a fish.

But the old boundary is weakening.

Later comes Acanthostega.

It still belongs largely to the water, yet its limbs end in true digits.

The old minds beneath the water

In trenches far below the new fishes, Aboleths still remember seas that existed before armour, jaws or forests.

They are diminished, but not gone.

Some regard the multiplying vertebrates as brief biological noise.

Others recognise something more dangerous: Earth has become too diverse for any ancient power to dominate completely.

The dying seas

Then the waters begin to fail—not in a single instant, but through repeated Late Devonian crises.

Across several extinction pulses, great reefs collapse as climate, nutrient cycles and ocean circulation become unstable. Whole marine communities disappear. Vast stretches of sea become poor in oxygen.

The placoderms do not survive the ending.

Dunkleosteus vanishes with them.

But sharks remain.

Bony fishes remain.

Forests remain.

Arthropods remain upon the land.

Tetrapods now possess limbs and digits.

The next age inherits all of them.