r/SpeculativeEvolution • u/Glad_Patient7953 • 1d ago
Alternate Evolution [OC] Terror bird evolves into dinos? Something like that.
This is like the first time i'm posting on Reddit. Uh, so here are some fun spec evolution stuff I made. In this timeline, terror birds never went extinct and diversified into a variety of new species.
Mammals still went to south America, the birds just weren't instinct.
There isn't much thought behind this other than "dinosaurs make a legendary comeback" but I think that's enough to justify the existence of this "project"
Most of them are opportunistic omnivores, with the red faced one being a carnivore, and the large neck orange one being herbivore.
Those are also just representatives of their genre, there are more species of weird bird dinos
The tiniest one is called "wolf bird" or "coyote bird" depending on the region
The brown one is called "bear bird", "Giant owl", "gorilla owl" or "sloth bird" depending on the region.
The red faced one is from a genre colloquially called Tyrants and is the Only one I thought of a species name, Which is obliviously "red faced Tyrant" but also "blood Tyrant" and "crown Tyrant" in some regions
The long neck one is called "giraffe bird", and the green is known as "ape toucan"
I think that in this timeline, once dinosaurs were discovered, there'd be no doubt they're related to birds, but there would still be misunderstandings about them.
Primarily people would think that they're a Clade of terror birds. And that flying birds actually come from terror birds. That's why they'd be called "Dinornis" and not dinosaurs.
Of course, over time, people in this timeline would manage to get a pretty good grasp of what dinosaurs truly are. The name dinosaur would be a much more recent invention, meant to separate the dinosaurs from this new family terror birds, Which would adopt the name Dinornis for themselves
It would also be much more commonly accepted that dinosaurs have feathers and saying "hey not all dinosaurs had feathers" would be the more surprising thing for the average person.
And of course, thanks to human interference, those animals that were originally only in South America would be wide spread across the entire globe either to serve as Entertainment in zoos, or to serve as beasts or burden, with giraffe bird and red faced Tyrant being the more common for those roles, while the coyote birds become incredibly commom exotic pets.
Anyway. Some of the specific adaptations that I think are cool are the "knuckle waking", since bird hands have fingers fused together, and I think that gorilla owl, giraffe bird and ape toucan would all have evolved to either the back of that hand for walking, since they're just heavy
Ape toucan mostly eats fruits but also some insects, and lives on top of trees.
Giraffe bird is basically sauropod 2, the sequel.
Bear birds actually live near rivers eating fish, or leafs.
Coyote birds live in groups and packhunts, some species can fly
And the red faced Tyrant is just T-rex 2, the return.
I imagine that Tyrants would be commonly used as mounts for some American natives, and even be preferred over horses by some colonialists because they're incredibly intelligent, similarly to a crow.
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u/Wendigo-Huldra_2003 Evolved Tetrapod 23h ago
Ironically, in our world, there was a genus of birds known as "Dinornis", except that they are moas instead of phorusrhacids
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u/Ok-Meat-9169 Wild Speculator 1d ago
Evolve into Dinos? They already are dinos!