Roughly two million living species have been identified on this planet and far more have
yet to be described. However, paleontology shows that life was once very different from
today—with the planet previously being home to a vast array of strange and exotic lifeforms.
Yet even the entirety of Earth’s evolutionary history is just a tiny fraction of evolution’s
nearly limitless potential. Speculative biology is the genre of fiction that seeks to explore these
biological possibilities and oddities. The genre follows hard science fiction qualities that often
ponders alternative evolutionary scenarios—such as what life could be like on other worlds,
or even what the descendants of today’s flora and fauna may look like. Many speculative
biology projects exist online, but you can find an amazing selection of artists and their projects in
Astrovitae magazine. Astrovitae is a free, online magazine with an aim to bring the creators of
worldbuilding projects together to show off their work to a wider audience and foster collaboration.
Most of the projects featured in Astrovitae Magazine, from conceptualization to the conduction
of research, are entirely made by the artists themselves. Contributors can submit articles
about their projects, providing a detailed look into their unique, alien planets or biomes.
The magazine releases biannually, with a new issue planned to release every April and September.
Astrovitae articles are split up into three main categories: Captivating Worlds,
the Artist Spotlight, and the Creature Compendium. The first category is Captivating Worlds, and is
the primary content Astrovitae has to offer. It's where artists showcase their unique world, biomes,
and interesting creatures. It's the largest type of article featured in the magazine, and the one
with the most detailed representations about a speculative project. The second category is
Artist Spotlight. This tends to be a bit less of a refined article and instead focuses more about
what occurs “behind the scenes” of a speculative project. This section gives artists an opportunity
to share their creative process, design philosophy, where they go to seek inspiration,
and are also able to show off sketches and unfinished pieces of their art. Lastly,
there is the Creature Compendium. This section is exactly how it sounds, it is a collection
of various creatures created by many different artists. These creatures are often accompanied by
a brief description that gives the reader a small snippet into another speculative biome and world.
Each article in Astrovitae has several icons above the title. These serves as guides for
what type of content it explores. These include the setting, such as whether it focuses on alien
world or paleontology, to what it emphasizes, such as the environment or microorganisms. The
magnifying glass icon indicates the articles prioritizes conceptualization, while the
microscope icon indicates that the article places a greater emphasis on research and plausibility.
Next, this video will give an overview of a six of the worldbuilding projects featured in Astrovitae.
It is important to remember that these are merely brief overviews of much larger articles,
which are themselves often introductions to or smaller pieces of greater worldbuilding projects.
The first project that will be highlighted is the Alternate Cenozoic Project by Thien Anh Nguyen.
It is not the first speculative biology project to wonder what the world would be like if the
non-avian dinosaurs hadn’t died out. Unlike most, the Alternate Cenozoic Project doesn’t take place
in an isolated location where the dinosaurs miraculously survived nor a world where the
K–Pg extinction event never happened. Instead, the infamous meteor was smaller, but combined
with a later mass extinction, many iconic clades still died out, including the tyrannosaurids,
sauropods, and all but a few ceratosaurs. Instead, less famous groups of dinosaurs have
replaced them as the world’s primary megafauna, including the ornithomimosaurs, parksosaurs,
and troodontids, who have become the new top predators. Most of the creatures the project
explores are primarily from its version of the modern day, the Holocene epoch. The Alternate
Cenozoic Project is explored in more depth in Issue 2 and art from it also appears in Issue 3.
Issue 2 of Astrovitae showcases a project from the founder and editor-in-chief of the magazine,
Domenic Pennetta. His speculative project, named Project Perditus, explores a planet analogous to
Earth called “Perdita c”. The article focuses on a clade of fish-like marine organisms called
“feather tongues”. These organisms are categorized by their slender shaped bodies, multiple gill
slits, and most notably, a hydrovascular cavity that allows the animal to simultaneously breath
while filter feeding. The feather tongue’s oral apparatus has a feather-like feeding crown.
One group of feather tongues, the “butterfly whales”, possess broadened feeding crowns adapted
to capturing the most plankton possible. Some smaller species, such as the “barbell tongues”,
possess two feeding crowns. Lastly, the most fearsome and recently diverging group of
feather tongues are the quill tongues. The feeding tendrils of these creatures have become a sharp
barb or barbs, which they use to harpoon prey. The article in Astrovitae focuses not just on
the feather tongues themselves, but also details their evolution from creatures called dart worms.
Issue 2 of Astrovitae also has an article about the Artechocene Project by Alejandro Martínez
Fluxá. Much like the famous program the Future is Wild, it speculates how life may bounce back after
a human induced mass extinction. The article in Astrovitae is about a new clade descended
from today’s sea snakes named the cetophidians, who have filled the void left by the extinction
of the marine mammals and a number of fish. They have evolved both fins and massive size,
becoming a more realistic take on the sea serpents of myth. Most cetophidians are tiamats,
a clade whose adults stage live as filter feeders. However, tiamats juveniles are pursuit
predators like their ancestors. By the time the Artechocene Project takes place, the only
non-tiamats cetophidians left are the serfish, who belong to the genus Paracetophis. Serfish
remain pursuit predators throughout their lives and have retained the venom of their ancestors.
Issue 3 of Astrovitae contain an article about Project Temere, by Michal Janovský. The article
focuses on the Salaš plains, an alien ecosystem which is heavily inspired by the African savannas.
However, the Salaš plains have been shaped strong symbiotic relationships. The hollow trunks of the
gigantic Koliba trees provide shelter for eusocial carnivores called valachs, whose
waste is used by the Koliba trees as fertilizer. Some of this fertilizer, combined with moisture
captured from the air, seeps into the ground water around the trees. This allows the nearby plants,
and the herbivores that feed on them, to prosper throughout the year. The valachs have also formed
mutualistic relationships with some of these herbivores, protecting them in exchange for food.
Another alien world inspired by Paleozoic marine life is Planet Polinices by J. J.
Aniorte. An article in Issue 3 focuses on the clade Polyzoa, the dominant clade on Polinices.
While the polizoans may look reminiscent of modern marine life, they are actually colonial organisms,
meaning their bodies are made of multiple connected but separate organisms. Examples
of colonial organisms from the real world include corals and the Portuguese man o' war.
The article in Astrovitae gives a brief overview of three of the seven polyzoa clades.
One of these, Ankylenterea, is unique because each organism in the colony, called a zooid, shares the
same digestive tract. Most ankylentereans have shells and are mobile. In contrast,
polizoans belonging to the Order Onirocolia have instead evolved to become primarily sedentary.
Most projects featured in Astrovitae take place in world’s different from our own,
whether in an alternate timeline or on an alien planet. Speculative Radiodonts by John Meszaros,
which appears in Issue 3, instead seeks to explore a gap in our knowledge regarding the evolution of
Radiodonta. Including the iconic Anomalocaris, the radiodonts were an extinct clade related to
arthropods which had a pair of large appendages in front of their mouths. While they were presumed to
have gone extinct during the Cambrian Period, that changed in 2009 when a new species of radiodont,
Schinderhannes bartelsi, was discovered in rocks from the Early Devonian. This was nearly
one hundred million years after the presumed extinction of Radiodonta, which inspired John
Meszaros to speculate how other members of the resulting ghost linage may have changed
over that time. The resulting art includes stationary predators such as the Stone Shrimp,
the parasitic Moustache Ghoul Shrimp, and filter feeders such as the Bearded Ceticaris.
While most radiodonts known to science in 2009 were large predators, discoveries made since then
have vindicated the more ecologically diverse radiodonts by John Meszaros.
For instance, the radiodont Aegirocassis was an actual filter feeder and even lived
during the Ordovician Period, twenty million years after the end of the Cambrian Period!
The creatures and ecosystems featured here are but a small taste of what is present in Astrovitae.
If you wish to see more, there is a link to Astrovitae in the description. Issue 4 is set to
launch on September 30th. Although it is currently too late to send a submission for Issue 4, anyone
interested in the genre of speculative biology is welcome to submit their art or speculative project
to Astrovitae. If you are interested in submitting work to the magazine, send a snippet of your art
to the editor at astrovitaeofficial@gmail.com or see www.astrovitae.com/submissions to review the
magazine's submission guidelines and other additional details.
Thank you to Domenic Pennetta, the founder and editor of Astrovitae, for helping this video
become a reality. Also, a thank you to the other five artist whose worlds were showcased in this
video: Alejandro Martínez, J. J. Aniorte, John Meszaros, Michal Janovský, and Thien Anh Nguyen.
And finally, a thank you to all of the other artist who have contributed to
Astrovitae and who agreed to have their art featured in this video.