Earthly Aliens – an Essay

By Tim Woodstrover

Imagine a scenario in which all the rhinos, giraffes or crocodilians of the world went suddenly extinct. Imagine that horseshoe crabs, or okapi, or camels, or orangutans were to vanish in the blink of an eye (pick a card; any card). Fifteen years after this extinction event, you have a child. Driving them home from school one day you drift into reminiscence, retelling a trip to the zoo you took on a weekend during university study. As you rattle off the diverse list of zoo inhabitants, your child turns to look at you, asking about that last one you said.

You explain to the eager nipper that although this animal has been extinct for a while now and they will unfortunately never see one in the flesh, you can describe it to them, and you might have an old picture somewhere they could look at. For now, you go about describing the animal, and before five words are out of your mouth you have drawn upon one or two familiar, extant animals to help alleviate the difficulty of starting from scratch using language too coarse for the task. This takes you closer towards your goal, but the child squints ponderously, struggling to visualise the unfamiliar creature. Eventually, through cutting and sticking features borrowed from different animals onto the canvas of your child’s mind, their brow relaxes, and they stare out of the window, integrating this newly modelled animal into the roster of their imaginary theatrics.

As you move backwards through time, you quickly find you can pick creatures from the land or seascape one after the other and find no accurate analogue in any modern day creature, at least in terms of explainable likeness relative to existing animals.

Compare this scenario to the present – experts in Pleistocene Palaeontology could probably describe a Cave Lion, Irish Elk, Cave Bear or Hippopotamus of the era such that you might construct an accurate resemblance in your mind’s eye by ‘citing’ just one extant animal while perhaps also explaining differences in size and lifestyle. Trying the same with a Megatherium or Glyptodon, you may need to cite a few more. On the whole, the further back in time your animal or plant existed, the more likely you are to have to cite more extant animals to try and explain even their vaguest and most superficial likenesses to those unfamiliar with them. Now, due to the non-linear development and specialisation of life on earth and the unpredictability of environmental catastrophes such as meteor impacts and volcanic events, there are numerous exceptions to this rule – one prime example is the coelacanth, which looked about the same when it was hauled from the deep sea in 1938 as it did four hundred million years ago in the oceans of the Devonian period. Additionally, Crocodilians of today are not so different to some of their early ancestors from the Cretaceous, eighty-three million years in the past.

But this rule holds true as a generality, and by applying it as you move backwards through time, you quickly find you can pick creatures from the land or seascape one after the other and find no accurate analogue in any modern day creature, at least in terms of explainable likeness relative to existing animals. This is one reason that worldwide dragon myths are sometimes thought to arise from fossil discoveries that defied explanation in times gone by, and why past clergymen of the UK attributed ammonite fossils to St Patrick’s famous banishing of snakes from Ireland, despite the fact that even poorly preserved ammonites bear little similarity to any modern snakes upon even the shallowest investigation. In other cases, likenesses are analogous and very little else is – the whale Odobenocetops looked astonishingly similar to a walrus, and its name literally means ‘walrus whale’.

Nevertheless, lifeforms that seem impossible in comparison with today’s fauna were once varied and widespread globally. The Carboniferous period yields many such strangenesses – the identity of the creature dubbed “the Tully Monster” has been debated for over seventy years without arrival at a definitive answer, while lifeforms such as Etacystis and Escumasia are strange enough to defy any classification attempts in a similar style. In some cases progress has been made with the enigmatic fauna of this period; the mysterious Typhloesus has features indicating it may belong to the molluscs, although distinctions are currently drawn no finer than that – it could be an ancestral relative of modern slugs and snails, but to gain deeper insights more work must be done. Still further back during the Devonian age of fishes, the land was dominated by colossal eight-metre sentinels that rose from the primeval soil like the outstretched fingers of long-buried giants. These organisms were Prototaxites, a group recently discovered to form a whole new kingdom ranking among the plants, animals and fungi, so completely unique they could have no possible place within these familiar groups or any others.

Upon reaching deep into time towards the earliest known forms of life – that is, into the Cambrian and Precambrian – describing the animals of the time becomes near impossible using only the twenty-first century toolkit of familiar likenesses, despite primeval relations connecting them with some modern groups. Attempting to describe Cambrian fauna such as Opabinia, Anomalocaris, Sanctacaris, Odontogriphus, Cambropachycope or Hallucigenia will prove this point. The utter unfamiliarity of Anomalocaris and Hallucigenia are their own namesakes: ‘Anomalos’ is the etymological root of the former, giving us the word ‘anomaly’ and meaning ‘peculiar’ in this context, while the latter was so considered so improbable upon its discovery that it would only ever have been perceived as real in some fevered hallucination, and was named accordingly. While they may look comparably less suited to gliding down the ramp of a UFO, the Precambrian produced an organism that is probably the most alien to us of all yet discussed. These were the Trilobozoans, and were the only animals known to have ever had bodies arranged in symmetrical thirds. This blueprint alone would never have been considered viable by science if not for well-preserved fossil discoveries.

So how is it possible then, that just fifty-one years ago, eminent scientists were so incredulous at animals such as Opabinia that they laughed in the faces of their own colleagues as they earnestly presented their findings, which featured reconstructions still supported by modern science? And should Opabinia have survived long enough to have swum the same beaches as human holidaymakers, why should we have considered it any more a stranger to us than a commonplace crab or starfish?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the adjective ‘alien’ as “belonging or relating to another person, place or thing” and as “differing in nature or character typically to the point of incompatibility”, and it is clear that these creatures meet the criteria for such description. They lived in places so different and incompatible with our world today that we would never likely have survived there, and even the whispered traces of their ancient lives come rising to our terrestrial platform from rocks buried in places deep underground, long hidden from waking eyes. Though not strictly extraterrestrial, these creatures’ possession of such alien characteristics makes them ‘aliens’ in the sense of their unfamiliarity, and the time and place driven nature of this unfamiliarity reinforces this.

And should Opabinia have survived long enough to have swum the same beaches as human holidaymakers, why should we have considered it any more a stranger to us than a commonplace crab or starfish?

This case that planet earth has sustained aliens is partially underpinned by a perspective bias that has implications for our view of natural history and wildlife today. Firstly, we must not ignore the mind-boggling fact that these creatures existed in their masses on this same great planet we call home! They swarmed under the same sun upon which we rely for food, and stranger still, the bodies of organisms privy to the secret nature of the Tully Monster now directly provide the energy we use to get to and from the ordinary settings that host our daily grind (oil and its derivatives including petroleum and diesel). While it provides us with useful and informative insights as to the history of life on earth, we should not permit scientific knowledge about ancient organisms to demystify these unimaginably alien tenants of the past and their complex importances for the function of today’s world – even the most artistic of human minds would have struggled to conjure such fascinating likenesses. Secondly, we must invert the theory and apply to not only our most exotic but to our most common modern wildlife the idea that should they now vanish abruptly, they would immediately begin to take on this factor of “alienness” that would gradually turn them into full-blown aliens. Likewise, should a crab, okapi, giraffe, rhinoceros or even common horse have suddenly come into existence where it had not existed before, it would immediately be considered alien in the same way, and surely prove so fascinating as to ensnare the hearts and curiosity of humans worldwide.

The bottom line of all this is that we are justified in any mystifying, inspiring, enamoured, protective or awestruck feeling that comes over us relating to the natural world past or present. Why scenes of natural grandeur and splendour have inspired such artists as Turner, Monet, and Van Gogh has prompted a few explanations, but I suspect at least some part of it is owed to the fact that the natural world makes up its own theatre – in set, setting, plot and characters – in which we both follow after and share the stage with creatures that are alien to us as humans. While driving extant, familiar species to extinction and watching them transform into aliens through the subsequent fading of their familiarity does is proof of the proposed concept, it is cruelly and irreversibly retrospective and will only propagate an apathetic yearning for what once was and can now never be. Thus, the alien aspect of organisms making up the natural world provides a conceptual justification for conservation efforts as well as a source of appreciation for the rich diversity of natural history that came before our rendition of the natural world.

Images: Both: Prehistoric CM via Wikimedia Commons