A Mind is a Beautiful Thing

A mind is a beautiful thing... for a placoderm.

A long time ago, my friend Jonas started a contest for free-form "alien" design.
[link]

Here is my submission.

Antiarch Placoderms ( [link] ) were early fish that had unusual properties such as armor-plated bodies and jointed, arthropod like front fins. Some species like Bothriolepis, looked like fat lampreys embedded through carapaces of lobsters. They had fairly mobile, claw-like front fins that may have enabled them to crawl through the sediment, or even onto land like mudskippers!

Suppose that the Antiarchs had beaten the later varieties of fish earlier on in the "land race" during the late Devonian.

Weird, polydactyl fish-salamanders like Acanthostega were the ancestors of every land-living vertebrate today. As the Acanthostegans crawled on their eight-finned stubs on -this- Devonian, they got a rather unpleasant surprise.

Heavily armored, predatory Antiarchs had gotten there first. As the 'Stegans quickly found out, the croc-sized, armored, pincer toting Antiarchs made short work of competitors on land. The 'Stegans reverted back to a littoral existence and for the rest of Earth's history, did not get more exciting than evolutionary footnotes.

Triumphant on land, the Antiarchs flourished. They shuffled around at first, and refined their front fins into fully functional limbs over time. Crawling, snake-like beasts were soon replaced with awkward, gangly bipeds.

Some of the bipeds folded their tails underneath for support. In time, the tail turned into a separate limb of its own. Of course by that time, the Antiarchs were as far from their boxy ancestors as lizards would have been from lungfish.

Once again, tripedal dynasties battled each other over eons, refining weapons and strategies that gave them warm blood, terrestrial reproduction, speed and intelligence. The specter of mass extinction hung over them throughout. Several times it struck, sweeping the decks clean and randomizing the survivors' chances as masters of land, or scurriers underneath.

Some tripods took back to the sea, like bony crocodiles with oars at first, smooth, sleek hunters later on. Some hollowed out their bones and filled them with air sacs and grew to unseen sizes. Their children thread the earth like giant, iron cranes. Still others took to the sky with spectacular arrangements of wings, fingers and legs. There, they faced overgrown descendants of insects, which had all the time to master the sky in the absence of vertebrate competition.

Some species remained generalists on land, or in the forests and jungles of improbably large, scaled trees. Cataclysms shifted the land and made one habitat give way to another. Some species survived because they could protect themselves well.

Others could afford to eat anything and everything. And one variety made it because they had the curiosity to observe and think about the world around it...

One of them lit a fire one day... on this Earth, mankind still had thirty million years to do the same.