As promised, the history lesson continues. The following abridged information is from the following website:
http://www.jmooneyham.com/lost-civilization-kerguelen.html#section49Approximately 33,000,000 BC- 28,000,000 BC:
Past events have led to the emergence of a unique species of reptile in the region. These reptiles enjoy chameleon-like natural camouflage, as well as shape-changing capabilities similar to a cobra's hood or bird's wings.
But as birds travel the road into the sky, these reptiles go the other way-- into the ground. At least in daytime. Their tendency to seek refuge underground stems from the evolutionary advantage such habits bring in surviving the periodic tsumanis suffered by their great island, and the maintenance of their long-time nocturnal hunting and scavenging practices. The animals are larger and heavier than most successful flight-worthy birds will ever be. Though their greater size robs them of future flight capabilities, it also allows them a bigger brain than their future bird relatives.
They maintain their natural geomagnetic navigational sense from earlier migratory movements, as well as the avian ultra-violet visual perception. Both these help them become masters of subterranean places.
Their nocturnal nature also allows them to roam and prey upon the surface during the night.
They are omnivorous, capable of feeding on plants or fungi and mushrooms in a pinch, but preferring large insects, fish, or small animals.
The reptiles may spit irritants, which causes a burning sensation on exposed flesh, and can temporarily blind and disorient prey, making capture and kills easier.
Erect, these creatures stand four to six feet tall through their youth. If they get beyond the age of 15-16 years, they may grow much larger. However, competition prevents most of the reptiles from getting that old.
The reptiles grow ever smarter as they get older, but they also grow larger and slower, and often become so large they become stuck in their underground hiding places, and either starve to death, to be eaten by other lucky reptiles who find their carcass (sometimes this is their own young), or become sufficiently weak from hunger in their trap that they may be easily killed and consumed by other, smaller reptiles.
One of the reptile's favorite foods is fresh pseudo-primate meat. Something with a taste and smell somewhat similar to that of later human beings.
The relationship between the reptiles and Kerguelen pseudo-primates first begins with the pseudo-primates being a natural prey animal. In their early history in Antarctica, the pseudo-primates rarely grew larger than an average 20th century housecat-- but such a size range made them offer almost ideal-sized meals for the reptiles. Over time however the primary Kerguelen pseudo-primates grew bigger and stronger and smarter, making it harder for the young reptiles to catch them (older and bigger reptiles could outsmart and trap them on occasion, but were too slow to capture them via speed). As this struggle between the reptiles and pseudo-primates escalated, the intelligence and capacities of both appreciated in response-- eventually leading to semi-sentience in both species.
The older, smarter reptiles gradually began to maintain their own trapped families of pseudo-monkeys near or within their den, breeding them as foodstock. This was much easier than tracking and capturing them in the wild, as well as reduced the need to compete directly with other reptiles. Female reptiles especially liked a snack of pseudo-primates meat before sex, too.
Some of the older, smarter reptiles eventually begin to realize they may lengthen their own lives and increase their sexual success through judicious use of domesticated pseudo-primates. The pseudo-primates can act as sentinals against attacks from other reptiles, gather fungi and plant food, and act upon the surface in daylight when the reptiles prefer not. They may also help maintain and gradually enlarge the reptile's burrow to prevent entrapment, and seek out new and larger burrows if necessary. They can be bait to trap other reptiles, and even help kill other reptiles at times. Plus, they offer a ready supply of meat too, as desired. Suitably trained pseudo-primates will actually help capture and deliver one of their own to feed their reptile master. To the reptile, this training is simply discipline; to the monkeys, it becomes something akin to a crude religious offering or sacrificial ritual.
Eventually the wisest and most powerful reptiles have amassed small armies of personal pseudo-primate slaves. These slaves tend to harass and watch the slaves of other reptiles, often orchestrating assaults upon same, leading to the capture of enemy pseudo-primates. Some of the captured pseudo-primates are eaten by the master reptile. But many become slaves of the reptile's own pseudo-primates, thereby setting up a multiple level hierarchy in the burrow and surrounding lands. In some cases the pseudo-primates eat their slaves, in emulation of their master reptile. However, such cannibalism is usually only ritualistic, as the pseudo-primates prefer certain forms of vegetation as food.
The health and obedience of the pseudo-primates in the burrows is partly maintained by weaker, less promising monkeys (or injured, sick, or less obedient ones) being eaten by the master reptile on a regular basis.
The great master reptiles take little notice when a new, tiny pseudo-primate species begins to interact with the reptile's near human-sized pseudo-primate servants. The servants are delighted with the creatures, quickly adopting them as pseudo-children, and giving them preferential treatment much beyond that offered the captured slaves of their own species.
The master reptile can barely detect the presence of the tiny pseudo-primates, and has no interest in them as food-- they are too small, with far too much bone for what little meat they provide.
The playful, experimental nature of the servants' interaction with the tiny psuedo-primates, plus the real functional complements the tiny beings offer to the servants' own abilities, as well as the increasing complexity of the society developing inside and around the reptile burrows over centuries, then millennia, then longer, eventually lead to breakthroughes in the servant pseudo-primates' understanding of the world and themselves.
Which does not bode well for the master reptiles.
Eventually the pseudo-primate servants become smart enough to cast off their masters, killing many of them in their burrows, before they (the pseudo-primates) leave the burrows behind forever. However, the feudal system impressed upon them by their master reptiles sticks, forming the basis for the pseudo-primates' own new society-- one of a few elite families, each commanding hordes of slaves. The pseudo-primates have effectively been genetically engineered to feel comfortable with such a social hierarchy during the time spent in thrall to the reptiles. The tiny, secondary pseudo-primate companions which helped trigger this new evolutionary stage also stay with the larger pseudo-primates, spreading throughout both the elite and slave populations.
As for the reptiles, their populations tended to expand somewhat at the height of their pseudo-primate enslavement era, but in the aftermath of the pseudo-primates gaining their liberty as well as slaughtering many of their former masters, the reptile population suffers a substantial decline.
After this debacle, the reptile species tends to split into two, differentiated mainly by number, size, lifespan, and potential intelligence. The first and most numerous consist of smaller reptiles (two to six foot standing erect), retaining their great running speed, gliding abilities, and enhanced jump and fall capacities. These small reptiles also retain their feathery trim. But they lose much of their previous potential for intelligence, now plateauing at roughly that of a 20th century adult chimpanzee-- or slightly better. They also lose much of their previous lifespan potential, with the new small species eventually rarely living longer than 20-30 years.
The second variant retains the longer potential lifespan and greater ultimate size, still transitioning from small, fast, and dumb to large, slow, and smart. But it loses most of its plummage as it ages. Its numbers also decline drastically, to not much above that necessary to retain breeding viability in the population. Elders among the second variant eventually learn to abandon their underground burrows before they outgrow them, and take to the water to avoid the direct light of day. Their unusual hearing mechanism also begins to adapt to a more marine existence. Mounting pressures from inland and subterranean killings of the reptiles by the monkey people accelerate this process. The newly aquatic reptiles prefer fresh water in the beginning, but over the eons some evolve a tolerance of salt water as well. Again, the long term inland killing campaign by the ever more efficient pseudo-primates encourages the adaption to the sea, as inland freshwater ways eventually become too dangerous for the large, slow-to-reproduce reptiles to inhabit.
The extra folds of skin which once combined with feathery trim to allow faster ground running for younger, smaller beasts, now gradually evolves into a form conducive to high speed manuevers underwater instead.
The beasts remain air breathers, and so must surface periodically like whales or dolphins. However, they retain their preference for subterranean spaces, and so usually seek out underwater caverns and passages in or about their favorite bodies of water which also offer suitable breathing opportunities for them.
Both species retain their camouflage capabilities. Both expand upon their nocturnal ways, and maintain subterranean preferences of one sort or another.
Over time the numbers of the large reptiles dwindle still further, and each member becomes ever more isolated in the world. However, various environmental and genetic coincidences serve to allow many of those remaining to explore the furthest reaches of their lifespan potential. That potential appears roughly equivalent to 120 to 150 years, perhaps longer. And the greater the age, the greater the size. Sixty to ninety feet in length is not unusual for a male over the age of 60 or 70. The water's buoyancy allows the creatures to become larger and live longer than they ever could on land.
Another lucky break for them is a quirk of genetics that allows the two ever more diverging species to still successfully mate, at least when the larger species member is still young and small. Their progeny sometimes turn out to be of the small species, sometimes the large. This exotic circumstance sometimes makes for a total extinction of the large species in certain regions of the world, for centuries at a time-- but then eventually a new representative appears, seemingly out of nowhere.
For the most part, the older a larger species member gets, the smarter it becomes. However, as there is little or no social interaction between large reptilian members, and progeny are abandoned at or near birth to make it on their own, each individual must start from scratch learning about the world. Thus accumulated knowledge is repeatedly lost with every new generation. This means even a genius reptile is severely limited in its effect upon the world, or what it may do for itself.
Virtually the only social interaction between adults occurs between sexual mates, and this only perhaps once every several years, at most. Some interaction occurs between parent and child too of course; but it is relatively brief. Some isolated members may go without socializing with others of their species for decades.
A few attempts are made by some elder reptiles from time to time to domesticate various sea life such as seals or penguins to act as new servants and domesticated fodder, similar to the role played by the Kerguelen pseudo-primates previously (no, no elder reptiles are aware of the monkey episode by this date; they are all coming up with this idea on their own). Unfortunately for the reptiles, no success comes from the effort.
Both the larger and smaller editions of these reptiles were originally native to the Antarctic and Kerguelen continents and coastlines. They managed to spread beyond those borders however by the time both Antarctia and Kerguelen were no longer habitable.
The Kerguelen pseudo-primates successfully wiped out the large reptiles on Kerguelen long before the exodus to space-- though not in the surrounding sea. Plus, the smaller version was much more difficult to eradicate. But the sinking of the continent almost did the trick for the smaller species, as few members were capable of the swimming feat required to reach the nearest habitable dry land from the doomed continent. However, as the giant reptiles easily roamed the world, and occasionally reproduced themselves as the smaller species, that's largely how the smaller reptile species managed to survive the sinking of Kerguelen to eventually reach and populate every remaining continent on Earth but possibly for their iced-over original homeland of Antarctica.
