The Prepaleoplostic Eon
Most nothing, or at least nothing worth noting geologically. The stones of the planet fart their way together into tectonic harmony.
The Paleoplostic Era – the Yurtomitvitch Period
Organisms figure out what to use all this boron floating around in the ocean for the past billion years and start constructing the first visible evidence of their presence recorded in the fossil record: very very small yurts. Construction is incompetent but diligent. The form of the inhabitants is unknown and presumably they were still mostly liquid.
The Rufflupogust Period
Organisms discover that boron-based structures can ALSO be used to create structure within oneself. Immediately life displays two great lineages: the blohardynopsians, who make elaborate internal scaffoldings and then swallow them; and the bunngowlisia, who make elaborate internal scaffoldings and then force them up their anuses. Both live side by side for entire years before the bunngowlisia abruptly go extinct at the end of the Rufflupogust, about instantly after they first appear.
The Greater Krimmidgish Period
Often called the ‘glory days’ of the Paleoplostic, the Greater Krimmidgish sees blohardynopsian life spread far and wide through the boron seas of Yurm, becoming bottom-dwelling scavengers, bottom-dwelling grazers, bottom-dwelling predators, and even a brief and terrifying experimental period where they floated just above the ocean floor.
The Lesser Krimmidgish Period
The inanimate and insensate bacterial mats that are at the base of all blohardynopsian food webs develop the capacity to float at the water’s surface. The entirety of the blohardynopsian lineage is wiped from the surface of Yurm within mere centuries; their only modern survivors are those little slimy things that try to eat your toenails in swamps.
The Whorlibord Period
A small and innocuously group of bacterial mat-dwelling creatures develop the snoot, an anatomical wonder that allows both breathing and eating with a simple flex and snivel. The group, termed innocuopods (after the late Horthord P. Innocuous), thrives and diversifies into a breathtaking array of forms, spreading into many of the old blohardynopsian niches and more besides.
One lineage of creatures become known around now, although their past remains hazy. Like the blohardynopsians and the bunngowlisia they use boron structures to keep their internals structured; unlike either they shun housing and don’t creature their internal support externally; instead building inside themselves using little tiny hands on the inward-facing surface of their skin, called creepi. The animals themselves, creepodonts, will remain a fixture of the seas for a very long time, thanks to their powerful crotchetiness.
The Lubbery Period
The oceans of Yurm dry up abruptly, forcing most of the organisms in them to stand on their own ten legs for the first time. Most perish, some grumble, a few thrive. In particular several of the most powerfully-snooted innocuopods do quite well for themselves – now their snoots can breathe, eat, and loco-mote for them! Truly a marvel of evolution. Many bacterial mats discover that adhering to dry rocks is at least as pleasant as a soggy water’s surface, and within ten million years of the Great Drying, life appears quite congenial.
Then the oceans of Yurm return from near-orbit in the greatest precipitation ever to occur, wiping out ten times the number of species disturbed in the initial hubbub. The Sog remains the most titanic disaster in the history of life on, around, and generally in the vicinity of Yurm. We can only aspire to top it.
The Mezzosorpanoplostic Era – the Quintuplic Period
The Quintuplic is a time of great hardship and great innovation: the few lucky snoot-bearers and bacterial matters that survive go apeshit across the surface of Yurm, sea and water and air alike. The sky buzzes with a thousand thousand whiny little heliwings; the water is abroil with fierce and chewy creatures from shorks to shirrts; and on land one million different kinds of creepodont-related creepostrophes lurch sulkily across the landscape in great pouts that shake the very ground.
At the close of the Quintuplic all five remaining continents bump together at once and the resulting shockwave exterminates all of the innocuopods, most of the creepodonts, a bunch of the creepostrophes, and all of the shirrts. None of the shorks though. They did quite well for themselves.
The Phlegmic Period
The violent wobbling of the continents produces a permanently shaky and highly wiggly climate for life; and the Phlegmic is famously home to the dawn of the jiggliest animals ever to swerve their way drunkenly over Yurm: the jauntertrophes. This extreme branch of the creepostrophe family tree squiggled their way to ever-more-scrambled heights throughout the entire Mezzosorpanoplostic Era, and indeed early scientists refused to believe the most impressive of their kind could even exist on dry land without undergoing fatal and immediate squiggling. Modern math has proven otherwise.
The Boddaceous Period
The Boddaceous was a period mostly consistent of lava, and the way life responded to this in many ways determined its future success. The jauntertrophes shuddered their way above it and around it and a bit to the side of it; crossing entire trans-continental lava fields without so much as wobbling into a single plume of smoke. The shorks dove deep and ate rocks. The creepostrophes ate the lava. And the creepodonts dropped dead.
Then a very large rock slammed into Yurm and everyone’s ingenuity was at best a huge waste of time.
The Seeloplostic Era – the Postpaleoplesic Period
The Seeloplostic begins with a much-diminished Yurm. The jauntertrophes are dead; the creepodonts are dead; the creepostrophes aren’t doing too hot, and the most prevalent type of animal on Yurm were little ugly bug things that ate fast and died faster – a dubious ecological niche, it’s got to be said. With little competition and a vast, devastated world open to all, they were free to eat faster and die faster than they ever had before. They were called copeiforms, and they were our ancestors, except for all the ones that died.
Which were most of them. Copeiform evolution believed in error moreso so than trial, with such luminaries as Puborre’s Witherbling (which fed entirely upon its own young); the Lesser Mock Skammer (which possessed eight pairs of redundant legs); and the Rippled Wharf (whose courting rituals appeared to consist of building a tiny ball and sealing itself inside forever).
The Postpostunpaleoplesicish Period
The beginnings of the modern ecosystem are more clearly visible as the Postpaleoplesic gives way to the Postpostunpaleoplesicish. Copeiforms begin to settle down into the sober middle-management phase of their existence, with the vosperoids and their plain colouration, bland legs, spherical torso, and modest, unassuming little brains reigning supreme in most niches thanks to a great efficiency of effort. Their exciting and whimsical wuuly competition were reduced to relictual fauna, surviving only in isolated paradise islands whose gorgeous, peaceful serenity and plentiful food left them plump, flightless, and – according to our ancestor’s records – delicious.
The Now
It falls to us, as examples of the mightiest single species ever birthed upon Yurm, to record its events for all posterity, which will doubtlessly not include us. As this chronicle is written we are locked into an irrevocable death spiral, having spent the last two hundred years industriously mining ocean sediments formed of dead creepodonts only to realize halfway in that they were filling our atmosphere with deadly oxygen (knew those would come back to bite us, the surly little bastards). Since changing things is somewhat difficult for vosperoid organisms, our principle strategy has been to resign ourselves to our fates and grimly trudge towards our deaths. I hope this chronicle of our world’s history of life explains why this was a winning tactic for our ancestors, and so too for us. Soon this volume will be loaded onto a satellite and launched beyond the farthest limits of our solar system. May it never reach another organism benighted and stupid enough to read it.
-Walmpurt Toos, Chief Botherer of Finklefaak United Collegiate Pit. Esteemed.