Geography, Flora and Fauna

Origins

Ryl Madol is a large island which sits almost exactly at the tripoint between the Indian, Eurasian and Australasian tectonic plates. Its geology is thus marked by a violent history of uplift, volcanism, subduction, erosion tearing and sinking. Using Occam’s Razor and thus discounting any supernatural phenomena, Ryl Madol must have begun life as an isolated break-away piece of ancient Gondwana, perhaps having once been its own subcontinent before being torn to shreds by the violent forces of the Earth into its current state. This former landmass may have served as a refuge throughout time where various lineages seem to have evaded the catastrophic mass extinction events of the Devonian, Carboniferous and Permian.

There are infamously much more exotic ideas about its origin. The fact that such a conspicuous landmass did not even exist as a phantom island on any maps before 1908 has raised many eyebrows. Combined with the unusual happenings in the year of its discovery, the extraordinary Palaeozoic fauna and the various physics-defying anomalies, this has led some eccentrics to suggest that Ryl Madol literally did not exist before 1908. Instead it could be a fragment from another timeline of Earth, where maybe one or perhaps all of the aforementioned extinction events did not occur, which a rift in time and space has somehow transported into our reality. It obviously sounds ridiculous, but some of the people who have actually been to the island attest that what they have seen makes it plausible that this truly is an otherworldly place of some kind. The reader is free to decide for themselves on the true origin of the island.

Geography and Climate

Topographic map of Ryl Madol

Ryl Madol is clearly volcanic in nature. Its most obvious feature, if viewed from above, is a large centre lake with many islands, which is actually a huge caldera. Geologic surveys suggest that, despite occasional tremors, the volcano is largely inactive and has not erupted for tens of thousands of years. The lake is ringed by vast swamps, jungle and fern prairies, fed by multiple large and small rivers. These originate in a range of mountains and hills which seem to encase almost the whole island. Southeast of the great crater is another river valley, whose mouth ends in a ruined city. To its west, separated by a range of hills, is a large floodplain with multiple smaller lakes.

The coast of Ryl Madol is geologically unstable, multiple smaller satellite islands splitting off of it and slowly sinking into the sea. Many signs point towards the island having been far larger in the past, with entire sections now possibly being submerged beneath the waves.

As is predictable by its position on the globe, Ryl Madol experiences a quite hot and humid climate. Its mountain ranges help catch a lot of that humidity, leading to almost continual rains across the island, which feed vast rivers, swamps and lakes, perfect for the large population of amphibian and arthropod life which inhabit it.

Flora

Like its animals, the flora of Ryl Madol has a distinctive Palaeozoic character to it, including plant groups that elsewhere on Earth have been extinct for almost 300 million years. Flowering plants and many derived gymnosperm groups are absent. Among the unique flora of the island are also extraordinary fungi and lichen. Some of them can grow to tree-sizes, resembling the ancient Prototaxites of the Late Silurian. Most infamous is the inconspicuous but ubiquitous lichen Rylmadolia toxoprothallium, which is one of the many protectors of the island from the splendors of civilization. Its near-constant spurting of diaspores covers almost all of the island in an invisible cloud of toxic miasma, which the native animals are immune to, but which cause a deadly infection of the lungs in any outsiders. Any attempt at wiping the lichen out to facilitate colonization have failed, as it grows faster than it can be destroyed by conventional means, short of carpeting the whole island with napalm and thus rendering it uninhabitable. 

Baragwanathia, a lycopodian

Trinkophyton, a zosterophyll

Archaeopteris, a progymnosperm tree

Wattieza, an archaic tree-fern

The flora which grows around streams, rivers, lakes and most other non-stagnant waters consists of taxa that are distinctively Devonian in origin. These include mostly primitive spore-bearing plants, Lycopodia, resembling club-mosses or the ancient Baragwanathia. Also present are Zosterophylla, a group of creeping plants broadly resembling ground-pines, unique in the plant kingdom for having evolved both an internal and external bilateral symmetry. Rylian zosterophylls differ from most of their extinct counterparts in that they evolved their own versions of microphyllic leaves and hairs, perhaps independently of other plants. Their discovery here has been of great interest for paleobotanists, as anywhere else on Earth this plant group has gone completely extinct in the Upper Devonian. Also present in these habitats, especially around thermal hot springs, are Rhyniophyta resembling Cooksonia, some of the most archaic known vascular plants, originating in the Silurian and elsewhere already being extinct since the Early Devonian. The trees here consist of gigantic cladoxylopsids (a group of stem-ferns) and progymnosperms, which resemble, respectively, ancient Wattieza and Archaeopteris.

Scaled bark of Lepidodendron

 

Stems of Calamites

The plants which grow in the stagnant swamps and estuaries, as well as the half-artificial lakes created by the beaver-like Castorosaurus, have a Carboniferous flair to them. The most abundant trees here are giant horsetails not unlike Calamites and lycophyte scale-trees resembling Lepidodendron and Sigillaria. Smaller ferns and horsetails also abound. Tree-ferns and archaic conifers of the extinct order Cordaitales can also be found. 

Neuropteris seed-ferns

In the drier lowlands and especially the hilly uplands, the flora takes on a more Permian character, consisting more of seed- than spore-bearing plants. Especially seed-ferns predominate, which bear great resemblance to the likes of Neuropteris, Callipteris and Glossopteris. These grow along cycads and Benettitales. The trees consist of a mix of conifers and gingkos.

Out of these archaic plants, Ryl Madol has also evolved unique taxa which have no counterparts elsewhere in the world or in the fossil record. In most of the jungles can for example be found mammoth ginkgos, giant trees which can grow as large as American redwoods. The semi-aquatic mkodo-fern is no fern at all, but a large, carnivorous zosterophyll, whose water-hanging vines can roll up like a sundew to ensnare and capture small amphibians and fish.

Fauna

Ryl Madol’s most unique characteristic is its primitive wildlife. There are no native birds or mammals, except for a few seals and seabirds that have stranded on the outermost islets. Like all outsiders, they would likely succumb to the toxic spores if they pushed too far inland. While some of the native creatures bear a resemblance to dinosaurs, none so far have been conclusively proven to actually belong to that group, the similarities being merely convergent. Just like the plants, all the animals instead trace their ancestry back to groups which thrived, went extinct or originated in the Palaeozoic Era, with only very few also having a vague Triassic character to them. In the dry regions can be found non-mammalian synapsids and archaic sauropsid reptiles. In the swamps thrive all sorts of stegocephalians, chief among them the temnospondyl amphibians. In the waterways and lakes can be found archaic fish, including even the placoderms of the Devonian and even more ancient jawless armoured fish.

These are all the same animal

Most dominant among the Rylian vertebrates are the “anamniotes”. These are reptiliomorph tetrapods, known from the fossil record through such forms as Limnoscelis, Diadectes or the Lepospondyli, that are closer to us than to true amphibians but still outside the true amniotes (synapsids+reptiles). In their adult stages they have nearly all characteristics we associate with reptiles, such as scaly skin, armour and claws, but they reproduce like amphibians by laying their eggs in water and going through a tadpole stage. This strategy, which from a modern perspective would be merely seen as archaic and transitional, seems to have remained widely successful on the swampy, lake-studded island. Most extraordinarily, Rylian anamniotes undergo a much more complex and lengthened metamorphosis than the likes of frogs and salamanders. In many species, the tadpole will go through multiple aquatic or terrestrial life stages that can differ radically in morphology and ecology from the adult. In some, the sub-adult stages can already be reproductively active and even “decide” to remain in this form instead of growing into a full adult. This way, the biodiversity of the island can seem almost “inflated” for such a restricted place, with multiple different types of creatures in different niches actually all being members of the same species. This also leads to the somewhat funny phenomenon where, depending on the climate, some “pseudo-species” can seemingly go extinct in one year and then suddenly reappear again in the next.

Invertebrate life on Ryl Madol is also full of wonders and horrors. Giant eurypterid “sea scorpions”, both herbivores and carnivores, are found along the waterways and coast. In the undergrowth and deep chasms crawl terrestrial trilobites, some adapted towards carving flesh off carcasses, as well as wingless insects and palaeodictyopterans. Most striking on land are giant arthropods which resemble those of the Carboniferous, including giant millipedes, griffinflies and scorpions, not at all diminished in size from their ancient counterparts Arthropleura, Meganeura and Pulmonoscorpius. Their existence here in a modern atmosphere has revived many debates about insect size-limits, the real constraint perhaps being ecology rather than oxygen. Though some have interpreted these creatures more as another of the many anomalies of the island. Notably, all of these giant arthropods circumvent the problem of having no structural support during molting by simply doing it in water, making them just as dependent on the island’s waterways as the amphibians. To the relief of all archnophobes, so far no species of giant spider is known from Ryl Madol.

The shallow waters and reefs just off the island’s coast also have surprises in store. The reefs themselves consist of tabulate and rugose corals, both taxa which went extinct at the end of the Permian, as well as stromatopore sponges. Brachiopods are abundant instead of clams and a few genuine ammonites, graptolites and blastoids can be sighted on occasion. The strangest beings to sometimes wash up on the Rylian coasts are homalozoans, an ancient group of echinoderms which gave rise to both bilateral as well as completely asymmetrical members.