Mesotylos

I remember still one of the very first expeditions I undertook on Ryl Madol. I was still a young researcher, given rather mundane tasks. There was an area close to the coast that was designated as relatively “safe”, where I routinely documented the local population and diversity of carnivorous cycads (yes, the plant, not the insect). Technically it was a task I could have done by myself, I knew my way with a gun in case any dangerous animal might have appeared, but, of course, the research base did not fully trust me, so they signed up one of the hired mercenaries to escort me each time I went. It was pretty simple. We donned our gasmasks, took a small motorboat out from the base islet and drove it upriver to the research area. Most days were quite peaceful. Most of the big, scary things live further inland and most of the aquatic life gets scared by the sound of the boat. The guy, Johnson, was sadly not that talkative. He seemed rather annoyed to be my “babysitter”. He often just sat there on the boat, gun in hand, and quietly watched me as I walked around on shore and studied the plants. The plants, you ask? Oh, they’re only dangerous if you are a bug. Ryl Madol may be full of biological wonders but even it doesn’t have man-eating plants straight out of Hollywood. At least as far as we have observed.

So, there I was one day, counting cycads (or were they benettitaleans?), when, absentmindedly, I moved a little outside the research area and, out of the view of Johnson, deeper into the forest. I just roamed around a little when, suddenly, three men walked out of the underbrush and circled me. Their faces, like mine, were obscured by gasmasks to protect against the toxic spores. They looked rugged and they carried high-calibre weapons. One of them, visibly unwell, had an insanity fish still stuck to his neck. I’m not even sure he noticed the death sentence, perhaps he was this numb from all the pain he had already endured. They clearly were not my guys. They were stalkers, come here to raid the island for artefacts. Sometimes they kidnap or take hostage unsuspecting scientists, thinking that we have more secret knowledge on where to find the good stuff. Today it seems it was my turn. I tried to cry out for Johnson, but one of them put a gun to my head before I could even raise my voice. I knew I’d be dead if I screamed. They asked me if I knew where the “Dream Pool” was. I did not know what that meant and to this day I still do not. But of course they thought I was lying and began to beat me up. My mask nearly broke. In that moment, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something moving between the trees. It was some sort of translucent shadow, either camouflaged perfectly or nearly invisible. But I could sense some kind of movement between the tall cycad trees. Out of raw nature itself, it seemed, two hooked arms materialized and pierced through one of the stalkers, lifting him into the air like a praying mantis would a fly. My first thought was some kind of mantiraptor, but we have never seen those being able to change their colour. Though maybe that is exactly the point. The poor guy, claws pierced straight through his shoulder and belly, screamed like hell. He tried to lift his gun and shoot wildly around. I don’t know what his plan was, he was probably not thinking at all in the moment. By a mere miracle he missed me and instead it was now one of his stalker buddies that ended up screaming and bleeding out on the forest floor. The third guy lifted his gun and tried to shoot at the invisible arms puppeteering his friend, but before he could even pull the trigger, something else grabbed him and dragged him silently into the jungle.

The next moments are blurry to me. For unknown reasons I was spared by the ambush and was able to run back to the river. Johnson was sitting there, waiting for me. It was as if nothing had happened. He sat there, upright, with his wannabe military-uniform, oar of the boat’s motor in one hand, the other hand on the pistol holster, ready to pull on any unsuspecting foe. But there was just one problem. His head was gone. Ripped clean off, no trace of it in sight. I don’t think I even saw any blood splatter on his clothes, at least not in the heat of the moment. I did not really have the time to think about how morbidly bizarre that was, I just pushed the boat back in the water, pushed his body out of the way and started the motor. Downriver I think I took a few wrong turns and suddenly ended up in some quite bad, rocky rapids. I crashed the boat and flew overboard. All I can remember next was floating out at sea, not too far from the coast. The current must have swept my unconscious body out. I took my mask off to get enough air.

As I was contemplating my options, perhaps trying to swim back on shore, that wass when I saw it approach me. The huge shadow of a Mesotylos, a nearly 10 metres long carnivorous marine reptile, slowly drawing near me from beneath the waves. I could see it undulate up and down through the water, swinging its large, wing-like fins up and down, like a humpback whale. The long, crocodile-like maw turned towards me and I just knew I was done for. There was no way for me to survive this encounter. I just leaned back in the water and pretended to be a corpse, in the faint hope that it might lose interest. 

The strangest thing then happened. I could feel it poke me with its snout, me doing my best to remain stiff and not panic. I could feel it nudging my body. But it did not attack. It placed its head underneath me and then gently lifted me above the waves. I could feel it breathing through its retracted nose and I sure as hell know that it felt me breathing too. But that is all it did. Lifting my body out of the water and just gently float there with me, for what felt like an eternity.

Eventually I heard a boat approach and, thankfully, it was one of our own research vessels. As the sound drew closer, the reptile sank into the depths again and left me alone. The crew had seen me and were able to pick me up right after. To this day I still think about what happened. Why am I not dead, a pile of half-digested bones at the bottom of the ocean? Was the animal just not hungry? Did it not recognize me as food? Was it just curious? I cannot help but be reminded of those old stories of sailors being saved from drowning by dolphins.

As the name implies, Mesotylos is a mesosaur, as far as could be gathered from stranded specimens. Yes, a mesosaur. Not a mosasaur. Mosasaurs were true marine lizards of the Cretaceous, whereas mesosaurs were much more archaic beings of the Permian period, the very first marine reptiles (though in some phylogenies they even end up on the synapsid side of the amniote family tree). In a world as stuck in the Palaeozoic as Ryl Madol, it is perhaps no wonder that such animals survived here and continued to evolve. Very obviously, Mesotylos and kin have managed to make the full shift into fully marine life, as have many amniotes that came after them. Unable to move anymore on land, they have completely reduced their hindlegs and their forelimbs have become elongate flippers perfect for “underwater-flying” as is also seen in penguins and the extinct plesiosaurs. Uniquely for any amniote, this style of underwater-flying is combined with a vertically undulating, horizontally flattened tailfluke, very much like that of a manatee. Also very strange is that each flipper still retains two prominent claws, something not seen in any other fully marine reptile or mammal. Perhaps these do serve a function in mating, or maybe they have some hydrodynamic effect. Speaking of mating, their reproduction remains unknown, though it is generally assumed that they give live birth, unlike their egg-laying ancestors. Based on the shape of the very crocodile-like snouts, it is also generally assumed that they feed on fish and various other aquatic vertebrates, which makes my survival all the more miraculous.

Apart from this, nothing more can be said about these mysterious animals, as they are rarely encountered in life. Cryptozoologists like Bernard Heuvelmans have suggested that Mesotylos may be the origin behind various sea serpent sightings all around the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia. While that idea may at first seem compelling, there is so far no solid evidence that the unique fauna around Ryl Madol’s coast has ever ventured to other areas of the globe, unless by human means. It is as if some strange force binds the animals to the island.

Regarding the little “reef friends” I depicted the fellow with: On the very right we can see one of the many strange brachiopods that inhabit the island’s waters. Its long stalk makes it resemble early Cambrian stem-forms, like Yuganotheca, however this appears to be a case of convergent evolution, as it is found to be a true rhynchonellid.

Emerging below it from a small tunnel is a Dermichthys, nicknamed “Dunkeelosteus”, a small antiarch placoderm with an elongated body that lives much like a moray eel, hiding in reef burrows and ambushing prey. Swimming below it is one of the many marine centipedes that swarm the island’s waters, as well as an ophiuroid brittle star.

More interesting is the Arboreaites and her offspring on the lower left. All research indicates that this seems to be a bona fide arboreomorph, a type of Petalonamae from the Ediacaran or Late Precambrian. This makes this unassuming frond actually one of the most interesting organisms in this picture, as it is the most ancient organism on show here. Tests done on these organisms have validated many hypotheses that had already been suspected about the fossil relatives: 1) They are indeed true, diploblastic animals, however outside crown-Eumetazoa. In other words, more derived than a sponge, but still more archaic than a jellyfish (though some genetic tests intriguingly recover it as somewhere near the base of Ctenophora). 2) It is in fact a colonial organism composed of multiple zooids, which together constitute a holdfast, a backing sheet and the many lobed filter-feeding “pods”. The central stem itself that is keeping everything together it in fact a bundle or fascicle of stolons protruding from all the pods. Very intriguingly, the individual zooids of Arboreaites, stuck on the inside of each pod, resemble miniature versions of the solitary rangeomorph Charnia. As can be seen Arboreaites can reproduce asexually using stolons along the ground, very similarly to bryozoans anc cnidarians. However, sexual spawnings have also been observed, where the organisms release eggs and sperms into the water. Even though the organisms lack true gonads, they appear to be able to produce these gametes from undifferentiated body cells, much in the manner of sea sponges.

It is extremely intriguing that Arboreaites survives and even thrives around the reef regions of Ryl Madol, despite plenty of competition with supposedly “better” Palaeozoic life. This brings into question many leading hypotheses about the extinction of these organisms elsewhere in the world during the Cambrian. One wonders what Earth’s oceans might look like if more of these had survived. Now that would be a fun scenario to think about for the enthusiasts of this new-fangled gene I heard of. I think they call it “speculative evolution.”

The Silent Ruins and their Anomalies

Ryl Madol was once inhabited, that much is clear. Cyclopean ruins of streets, plazas, houses, temples, pyramids, walls, statues and monoliths are strewn across its entirety. It seems that almost every point of the island was at one point built upon by this ancient race. Perhaps, when it was once part of a far larger landmass, Ryl Madol was but a city-centre at the heart of a much larger empire. 

But however long ago those days must have been, they are now over. Any border between nature and civilization has long since collapsed. The jungle has crept over everything, every dwelling now only houses spiders and infernal centipedes. The works of intelligent forces are turned to rubble each day under the feet of giant beasts.

Who were the people that built these structures? Some architectural similarity suggests a vague link to the cultures of South-East Asia and the Pacific. Especially the art of interweaving columns of volcanic rock to build structures bears an uncanny resemblance to the Polynesian ruins of Nan Madol in Micronesia, which is what has earned the island its name. Just as intriguing are the large stone blocks sanded down into individual shapes in order to fit into each other like pieces of a puzzle. This polygonal style of building can elsewhere only be found in Peruvian sites like Sacsayhuaman, which was built by the Inca.

But were the people of Ryl Madol people at all? This is a question that naturally occurs if we take the current intelligent race of the island, the Headtakers, into account. Although these reptilians currently exist in an archaic state, is it not possible that they degenerated from a once far more advanced race which had inhabited the island? It is hard to say. Some of the ruins’ dimensions, especially roofs, doorways and tools, do seem quite inhuman, as if made for and built by entities at least 2.5 metres tall. No corpses, mummies or skeletal remains have ever been found of the vanished race. Were they all devoured by the forces of nature and time? Did they perhaps cremate all of their dead? Their remaining artwork also gives little clue. Clearly, they depicted some of the animals they lived with and (hopefully) mythical monsters, but there are no clear depictions of themselves. Found across the island are large monoliths with the relief of a vaguely humanoid face, which evokes Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Is this what they looked like or just a figure of their mythology? Disturbingly, shortly before he died under mysterious circumstances in the streets of Istanbul, the mad Turkish artist C.M. Kosemen had illustrated just such stone features in his reconstruction of the dinosaur Massospondylus, claiming the inspiration to have come from entities encountered during sleep-paralysis.

The Walls

Most spectacular among the ruins are of course the gigantic walls found in two sections of the island, both standing almost 20 metres tall in some sections. The more intact one is found in the southeastern valley, spanning two mountain ranges in order to shield a river-delta and bay from the remaining island. Likely, this area used to be a city, the wall having functioned to keep the large monsters out. The other great wall in the north-west used to be far longer, but is now broken, many of its sections slowly sinking into the sea. The area it circled may have also been a population centre once, far larger than any others, but the unstable geology of the island has caused this stretch of land to sink beneath the sea. Former hills bearing temples are now heavily fragmented islands jutting above the waves. It is likely this instability which has led to the downfall of the civilization, as frequent earthquakes destroyed their infrastructure and tore down the walls, which could no longer protect the inhabitants from the wild monsters roaming the island.

The architectural style of the walls is markedly different from that of the other ruins. Perhaps this is simply a consequence of mechanics, but it could also suggest that a different culture or even species could have built them before the main civilization arrived on the island.

Anomalies

The most baffling aspect of Ryl Madol are “anomalies”, places or objects on some parts of the island which seem to defy physics. These are largely found underground inside subterranean chambers and catacombs created by the vanished race. Some of these create fields which completely negate the effects of gravity, making things float with no weight. In other sections, gravity is increased tenfold, making for invisible but deadly crushing traps. There are holes and pits which seemingly have no bottoms. Stalkers who accidentally fell into them appeared dead the following days atop random pyramids on the island. Some of the recovered artefacts cause madness and schizophrenia, often leading to suicide or worse. Some catacombs have vats filled with “hell slime”, an unclassified viscous liquid that dissolves any biological matter that falls into them. The entire underground of the island seems to be networked by a labyrinthine maze whose entirety has never been mapped and whose depth seems immeasurable. Stalkers who have gone too deep into it and survived later fathered stillborn children.

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.