sea monsters, land monsters | sbi merpeople au

2 | sea monsters

oops i dropped my taxonomy and biology all over your fic i'm so sorry let me just try to clean that up for you-- whoops it only smeared all over the rest of the chapter gosh i didn't mean to get the science all over it! i can't get it clean, i guess it'll just have to stay messy!

ok yes there's a lot of science shit that i doubt you care about but there is also emeraldduo

cw
- brief minor character death ments
- sedation misconstrued as poisoning

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Sea monsters were real.

Sirens and mermaids were not real. Despite claimed sightings of beautiful girls with shiny fish tails and entrancing songs, they were not real.

Now, those "merpeople" discovered only two years prior? Those were real sea monsters. They were covered head-to-toe in colorful scales, ranging from cool oceanic hues to warmer sunshiny yellows and fiery reds. They had arms and legs like humans, with opposable thumbs but only three large, flat toes on their feet. They also had long tails, forked at the ends and connected with a membrane used for steering. They had massive ray fins on the side of their heads by their ears, used for feeling vibrations in the water. They swam gracefully, occasionally pulling themselves along by grasping rocks. They breathed with gills, saw with round, gemstone eyes, and spoke in cries and chirps. They weren't nearly as horrific as some old tales would make sea monsters out to be.

That wasn't to say they weren't scary in their own right, though. Merpeople bore sharp teeth and tough claws, made for capturing and killing fish and even sometimes bigger creatures like a wayward marine mammal. They could make threatening growls, hisses, and clicks, snapping powerful jaws at anyone who came by. Some people found them terrifying, even more so than arguably much more dangerous animals like venomous snakes. Their discovery had sent the public panicking, starting protests for the poaching and intentional extinction of the water creatures. Those protesters were small but loud, and conservation efforts had fought them back down. Laws had been passed to protect the merpeople and research had begun on how best to care for them, should they need space at a marine animal rehabilitation center.

Those research efforts proved useful after a huge oil spill in the natural environment where the merpeople lived. Dozens upon dozens of ill merpeople had been brought into facilities and cared for, albeit still with quite a bit of ignorance. There's only so much two years of research can do to aid.

Taxonomists had nearly all had a collective heart attack upon hearing about merpeople. By a large majority of definitions, they fit into zero existing classes, and thus had ended up creating their own just to accommodate them. That also meant that they received their own new order, family, and genus as well, making them the first known members of each. Once it had been determined where merpeople tended to live, excavations had been done nearby in attempts to find relative fossils of closely related species. Multiple potential related fragments were excavated, but no full bodies were found. However, nearer to the poles, two other living related species had been found. Arctic and antarctic merpeople had been identified, both being larger and heftier than their warmer counterparts.

The most commonly seen merpeople were the warm-water species of Procerus madidus. Theirs was also the area where the oil spill afflicted, causing them to be the most well-understood of the known mer species. Procerus glacies and Procerus stiriacus, the arctic and antarctic species respectively, were slightly more poorly understood, though that wasn't to say that countless hours weren't poured into their research.

Phylogenists had started tracing the family tree of the new group. Based solely on the rayed ear fins of all merpeople, it was easily determined that they had split off of ray-finned fishes, Actinopterygii, before the first tetrapods had evolved. Merpeople had evolved limbs entirely independently of the ancestors of all reptilians, amphibians, and mammalians, similarly to how bats and birds both evolved wings, though independently from one another.