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The next 50 million years may see some drastic changes not only in the environment of Earth, but large degrees of changes to the characteristics of the structure of Earth, the solar system. Along with each of these changes, species will need to change in order to maintain surviving members of the populations. As the environments on the enormous scale (solar system, sun-sized influences, planet-sized influences, ..) begin to change, the change will either propagate to the smaller environments or change the smaller environments instantly. These changes, when viewed on the long-term scale, seem too powerful to cope with. Viewing the species as they change throughout this long period of 50 million years, we can see how they end up -- however they might appear at the 50 million-years-from-now mark.

To develop this fictional future, we first should define the selective pressures on the species that occur throughout the ages. There is the option of not changing the selective pressures that are noticeable on Earth at the moment, however, that may not be as entertaining as playing god and killing species or allowing them to evolve into other species, et cetera. Thus, the events that we will say will occur in the next 50 million years are as follows:

As we can see, #3 says that in this fantasy future that there will be some sort of planet colliding into Earth. This is likely to release enormous amounts of energy and make the environment quite difficult to survive in. We will suppose that this will create conditions similar to Earth during the time period when microspheres may have existed and served as the first form of a boundary, leading to what we know now to be cells (life).

If other organisms survived the nuclear wars (#1), asteroid impacts (#2), and the planetary collision (#3), any competition for resources will be fierce. There might be some type of newly forming line of life from the similar pre-life Earth, and if the organisms survive the disasters, then there will be two lines of life (so-to-speak). The original line would have very little to do with the first in the sense of hereditary. It should be noted that there are theories that the release of oxygen into pre-eukaryotic Earth slowed down the speciation and emergence of new species, along with the stabilizing of the species available entirely, and we shall take this theory to be a fact for this fantasy-future developing.

Now that the terms of the environment have been defined, we can take a closer look at the species that would have developed after the 50 million years. Take, for example, the species of organism called Gigantelope. From the looks of the creature, it may have evolved from a goat or a bull. The environment selected this species of organism over others because this species was more `fit'. In the context of the above scenario, the large horns would be useful to dig up food (perhaps some form of rock with nutrients embedded within in a particular region), and the large hump on the back, formed by the skeleton, would provide a way to protect itself from the onslaught of asteroids experienced in period #2 (the species; not a particular member of the population). Of course, it is incredibly unlikely that asteroids would hit members of a species often enough to produce some noticeable selective pressure on the entire species, but, for this purpose, we will suppose it is much more likely. The feet of the Gigantelope would have been selected against softer feet because the unstable grounds are not always soft enough for skin-padded feet.

Another species that might be seen in this almost completely unrealistic future is the rootsucker. At a first glance, the species might look like it is a far fetched ancestor of the armadillo family, and it might be, though it could also be an ancestor of the modern-day mouse, rat, skunk, or porcupine. The rootsucker is a species that has an ability to literally “suck” roots of plants for nutrients, though this should not fool the observant - the sharp claws and thick tail are used to ward of predators (have to protect those food sources). Underneath the hard exoskeleton, which resembles a turtle shell, is the skin of the animal, of course, but skin is covered in fur where the exoskeleton has yet to engulf the species. At 43 million years into the future, there was a species that was a `spin-off' (due to an isolated environment) that grew the exoskeleton completely around the body of the rootsucker, and after a few million years, the flesh within the creature tended to break down, and then the organ systems within the exoskeleton simplified - a bit too much - the species became extinct when the original rootsuckers migrated into the isolated environment and killed the population of foreigners.

Finally, the Chirit is worth looking at. It has a long, slender body, which supports it in rapping around tall trees to reach high branches to escape predators or to pursue prey. The Chirit seems to be an ancestor of the ferret. The slender body was selected over the alternative (plump, obese obstruction of a torso) because the Chirit was able to escape predators, travel longer, further, and had an increase in intelligence with the slender body -evidence of gene-linkage (`intelligence' and torso-type - since intelligence is comprised of multiple traits, one being linked with torso-type).

These organisms all live in the same environment. The Chirit, the rootsucker, and the Gigantelope. From an ecological point of view, the Chirit and the rootsucker compete (as species) for the role of consuming the organic energy converted from the inorganic energy (sunlight) by the plants. The Gigantelope, though, consumes either the Chirit or the rootsucker population. The Gigantelope actually comes in two breeds - one that specifically hunts the Chirits, and another which hunts the rootsucker. The Gigantelope, then, are able to represent a selective pressure on the populations of the Chirit or the rootsucker. If the rootsucker population becomes too large, the Chirit may not be able to attain food, and then members will start dieing. On the other hand, if the Chirit population becomes too large (in numbers), the rootsucker population will decrease. In either case, the breeds of Gigantelope are effected, too. If there are only rootsuckers, the Chirit-hunting Gigantelope would not be viable. In environments that host species going through co-evolution, these relationships would be much more complex (e.g., the rootsuckers may produce some chemical which the plants rely on, so the gigantelope eating the rootsuckers causes that chemical to not be spread about as much, and then the chirit population suffers when plants do not grow as much). The complexity of relationships sky-rockets as more and more species of organism are added to the environment.

As life continues to grow and the relationships between the organisms and the environment become more dependent on each other, the ability to break into the system becomes increasingly hard for the complex organisms unaccustomed to dealing with particular environments. Never the less, it appears that organisms have done it once, and it is likely that they will do it again.