If one was to unknowingly travel to the alternate earth of Cronus, 13 million years into our future, one might not immediately recognize the world as being different from our own. Landforms may have changed, of course, and biomes somewhat redistributed, but life hasn’t truly been altered. Woods and grasslands are still woods and grasslands and many an organism wouldn’t appear out of place on our world. However, that is not to say there is nothing of interest here.

In Cronus’s Europe, glaciers from some ancient ice age have scored the landscape, resulting in networks of shallow rivers and lakes. Around these shallow bodies of water, vast swathes of massively beautiful temperate forests have grown, sheltering bovid browsers and feliform predators on the forest floor. In the trees above, amid flocks of birds, live large arboreal omnivores somewhat resemblant of monkeys in lifestyle, if not exactly appearance. These creatures are the descendants of our dormice.

Dormice are omnivorous sciuromorph rodents that can be found throughout the old world on our Earth. On Cronus, a population of dormice radiated into a group of larger arboreal forms. These creatures are typically referred to in company literature as dormonks, for obvious reasons. Dormonks consume a variety of foods ranging from fruits and nuts to insects and even small vertebrates. However, dormonks have a hard time taking advantage of vegetable matter such as leaves for food; like all dormice, they lack a cecum. Instead, the dormonks share the trees with certain avian lineages, not pictured here, have taken up tree leaves as a primary food source, Weighed down by their developed gut, these birds can only hope to take short fluttering flights from tree to tree. Most dormonks are not averse to occasionally preying upon their eggs and young. A wide range of species make up the dormonks, but one of the most unique is the oakwood troll.

The Oakwood Troll’s most distinguishing feature is its incredibly long tail, over one and a half times the length of its body. Semi-prehensile, like in most dormonks, the tail is highly mobile but does not appear to normally be used in climbing or grasping. Instead, the troll will soak its tail into shallow bodies of water. This behavior puzzled surveyors, and it was initially thought to be a cooling mechanism. Indeed, this may have played a role in the evolution of the tail, but its current use is even more obscure.

When a surveyor first noticed small black frogs clinging to the creature’s tail, at the time known by its original, and now ill-used, common name, the long-tailed dormonk, it was written off as a humorous coincidence. Only after several further such sightings and the examination the body of a tranquilized troll did it become apparent that the frogs commonly hitch rides on trolls, often hidden under thick fur. The Hitchhiker Frog (Peregrinus fluminum) is a small, jet black amphibian whose distribution closely matches that of the troll. Though the frog is relatively hardy, able to endure drier conditions over long periods of time, to spread from body of water to body of water would still incur a significant risk; many creatures would be happy to come upon a slow moving amphibian snack. Instead, the frogs utilizes the troll to move from water to water.

Of course, the troll doesn’t perform this taxi service for free. During the troll’s meandering journey throughout the day, the frogs will move around its body, eating its external parasites, helping to protect it from infestation and disease. In order to pick up hitchhiker frogs, the troll will periodically come down from trees to dip its tail into water. As the frogs typically stay in the close to the bottom, the length of the tail allows the troll to “fish” even in deeper waters. The frogs appear to recognize the presence of a troll from a small distance away, likely recognizing musky chemicals emitted by the troll and the pulses of pressure created by the slow wagging of the troll’s tale. To help keep the frogs who have clambered aboard from drying out, the troll’s hair tail is not water resistant. In fact, a combination of the hair’s unique composition and structure allow it to wick up and hold water. While could for the frogs, this has also been interpreted in the light of the tail originally being a cooling mechanism. Exactly how the frogs determine when they leave the troll is unclear at the present.

Initial reports of the troll’s “frog-fishing” behavior was met with skepticism by some, with the assumption that it would make the typically arboreal dormonk an easy target for predators, both in and out of the water. Please note that there is little evidence to support the initial suggestion that the troll’s tail might possess autotomy to some degree. While there are some references in literature to the edible dormouse (Glis glis) possessing this ability, there is no evidence to support this for the troll and such an adaption is not really necessary. The rivers and lakes within the distribution of the troll typically lack large aquatic predators, and those that might be present are not shore-associated ambush predators. Even the freshwater sharks, whose names bring to mind apocryphal tales of ferocious lakeside attacks on our Earth, are closely related to our nurse sharks and are not a danger to large vertebrates.

Terrestrial predators would be more of a clear threat for the troll; there is no question that many of the predators of these forests will feed upon the troll. Nevertheless, the troll’s signature behavior does not appear to particularly endanger it. Despite the fact that the tail might logically be seen as a hindrance, troll is still fast on its feet when on the forest floor; its muscular tail is capable of being held above the ground when in motion, often somewhat curled back onto itself. Additionally, the very nature of being restricted to the water’s edge provides a sort of protection. The troll’s terrestrial predators would not typically be found in water and if they were to enter, the splashing of their swimming would provide an easy auditory warning for the troll. Thus, trolls will lay with their backs to whatever body of water in which they are “fishing”, having effectively halved the physical space to which they must pay attention. Trolls do appear to make conscious decisions on the locations they choose to “fish” at, favoring still, and thus quiet, water and banks with less dense brush.

The oakwood troll was created for COM #72: Chekhov's Adaption, which had the following prompt: create an organism with an adaptation that superficially seems useless or bizarre, but actually provides a vital function. My entry ultimately got second place out of thirteen, losing to Flisch's Fishbowl Beetle.

Though I never possessed much interest in developing a future setting, I am charmed by some of the extraneous details I added about Cronus's freshwater sharks and browsing birds. I have little to say about the oakwood troll itself but the primary illustration remains one of my favorite pieces I created for the forum. The reference to the “obvious” logic behind the naming of dormonks is inscrutable to me; I suspect this may have been a joke.

Though Cronus was created solely as background for the oakwood troll post, when working on this website I rediscovered notes for an abandoned entry for COM #74: Horsin' Around that would have also been set on the world. COM #74 had the prompt “create a species descended from seahorses (genus Hippocampus)” and presumably mine would have centered around the mentioned seahorse descendent. Unfortunately, the above text is essentially all that was present in the relevant notes and I possess no memory of my plans; was the miser's coral the common name for the seahorse itself or something separate?