Spectember 7: Fan Fiction

When German zoologist Harald Stumpke arrived on the Hi-yi-yi Islands of the south Pacific in 1940, he found them to be inhabited by dozens of species of snouters-- mammals evolved from a shrew-like ancestor that had evolved their noses into appendages for every conceivable purpose. Ranging from only a few inches to more than a meter in height, the snouters occupied almost every land vertebrate niche on the islands, a splendid example of adaptive radiation. But there was one snouter species that Stumpke never encountered-- the elusive Snout-folk (Rhinosapiens latens).

While Stumpke believed these creatures to be only a myth by the islands' indigenous Hooakha-Hutchi people, they were quite real, and were the only sapient species on Earth besides humanity itself. The Snout-folk were members of the clade Tetrarrhinida, which includes both the common nasobeme (the best-known species of snouter) and the giant predaceous snouter Tyrannonasus. While its relatives have four snout-derived legs, in the Snout-folk these have been reduced to two.

The Snout-Folk had a strongly collectivist culture, with centralized leadership within their colonies. In a typical colony, the dominant males or chieftains were the individual allowed who bore children; females were of lower status and were the "property" of the males, while lesser males would have to curry favor with the leaders to borrow their mates. It was a system vastly unlike that of most human civilizations, and the relations between the Snout-Folk and the Hooakha-Hutchi were often uneasy. The Hooakha-Hutchi regarded them as mischievous jungle spirits who raided food stores and ransacked dwellings.

Pictured here is a typical Snout-folk chieftain, along with one of the fortified houses typical of their kind. The Snout-folk were never abundant, and were already on the decline when European explorers first reached Hi-Yi-Yi in the 1940s. When a nearby nuclear bomb test reduced the Hi-Yi-Yi archipelago to rubble, the Snout-Folk were among the victims.