There are many reasons why species go extinct. You could add social reasons to the list for intelligent species. Purity wars for example could exterminate a targeted species. If too many different species are living in an area then the mixing between the similar species could render the pure species extinct. So you decide which species you want to keep and exterminate the rest to keep the remaining species pure. But a natural 'species selective' super bug could eliminate a too. Then again just because rats evolved and did well on our world that doesn't mean that the species evolved at all on the Skunkworks world. Our maybe rats just didn't evolve into intelligent beings. Or maybe they did evolve intelligence and went extinct. There may have been many more intelligent species on the Skunkworks world than there are now just like there were once many kinds of humans on our world. Sometimes species don't die out; they breed into other species and disappear as a pure species. That happens when their numbers get too thin. For example, present day homo sapiens have neanderthal dna in them. So the neanderthal still survives as part of modern man. I would imagine that we have other species of human dna blended into our dna as well including extinct species of human that we still know nothing about.
I think that the point that JMH has been making all along is that the creatures on his world only LOOK like species that we recognize on our world. They are not the same species. They evolved on an alien world and they evolved differently from the creatures on our world; sometimes by a little; sometimes by a lot. They are not what they appear to be to us. They are aliens. Different world; different evolution.
Received on Sun May 04 2014 - 17:19:53 CDT