Grass equivalent: nullfire, tall on the veldt, a thick turf elsewhere.
Kinds of trees: brightcrown; saw-frond.
Other plants: fragrant nightwort; rattling spearcane.
Small twilight creatures: darters; scuttlers; light-flashers.
A hovering flyer: something strange from beyond the Guardian Range.
Ramnuans spread vanes and ride onsars. Yewwl carries an infant in her pouch.
Poul Anderson creates distinctive organisms for each new planet. We become familiar with Ythrian hammerbranch etc. However, imaginative new names of trees must be invented for Ramnu: brightcrown etc.
4 comments:
"Grass equivalent"
Would another planet with life have a plant that is ecologically equivalent to grass?
It is possible, but not necessarily so. On earth grasses evolved only as late as the Cretaceous and became common only somewhat later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae#Evolutionary_history
Since Earth did not have grass until a few 100 million years after land plants evolved, it seems far from certain that we would find a grass equivalent on another planet with life.
PA has a lot of grass equivalents.
There's a big niche that was vacant until grass evolved. And soil erosion must have been horrendous without it.
Kaor to All!
It would have been interesting if Anderson had written a story set on a planet where no grass equivalent had evolved. How might that have affected that planet's life and history?
Ad astra! Sean
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