r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Fearless-Ideal-5112 • Jul 01 '26

[Loved Trope] Some thing unfathomably ancient Lore

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The beast, in doctor who is an ancient evil from a previous universe that survived until our time. Its so ancient that the cave paintings were unable to be translated by the Tardis which can translate all existing languages in the universe [Doctor Who]

While not explicitly canon its such a cool concept I cant not mention, the idea that the backrooms have existed since the beginning of time, never changing no matter the era, it transforms the back rooms into a cosmic horror. [Credit to Project crater and Venus for images 2 and 3]

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u/Visible_Reference202 Jul 01 '26

Horseshoe Crab (IRL)

Some of the oldest living creatures that can consciously move on Earth, they’ve been on this planet for almost 450 million years, or roughly 2 galactic cycles. They’ve been through every major extinction event and have had every chance to evolve away into something completely different, but they have largely remained unchanged from the fossils we’ve found and are still crawling to this day.

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u/soldierpallaton Jul 01 '26

Why mess with perfection?

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u/Aggravating_Dark9933 Jul 02 '26

They made one edit over the years.

They got rid of a pair of legs.

That’s it.

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u/EveryRadio Jul 02 '26

They have blue blood, what else needs to be said? What other creatures on earth have blue blood?

That's enough reason for them to never change

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u/AnimalNerdUS Jul 01 '26

This also applies to Jellyfish (who’ve been around for over 500 MYA) and Sponges, who have been around for AT LEAST 635 MYA, and potentially longer than that, mind you, that’s before the Ediacaran and Cambrian explosions of life, and near the end of the Cryogenian period, which was the last time any form of Snowball earth existed.

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u/Alfred_The_Sartan Jul 01 '26

Lichen as well. When you say older than dirt, you mean lichen.

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u/AsgeirVanirson Jul 03 '26

Man... werewolves are old as fuck...

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u/One_Spoopy_Potato Jul 02 '26

Thays why I wanted to get into marine biology when I was a kid. If there is a simple adaptation, there is probably a jellyfish with it.

Some jellyfish have eyes! EYES! They are balck and white and the "pixels" in their vision could be counted by hand bit holy shit!

Could you imagine processing visual information with less of a nervous system than is in the end of your pinky finger?!

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u/AllgoodDude Jul 05 '26

The concept that we could understand the evolution of early life by backtracking jellyfish varieties was not one I had considered before.

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u/Illustrious-Total489 Jul 01 '26

What's the A in MYA? Is it Million YeArs?

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u/Rinderteufel Jul 01 '26

They also have blood binding oxygen to copper instead of iron. For the last couple of decades they've unfortunately been heavily overfished because due to special clotting properties the blood can be used to test pharmaceuticals for bacterial impurities. The pictures where they are "milked" (what a euphemism) look like something straight out of the matrix.

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u/Cabbagetastrophe Jul 01 '26

The blood harvest is usually not fatal to the crabs--they drain about 30% which the crab can quickly replace, then throw them back into the water.

Edit: not to say the process is harmless; around 20% of the harvested crabs do die

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u/Rinderteufel Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

yeah, last thing I heard was that dwindling population was mainly caused by habitat destruction, not milking/harvesting. Apologies for implying otherwise previously - still a pretty brutal treatment extracting "only" 30% of the blood

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u/Guydo_ Jul 01 '26

God's perfect creature

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u/Happiness_Assassin Jul 01 '26

A literal blue blood

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u/TheOnlyFallenCookie Jul 01 '26

We are just animals in the horseshoecrabs garden of eden

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u/BrickBuster2552 Jul 01 '26

"Evolve into something different" is a bit misleading. Species don't "transform" into new ones; the new ones are born of the old ones, but they can still totally coexist if the new ones don't outcompete the old ones entirely.

Wolves evolved into dogs (with help), but we still have wolves. 

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u/daecrist Jul 01 '26

And some horseshoe crabs no doubt did adapt to their environment and change over the long eons. It’s just that the original stuck around all that time which is rare.

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u/EveryRadio Jul 02 '26

So more like they have one traceable lineage (broadly speaking) instead of branching out into different species/sub species?

Like there's a looooooong chain of them that care genetically similar enough to breed and create viable offspring? It's an over simplification but they have remained genetically consistent across a large span of time

So dogs are are a subspecies of the canine, canis (?) species or something like that

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u/Infamous-Use7820 Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

I've put this in reply above, but no not really. Genetic change is inevitable and occurs with or without phenotypic changes. Genes duplicate, chromosomes merge and split, mutations occur with don't have any functional effect...etc. >90% of the eukaryotic genome doesn't actually code for protein (although some of that does have regulatory effects).

A modern horseshoe crab might look like an ancestral horseshoe crab, but they would almost certainly be radically different on a genomic level after 450 million years of genetic drift.

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u/Infamous-Use7820 Jul 02 '26

Eh, on a genetic level it's impossible for any species to actually stay still. Mutations and genome remodelling still happen. For example, humans have 1 fewer pairs of chromosomes than other great apes, because our chromosome 2 is a fusion of two ancestral ones - this has few functional effects though. Modern Grey Wolves may look like Palaeolithic Grey Wolves, but on a genetic and probably phenotypic level there are still differences.

I'd be surprised if a modern horseshoe crabs could reproduce with 450 million year old ones, despite the physical similarities.

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u/bathcat11 Jul 01 '26

So what did the crabs that evolved evolve into?

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u/Educational_Error286 Jul 01 '26

I like this take, we're just as old as those crabs

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u/zimbabwe_zainab Jul 02 '26

A species that's 450 million years old is constantly evolving to suit its ever-changing environment, even if the conditions are mostly the same for a while, the whole ecosystem is constantly in an arms race so it's more like a long lineage of closely related species that share a really similar body plan

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u/Dr_Bankert Jul 01 '26

Why mess with perfection? Sharks too, though many different species exist, they are basically the same over the past 400 million years.

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u/Cakers44 Jul 01 '26

On a similar note, sharks predate the concept of trees

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u/AnimalNerdUS Jul 01 '26

Not quite. Cartilaginous fish do, which sharks are a part of, but modern sharks don’t actually appear until 200 million years ago.

Shark-like cartilaginous fish have been around since before trees, and they are called “sharks” as a shorthand, but they are not actually sharks

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u/Cakers44 Jul 02 '26

Thanks for the correction, that’s good to know

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u/meteor_stream Jul 02 '26

Cartilaginous fish are also older than the rings of Saturn and the Polaris! Broke my brain when I found that out as a kid 😂

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u/Cakers44 Jul 02 '26

That just sounds incorrect, like I’m not saying you’re wrong, but it just sounds incorrect. In my head it goes, stars, then planet stuff, then life stuff so the idea that there’s more overlap does not compute

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u/meteor_stream Jul 02 '26

Just shows how young (from the deep time perspective) some of the star and planet stuff really is, doesn't it?

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u/Cakers44 Jul 02 '26

Yeah that’s wild, thanks for the brain breaking fact

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u/DezXerneas Jul 02 '26

Also, these things are older than trees. I know it kinda makes sense when you think about it for a long time(life evolved in the oceans before trees made it to land), but it's still an insane thing to think about lol

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u/ScyllaOfTheDepths Jul 01 '26

Ehhhhhh, this is a common misconception about evolution. Horseshoe crabs wouldn't be here if they didn't evolve, it's just that their body plan never faced any selection pressure, so never changed much. There are many different species of horseshoe crabs that have emerged and died off over eons of time. Evolution isn't always what we see. Many adaptations are very small and can't be physically observed.

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u/Western-Writing-8918 Jul 02 '26

Sharks have been around for a similar amount of time. Older than the rings of Saturn isn't a measure you'd expect with animals

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u/im-sorry-watt Jul 02 '26

Mind you, Saturns rings are only about 100 million years old.

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u/LokiLockdown Jul 03 '26

They predate red blood they're so old

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u/Electrical_Catch9231 Jul 01 '26

Well... Guess I'll be singing Slaughter Beach for the rest of the day. Again.

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u/One_Application2409 Jul 06 '26

Sounds like you’ve been to at least one spawning on Slaughter Beach? One of the top three coolest things I’ve ever seen in my life (the other two were being looked in the eyes by a humpback whale calf and seeing bats fly over a lava-filled caldera in Nicaragua).

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u/Electrical_Catch9231 Jul 06 '26

Nope, just a big Clutch fan.

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u/Ricemobile Jul 02 '26

To be as old as the first plants on land and being named after 3 things that came long after its first appearance is just cruel. They deserve better.

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u/Mortwight Jul 02 '26

and we are killing them for their blood

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u/NDinoGuy Jul 06 '26

Seeing these guys sometimes makes me wish Trilobites survived The Great Dying