Why It Sucks To Be Born As a Dollocaris (Before Dinosaurs Ruled)

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]Your parents are mating 3 ft above you.

[00:00:02]If you can call it mating. Your father grabbed your mother from behind with six clawed arms, locked on, and hasn't let go for 2 hours. She's twice his size and could rip him apart if she wanted. She doesn't, not yet. The whole thing looks less like romance and more like a hostage situation with biological consequences. Nobody knows how your species actually reproduces. No eggs have ever been found, no sperm, no mating organs. Scientists have cracked open your fossilized bodies and found what might be gonads, but can't even tell which ones are male and which are female. Your entire love life is a mystery buried under 165 million years of rock. You are born and the first thing you see is your mother being killed. A Vampyronassa, a 10-in ancestor of the vampire squid, slams into her from below. Eight arms, a beak that punches through her shell like wet paper. She thrashes once, then goes limp. The vampire tears her apart and drifts away with the biggest piece. You see every detail because your eyes, two bulging hemispheres taking up a quarter of your entire body, packed with 18,000 lenses. Each are the sharpest eyes any arthropod has ever evolved. You can't blink. You can't look away. 36,000 lenses and this is the first thing they show you. Your father is already gone, bolted the second the attack started.

[00:01:18]You're alone, 2 cm long, soft, paper-thin armor on a dark Jurassic seafloor in what is now southern France, 165 million years before humans exist.

[00:01:29]And the thing that just killed your mother hunts these waters every single day. Here's the only thing that can save you, size. If you grow big enough, the Vampyronassa can't take you. Your mother was small, freshly spent from mating, caught in the dark, easy target. But a full-grown Dollocaris, 20 cm of ambush predator with three pairs of raptorial claws, is too big, too dangerous, too much effort for any vampire squid to crack open. You need to survive long enough to outgrow your mother's killer.

[00:01:58]That's the mission. That's your entire life reduced to one goal. Get bigger before the dark gets you, and everything about your body is working against it.

[00:02:05]Skip forward a few weeks. You're growing, still tiny, and you're learning the worst thing about yourself. You can't swim. You've got eight pairs of stubby legs on your belly that flap like they're trying their best, but your head is two giant bowling balls with lenses glued to the front of a paper kite. You move through water like someone taped headlights to a napkin and threw it in a pool. Your species name, Ingens, means enormous. Your swimming says otherwise.

[00:02:31]So, you do what your body was actually designed for. You hide. Press flat against the rocks, tuck your six clawed arms under your shell, wait. You're not a hunter that chases. You're a hunter that sits, and right now, you're starving. You haven't eaten in 4 days.

[00:02:45]Your body is burning through reserves it barely had to begin with. Those massive eyes are draining energy every second.

[00:02:51]36,000 lenses running non-stop whether there's food or not. Your eyes cost you more calories than your legs. You're paying rent on a weapon you can't always use. Then, the light hits. Sunlight punches down through 200 m of water and lands on the seafloor like a dim spotlight. Your lenses fire up.

[00:03:11]Suddenly, the murky blur around you snaps into focus. You can see the texture on individual grains of sand.

[00:03:17]You can see the antennae of a shrimp twitching 40 body lengths away. Your eyes were built for this. This exact moment. This exact light. A juvenile solenocerid shrimp drifts across the open mud. 4 cm, translucent, picking at the muck. It doesn't know you're here.

[00:03:34]You track it. 18,000 lenses computing its speed, its angle, its distance. Your claws tighten under your shell. Every muscle coils. The shrimp steps into range. You strike. Miss. Your claws snap shut on empty water. The shrimp rockets sideways and vanishes behind a rock.

[00:03:52]You just burned the only burst of energy you had. And worse, every predator within 20 ft now knows something just moved in this crevice.

[00:04:01]You freeze. Press flat. Don't breathe.

[00:04:05]A shadow passes overhead. A cuttlefish, half a meter of predatory fish, sweeps the area, mouth slightly open. Its eye scans the rock where you're hiding. You don't move. It passes, keeps going.

[00:04:16]You're alive, but you're still starving, and you just lost your only meal.

[00:04:20]The light is already fading. You can feel it in your lenses, the edges of your vision blurring, details dissolving, shapes turning into smudges.

[00:04:29]In 10 minutes, you'll be blind, and the Vampyronassa hunts at night. Another shrimp, smaller, closer, picking at something near the base of your rock.

[00:04:38]You don't have the energy for another miss. Your claws unfold slowly this time. No rush. Track it. Wait for it to come to you. It steps on your claw. You snap. Three pairs lock around its body before it twitches. You drag it under your shell to your mouth, which sits right between your eyes, facing the ground. Bite. Shell cracks. You swallow what you can, and spit out the pieces too big for your gut, like an owl pellet. First meal in 4 days, and the light is gone. You press into the crevice and don't move until morning.

[00:05:14]Skip forward. You're 5 cm now, growing toward the goal. But, growing means molting, cracking out of your old shell, inflating a new one, and waiting for it to harden. During those hours, you're naked, no armor at all, soft as a worm.

[00:05:34]Every predator on the seafloor can smell the chemicals leaking from your fresh shell. You wedge yourself into the tightest crack you can find, and molt in the dark. Your old carapace splits down the back. You pull yourself free, legs, claws, eyes, all of it sliding out of the husk like pulling off a glove. The new shell is soft, crinkled, tissue thin, and it's going to stay thin.

[00:05:54]That's the thing nobody warned you about. Your armor never gets thick.

[00:05:58]Other arthropods build calcium into their shells. Hard, dense. Yours doesn't. Your carapace stays soft, barely tougher than the day you hatched.

[00:06:05]You look armored, you're not. Anything with real claws grabs you, your shell folds like paper. You wait in the crack until it barely stiffens, then you crawl back and start hunting again. Skip forward 8 cm. The hunger never stops.

[00:06:18]Three, maybe four hours of real visibility a day. The rest is darkness and waiting. Then you smell something.

[00:06:24]Another dolicharus. Your body reacts before your brain does. Hormones, instinct. You find it tucked behind a sponge colony and lock your front claws onto its shell. It thrashes. You hold tighter. Six-clawed arms digging in, both of you scraping across rock, knocking debris into the water. Every predator in range just heard this. It's over in minutes. No bonding. The other one shakes you off and leaves. You're exposed in open water, exactly where your mother was when the vampyronassa found her. You bolt for the nearest crevice. Nothing comes this time. Skip forward 10 cm, halfway to safety. But halfway means nothing down here. One night, no light, no visibility, you feel it. Water displacement, fast, right behind you. Two arms brush your carapace, testing. You snap your claws wide, a bluff. The vampyronassa hesitates, pulls back into the dark. Not worth the risk. This time, skip forward.

[00:07:17]You made it. 20 cm, fully grown, hemispherical eyes protruding through your shell. 18,000 lenses each, detecting motion in every direction.

[00:07:27]Claws that unfold in a fraction of a second. The most visually advanced ambush predator this seafloor has ever seen. The vampyronassa doesn't come near you anymore. You can see it sometimes, eight arms trailing, beak tucked, drifting at the edge of your vision. The thing that killed your mother now avoiding you. You outgrew it, but that's not how this story ends. The world is changing. Faster fish, sharks with calcified jaws, marine crocodiles 3 m long that hunt by feel, not sight. Your paper-thin shell means nothing to them.

[00:08:03]Your incredible eyes are useless against something that doesn't need to see you to kill you. Your kind dominated the seafloor once, a third of every arthropod here. Then generation by generation, the numbers fall. 370 million years of existence, 70 species, 30 genera, and you just quietly disappear 18 million years before the asteroid that kills the dinosaurs even enters orbit. The dinosaurs get fire and darkness and a line in every textbook.

[00:08:32]You get nothing. You just stop showing up. The last of your kind dies in what is now Lebanon. 84 million years ago. No fanfare, just silence. You had the best eyes in the arthropod world. You could see everything except the future.