When people think of extinct life, they usually have images of fossils and artistic reconstructions in their head. Extinction is a phenomenon seemingly relegated to the far past, to dinosaurs and mammoths. In reality, extinction happens all the time, throughout the present. It is a process as natural as life and death itself. Yet, it leaves us mourning when it happens in front of our own eyes.
The awbar were a fascinating species which the first astronauts encountered on Mars, including myself on some of my early missions. They lived in a peculiar area of the Argyre Basin. Mars lacks a global magnetic field like Earth does, making it an all-around more irradiated and hostile place. However, some areas contain highly magnetized rock formations, which have managed to save some remnants of the prehistoric magnetosphere, creating local shields against UV and other harmful radiation from space. In these so-called UV-oases, flora and fauna can lead a more sheltered life and attain higher biodiversity than in other areas of the planet. The awbar lived in one such oasis - only one – together with the organisms it depended on.
The awbar is thought to have been a goniopod, a group of dinosauresque deltadactylians, but unlike its bigger cousins, the cecrops and syncarpus, it was generally not included within the more exclusive Thecocerata, as it lacked the characteristic hornlets inside of its beak. This decision has often been criticized, as the lack of that trait may instead have resulted from its specialized diet. Other unique traits were that it felt comfortable walking both on two and three legs and that it exhibited multioculy (having more than two eyes), a trait otherwise rare in goniopods.
It was a nimble creature, able to fit inside a human hand. From its back grew a fleshy fin, adorned with a peculiar oval spot. Undoubtedly this served some display function, but what exactly is now forever uncertain. Awbar lived in close association with a plant dubbed the sporangobush, a type of fractarian. Its sporangia ended in hairy bulbs, each hair drenched in some kind of viscous liquid. Awbar were most often seen climbing up the bushes and licking these furballs with their long, retractable tongue. Many authors have assumed that this could have been a symbiotic relationship. Assuming the liquid produced by the sporangia was some kind of nectar, the Martian may have been lured into licking up the plant’s spores. Inside the stomach and guts of the creature, these spores may have combined with those of other sporangobushes and exited the body through excretion, already fertilized. It is impossible to test any such hypotheses anymore, however. There may not have been a mutual benefit at all to such behaviour, the creature could have been licking the sporangia for reasons entirely unintended by the plant. Perhaps the liquid was toxic or unappealing to some herbivores but was unintentionally alluring to the little creature, the same way spicy plants on Earth have unintentionally garnered the attention of humans. Or the relationship between the organisms was much more intricate and complicated than we can ever imagine, seeing as how little we still know about these ecosystems.
The extinction of the awbar was not brought about by a catastrophe like the dinosaurs’ or through human interference like the dodo’s. It was the end of a slow process already well on its way long before man set his foot on the red planet. The magnetization held within the surrounding rocks had simply begun to fade. With each passing year, the local magnetosphere grew weaker and more radiation reached the soil. The changes must have been incremental at first. With each blooming, the number in each organism’s generations must have grown less, rates of cancer and other ailments must have risen and gradually lowered their lifespan. The margins and tall hills of the oasis became barren first, the eggs of the sporangobushes and tube-cycads in the soil simply failing to germinate. These blank spots were then quickly colonized by more UV-resistant flora and planimals from outside the region, like chiropedes and the aggressive red weed. From that point on, the collapse of the previous ecosystem progressed at a geometric rate, as now the local organisms did not only face environmental degradation but also competition from outsiders they would have normally been able to outbreed. Local nekhbets failed to spawn and were gradually replaced by wadjets and more delicate spongisporians died from mutations before they could bloom, losing ground to their thorny upland counterparts. The ecosystem transformed and many were simply not able to adapt quickly enough to the changes. It was a prolonged evolution of the landscape, observed by us humans over a span of about twenty years. When the shield was finally gone, very little remained of the previous ecosystem. The last sporangobushes failed to reproduce and aged into misshapen mutants before mercifully fading away. The last awbar was already sighted five years before their extinction.
It is a curious feeling, to know that these little creatures used to crawl over my feet one day and are now forever gone. Though less spectacular than the great fossils dug out from the ground, their loss is a much more personal one. A more painful one. It is the difference between reading about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in a schoolbook and seeing your own father pass away at the hospital. The many questions you ask yourself. Was this inevitable? Were there ways I could have helped? Why didn’t I try to help? Why did I not do more with the time we were given together? But such things, speculating about changing a past that can no longer be changed, hypothetical realities, is a futile misery. There was nothing I could have done. The magnetized rocks would have faded regardless of me being there or not and none of our expeditions were ever equipped to preserve species. We were just there to observe and study. And by the point I knew my father was sick, it was already too late for us to bond in the way be both wished we would have. Years of neglect had eroded any emotional foundation that could have been built upon. He was my father, and a good one at that, but he was never my friend.
