The Evolution of Shashnia and its organisms is a fascinating and exciting field. The presence of magic has caused it to diverge from Earth patterns even though we see a large convergence of body forms and niches.  With the discovery of humans, this similarity has been used to argue the limited ways in which planets can produce sentient life.  The Dual insists this is not true, and that the sameness of the two species is either chance or fate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_life - Earth prehistory

The Beginnings of Life 

After the bombardment of space debris ceased the surface of Shashnia was primarily water. The conditions for evolving new life are consistent with those predicted for the origin of life on earth. These processes were accelerated by the influx of organic material from oceanic volcanic activity.  The core of Shashnia seems to be inhabited by some sort of being capable of surviving in the intense heat of molten metals.  No one understands exactly what happens, other than different regions being dominated by different colours or blobs with differing abilities. When these beings are released into the atmosphere by a volcanic eruption, they are dying due to lack of metabolic energy and food.  The living lava consumes everything as fast as it can, especially magical items or beings.  Fortunately for the appearance of new life forms, the voracious blobs could never survive long isolated from the extreme heat protection of molten metals and organic material to prey upon.

Interestingly, throughout the extended periods wchich this volcanic activity has occurred frequently, no blob has ever evolved the capability to survive in the 'inorganic' surface world. However, volcanic outbreaks of blobs still occur and they consume anything living they can before dying. The variation is incredible of those that reach the surface; colours ranging from black through red to yellow, gelatinous to armoured, steaming hot to mildly tepid, acidic through neutral to basic...  There are rare tales where a blob has been able to learn speech or cast key spells before dying.  Speculation is that these blobs contain the spirits of myn, which are known to reside in the core of Shashnia.

Life evolved for a long period of time as solely aquatic, very much like her on Earth. The first major split in this group of life's evolution was the incorporation of magickophore

Related Links

Cultural

The Evolution War

new evolutionary reproductive biology

Eugenics

Evolutionary Tree

A categorization of the diversity of Life

Orders/clades 

Arthropod

• Insecta
  • True Insecta
    • Hymenopterans
  • Magical
  • Vascularized
    • Termita
    • mantid warriors
• Crustacean
  • Aquatic
  • Land

Cephalopod

• Wind-sail octopi

Hexapod

• Reptilia - paraphyletic
  • Snakes & Lizards
    • Sandrays & Dragons
  • Ornithischia - duck bills, brachiopods, large herbivores,
  • Amphibians
    • Glider frogs
  • Turtles & Pareiasaurs
• Endotherms
  • Egg-layers
    • Multi-tuberculates
    • Ungulates & Artiodactyls
    • Shashnimyn
  • Dinosaurs (paraphyletic with ornithischia)
    • Suarischia
    • Therapods
    • Raptors & kin
    • Moa & Rocs
  • Monotremes
    • platypi
    • platipus bat
  • Placentals
    • Whales & W\hales - large and island size

Gnathostome

• Extant primitive jawed fishes

Dermatchrondite

• Ancient soft-bon

(see notebook for orig. diagram)

Ascii version. unfinished 

Indents represent a dichotomous separation from previous group. Letters with nothing after them are monophyletic groups?

0

--A

B

--C

---E

D

--F

--G

--H

--I

--J

--K

L

---M

--N

-O

---P

-Q

R is unresolved. A potential polytomy with C/E