The Lithic Nervature of the Forgotten Mouth

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Specimen Field ID: Subterranea Palimpsestoformis (Order: Lithodermata / Family: Neurostrata)
Habitat: Found in the interstices between tectonic dreams, where sedimentary memory and failed architecture coincide.

Description:
The surface of Subterranea Palimpsestoformis appears at first glance to be a petrified landscape or the fossilized cortex of an unknown creature. Closer inspection reveals layered dermal strata, each veined with subsurface channels—arterial crevices once pulsing with mineral ichor. These strata function as both epidermis and topography, merging biology and geology into a single murmuring organism. The folds and ridges are thought to be muscular contractions frozen in time; however, some xenobiologists insist they still move imperceptibly, at rates slower than continental drift.

Taxonomic Subdivisions:
• Cortex Marmorea: upper dermal field, smooth yet bearing the faint lattice scars of extinct architecture. This grid-like tissue once served as a filtration organ for light frequencies no longer emitted by the dead stars of its native system.
• Venae Noctilucae: obsidian fissures that pulse with dormant photonic residue. Their black viscosity, when stimulated by seismic vibration, emits a brief phosphorescent sigh known as the gray aurora.
• Corpus Fissilis: the central rift—interpreted as both spinal column and riverbed. It marks the site where the organism divided itself into two opposing cognitive halves during its geological maturation.
• Oculus Fossilis: circular apertures resembling eyes or vents, exhaling invisible spores of petrified consciousness.

Behavior and Ecology:
This entity feeds upon erosion, consuming its own decay to perpetuate stillness. Its sustenance is entropy; its respiration, slow collapse. It thrives in forgotten tunnels beneath extinct planets, where gravitational whispers turn to mineral hymns. Some accounts describe it as a symbiotic dream parasite, nesting inside the imagination of planetary cores, replacing magma with thought.

Reproduction:
Fragmentation through tectonic stress. Each fracture spawns a new consciousness shard—a lithic embryo with no recollection of its parent structure. When multiple shards intersect, they form temporary neural nets across fault lines, producing what geopsychologists term The Choral Silence.

Remarks:
To observe Subterranea Palimpsestoformis is to confront the end of differentiation: stone becomes tissue, map becomes memory, architecture becomes scar. It is neither dead nor alive but perpetually in the act of forgetting what those states once meant.