Monsters Read Free

across the subcontinent of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The influx of fresh water crippled the coastal ecology of Asia, destroying food supplies and forcing mass migrations in search of sustenance. Those that escaped the floods succumbed to disease and famine, killing 1.4 billion people within the first decade. As tragic and heartrending as this catastrophe was, it too was not the worst of the curses brought on by the coming of Comet Holt.
    Drought ravaged Asia, Africa and the Americas, crippling crop production. Hundreds of millions of people starved.
    It might have been the climatic changes that brought man to his knees, but it was the rise of monsters that kept him there.
    During the first few years, the monstrosities were dismissed as oddities. Mankind was too busy struggling with the natural disasters overwhelming civilization to understand what was happening at a biological level. Those scientists that had the luxury to investigate the gigantism arising within dogs, cats, wolves and bears struggled to understand the cause.
    Birthrates dropped among domesticated farm animals like cows and pigs. For those that remained fertile, complications arose during birthing as sows, ewes and mares struggled to bear oversize stock, often proving fatal to both mother and child. The number of stillborn farm animals and complications during birthing resulting in death reached alarming levels, but the primary concern of scientists was the impact on food production, not the implications of rapid evolutionary change on the distribution of species. Natural Selection was pushing back against artificial selection.
    The thickness of eggshells decreased in both domestic poultry and wild birds, reducing the number of offspring to an average of 1.8 per roosting nest in North America alone. At that rate, biologists predicted the extinction of all but the hardiest of bird species within a decade.
    So many amphibian species succumbed to extinction in the wake of Comet Holt that scientists initially thought the entire phylogenetic clade had been wiped out, destroying tens of thousands of individual species. The discovery of desert frogs and cane toads surviving in the remote outback of Australia gave hope that some amphibians had survived to continue a genetic line that predated the dinosaurs.
    Algae blooms choked the Great Lakes, while microscopic plankton and other strains of cyanobacteria dominated large tracts of the Pacific Ocean, spanning upwards of ten million square miles from the coast of Chile to New Zealand. Although the mechanism stimulating the algae was unknown, scientists hailed the bloom as a carbon sink. They said the bloom acted as a counterweight to anthropogenic climate change, and they thought that atmospheric warming might reverse, but it didn’t. They noted that the algae was exchanging CO2 for oxygen, but the blooms suffocated the oceans, decimating fish stocks. Within a few years, the proportion of oxygen within the atmosphere began to change, creeping up toward prehistoric levels.
    Scientists predicted the biosphere would be self-regulating, and expected oxygen levels to peak well below 25%, but even a small increase of less than two percent within the first decade encouraged forest fires to run rampant. The CO2 released by the fires only fueled the algae further.
    It took some time for scientists to recognize the relationship between the devastation of entire families of species and the advent of gigantism, as not every species was equally affected. At first, the enlargement of surviving species was assumed to be a naturally selected response to the rapid loss of competitive pressures from other species, but Natural Selection didn't explain the changes to domestic pets.
    Although most cats and dogs had become feral, being abandoned by their owners either through desperation or an untimely death, even the litters of those that continued in the care of humans showed enlargement. Within a few years, cats were reaching four