Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

The Mystery Flesh Pit National Park is an online speculative evolution and alternate history project created by artist Trevor Roberts consisting of text fiction and photomanipulation. The project revolves around the fictional "Mystery Flesh Pit National Park", said to be a United States National Park dedicated in the 1980s. The eponymous 'pit' is depicted as a massive subterranean organism (erroneously referred to as a superorganism) of unfathomable size and mysterious anatomy discovered during the mid-1970s near the fictional town of Gumption, Texas. A major event in the project's timeline is a catastrophic natural and artificial disaster in 2007, resulting in permanent closure of the park to the public. Thus, the frame story of the project is that it is a historical retrospective of the park by an amateur enthusiast.

Creation


An image of the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park was first posted to Reddit in 2019 by artist Trevor Roberts. The Flesh Pit in the image is modeled after a decaying cantaloupe Roberts found in his workplace in 2019, which was Photoshopped onto a stock photo of the Big Hole, an open pit mine in Kimberley, South Africa. The resulting image was then stylized by Roberts to have the appearance of a WPA National Parks poster. Roberts has since posted fictional letters, diagrams, posters, advertisements, and other materials that emulate the style of National Park Service publications that expand the lore of the Mystery Flesh Pit. The documents and posts made by Roberts surrounding the Mystery Flesh Pit combine satire and horror.

Synopsis
In the 1970s, the crew of a drilling rig in West Texas stumbled on a crater just outside the fictional town of Gumption, TX. Drilling operations within and around this crater do not turn up potable water or oil, but instead uncover blood and flesh. Exploration of the site reveals it to be an enormous subterranean animal known as the Permian Basin Superorganism (PBSO). The crater was soon commercialized by Anodyne Deep Earth Mining as a tourist destination, until the location was annexed by the National Park Service and renamed to the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park. The park operated for about thirty years, before being shut down due to the events of the Fourth of July in 2007. During the evening celebrations, unseasonably rainy weather and an electrical fault cause the PBSO to 'swallow' the structures inside the park and then vomit. The incident was said to have taken the lives of over 750 people.

Speculative evolution
The PBSO is home to a wide variety of "Geo-biological" structures that were popular hiking destinations during the park's tenure. Examples included the Bronchial forests, or the lungs, the Gastric seas, or the digestive areas, the throat of the organism, and more exotic organs such as the 'Ballast pods', which contained a potent aphrodisiac and were operated by the park as hot springs. A troglobitic ecosystem of organisms lives inside the PBSO, having been completely cut off from the rest of the world. The majority of the parks fauna include arthropods, echinoderms, mollusks, cnidarians, worms, and several vertebrate species. The amount of originally marine organisms in the PBSO suggests that the super-organism once lived in the ocean earlier on in its life-cycle. Examples of some of the so-called 'interpit fauna' include:


 * "Abyssal Copepod", a large arachnid-like arthropod that could grow to over 6 meters (20 feet) and possessed human-like hands and arms
 * "Gigantipede", an enormous arthropleuridean myriapod that had evolved a carnivorous diet
 * "Gasp Owl", an avian-like vertebrate that had convergently evolved a lifestyle similar to insects like mayflies and cicadas
 * "Amorphous Shame", a highly derived relative of weasels that lost most of its skin, eyes, and other organs
 * "Macrobacteria" a diverse collection of several species and subspecies of terrestrial echinoderms of various sizes, with some living a highly social lifestyle
 * "Mesogleal Tridecapod", a unique species of arthropod that helped filter out harmful parasites from the park's arteries and blood vessels
 * "Venous Shamble", a unique species of cephalopod that has dozens of long tendril-like arms

The most bizarre example of fauna in the PBSO are the "Compound Surface Fauna" which were anatomical amalgamations of surface animals (deer, coyotes, et cetera) and humans that became fused together because of the bizarre phenomenon occurring within the park.

In other media
A tabletop RPG is currently being developed in a partnership with Ganza Gaming. A book is also currently being created by Roberts. Once the book is published, which is set to contain expanded lore and art, Roberts says he will be done with the project. A video game based on Mystery Flesh Pit was in the process of creation, however the project was scrapped for numerous reasons, including fan feedback and creative differences.