Have you heard of the Permian extinction?
It was bad. Very bad.
It started around 252 or so million years ago. It was caused by volcanic eruptions that released basalt lava. These eruptions were some of history's most destructive and immense volcanic events. So intense in fact, that they caused 7 million kilometers of what would be known as the region Siberia to be covered in basalt rock. The 'flood basalt.'
Before that however, the lava caused SO2 (Sulfur dioxide) and CO2 (Carbo dioxide) to be released into the world and caused the oxygen levels to plummet to an all-time low. This event known as Euxina caused global temperatures to rise and the oceans to acidify. These eruptions also caused the chemical methane to be released into the surface world as well. And eventually, the numerous destructive events even reduced the ozone layer to nothing. Causing the sun's rays to irradiate everything it touched.
Over 90% of all living things, plants, animals, and otherwise died during this event. It resulted in it earning its name.
The great dying.
What they didn't tell you, is that some things learned to adapt to this harsh environment, much earlier than the average Triassic period proto-dinosaur.
New unicellular organisms learned to harness the sun's radiation.
Plants and animals adapted and evolved to survive and thrive in the unimaginable heat.
And one animal, in particular, was already built for an environment such as this.
251.5 mya
It wished everything would stop burning him.
The giant animal rose from the irradiated soul of his island. Untouched for billions upon billions of years. It stood over 65 meters tall, had jagged and long dorsal spines on its back, and a tail with a tadpole-esque paddle at its tip. Its arms were long and muscular and its legs were big and beefy. And yet even they shook under the intense heat of the sun.
Heat like this was new to it. The last time it awoke, the ozone layer had been new but had HELD. Now he was feeling the full force of the sun's heat and it was not fun.
Although, even as it glowed bright orange due to its skin immolating and melting in contact with the sun's rays, it didn't die. It was rapidly converting the radiation the sun's rays granted hit into resistance and regeneration.
Soon enough, a mere glow of see-through orange light would be all that surrounded the beast. The resistance to heat builds up to a point where the sun's rays do not affect it, and instead just convert into a constant stream of radiation. Power.
And power is all this bitter creature had.