Editing Hive Fleet Ouroboris (section)

== Tyranids during the Great Crusade? ==

The time of arrival of Hive Fleet Ouroboris is an interesting point of discussion. The earliest mentions of this Hive Fleet were made in M36, when the then-Cardinal of Thracian Primaris, Miriamulus the Elder, wrote in his life work about how, in an earlier age, the Helican Sector had been attacked by what he called the "Legion of Ouroboris". He mentions how this attackers could strip all the life wherever they went, and how "winged monsters vomited from the bellies of bigger beings" composed most of its forces. In this documents, it is mentioned that the [[Emperor]] himself had to fight them to drive them back, culminating in a two weeks long battle over a Warp Rift close to the Eye of Terror.

This description made certain Imperial scientists think years later that this was humanity's first encounter with the Tyranid menace, although this is a point of contention. True, the descriptions written here are close to Tyranid biology, strategy and behaviour (and the idea of the Emperor personally fighting Tyranids is an amazing concept) we cannot fully prove this was the case. By the time of the [[Great Crusade]], there were hundreds, if not thousands, of alien species Mankind had to deal with and there were also some species of insectoid nature that could have fit the description. Hell, this was close to the Eye of Terror, and if the Emperor part was true, maybe it was an early [[daemon]] encounter that was censored later as a [[xenos]] attack. That would certainly match the "strip all life" part ([[Exterminatus]] on the planets before the rumours of daemons spread throughout the galaxy, then blame the blasted xenos). There's also the problem of its location: they appeared very close to the Eye of Terror, and not in the fringes of the galaxy. Most experts believed this proved the "Legion of Ouroboris" couldn't be a Tyranid fleet, but the arrival of [[Hive Fleet Leviathan]] in M41 by moving down the galactic plane meant that this argument is now invalid. To be honest, the fact that most of the early chronicles about Ouroboris were made millenia after its encounter make these story tacky at best. Still, if this "Legion of Ouroboris" was indeed a Tyranid Hive Fleet, it would mean this was Mankind's first conflict with the Tyranids; [[Hive Fleet Tiamet]]'s discovery was a millennia before them, but they were content to stay in the Tiamet system instead of trying to OM NOM NOM the galaxy, so it's debatable whether they count as a proper contact. The immediate answer to this puzzle might be warp time chicanery, but tyranids don't use a warp based FTL so baring somebody in the future throwing a hive fleet into a warp storm that possibility seems unlikely. (Wait a minute, isn’t that what happened to Leviathan at Baal?)

Also, some people believe that the tyranid-like creatures living in Fenris are, in fact, Tyranid bioforms captured and sent to that planet by the Space Wolves captured during this campaign as war trophies many millenia ago, but this is also not confirmed.