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| Strange dinosaur adaptations; Who thinks these are plausible? | |
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| Topic Started: Feb 12 2010, 08:59 AM (8,961 Views) | |
| Margaret Pye | Feb 12 2010, 08:59 AM Post #1 |
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So, as I said on the introduction thread, I haz a maniraptoran sophont. I've been fleshing out a world for them to live in. And I've been violating the phylogenetic bracket appallingly - in ways that strike me as plausible, but I've been doing it a lot and I wanted some second opinions on the plausibility of some of my critters. I've put fur on a lot of ornithopods, but that doesn't violate the phylogenetic bracket since Tianyulong. (I was writing furry ornithopods before Tianyulong, mind you - how else would Leaellynasaura have avoided freezing into a little hypsilophodont icypole? Especially since it didn't have growth rings in its bones, and therefore probably didn't hibernate.) Things I want criticism and suggestions on, mostly dinosaur-related: Opposable digits. I've been handing out opposable digits like candy, and with blithe disregard for phylogeny (I figured they could evolve repeatedly and independently.) Bipedal browsers get opposable digits with which to hold browse. Most of my small-game hunting coelurosaurs have hands like three-fingered hawk claws. Most of my grazers evolved from browsers, and most of my big-game hunters evolved from small-game hunters. Direct brooding by a lot of ornithopods (I don't know what the ceratopsians and ankylosaurs do, I'll have to figure that out: I think sauropods are extinct, perhaps very recently as a result of sophont activity, and coelurosaurs are the only surviving theropods). No, there's no fossil evidence for it. But it seems enough of an improvement on the megapode model that I'd assume, given enough time, it could evolve. Is this stupid? (The obvious way to get round "It's too heavy to sit on eggs!" is to have them lie next to the eggs rather than on top.) Pouches. I've given a lot of random dinosaurs (again, it seemed a simple enough and useful enough adaptation to evolve repeatedly and independently) some kind of skin pouch in which to incubate their eggs. A lot of the bipeds, including the sophonts, have "saddlebags" either side of the ribcage. Venom. I have a clade of venomous coelurosaurs. In most of them, the venom is quite weak: it's the slashing sharklike teeth that do the real damage, and the vasodilator, anticoagulant venom just makes the wound bleed more so that the prey collapses faster. (Yep, idea stolen direct from Komodo dragon.) I'm thinking about creating some with more powerful venom, and possibly with a fancier venom delivery system than "it's in the spit so it gets all over the teeth." In particular, I was thinking about cheetahs, and I came up with a concept for a Coelophysis-shaped creature adapted for camouflage, stalking and incredible sprinting abilities. Except when it caught up with its prey, instead of wrestling it, it'd bite it once and let go - and the prey would run for another minute or so, then drop dead. External ears. Yes, on dinosaurs. Specifically, on troodonts. Troodonts seem to have had very sensitive hearing, and asymmetrical ears like owls, so it seems reasonable to give them an external sound-focussing device. And yes, I could just give them an owly facial disc of vaned feathers, but external ears didn't seem that improbable. They aren't complex. They're strategically placed flaps of skin, plus a bit of cartilage stiffening and, if you're feeling fancy, some muscle. Asymmetrical external ears, obviously. One pointing up, one sideways. And a non-dinosaurian issue: I want to replace rabbits and hares with bipedal saltorial versions. Do you think I'm better off with wallabies, or with very large jerboas? (I also want some saltorial-biped mammalian predators and omnivores, most of them under 5 kg: they don't have to be related to the kangabunnies, and I don't know whether they're marsupials or rodents either.) |
| My speculative dinosaur project. With lots of fluff, parental care and mammalian-level intelligence, and the odd sophont. | |
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| Margaret Pye | Mar 13 2010, 05:43 AM Post #91 |
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OK, size edited! And thanks for the link! |
| My speculative dinosaur project. With lots of fluff, parental care and mammalian-level intelligence, and the odd sophont. | |
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| Carlos | Mar 13 2010, 05:58 AM Post #92 |
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Adveho in me Lucifero
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Again, awesome work |
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Lemuria: http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/topic/5724950/ Terra Alternativa: http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/forum/460637/ My Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Carliro ![]() | |
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| Margaret Pye | Mar 13 2010, 06:13 AM Post #93 |
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Glad you like them :-) . Azhdarchids are next unless I get distracted, and I'll figure out the teeras eventually, probably after doing a bit of research on seals. |
| My speculative dinosaur project. With lots of fluff, parental care and mammalian-level intelligence, and the odd sophont. | |
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| Holben | Mar 13 2010, 07:29 AM Post #94 |
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Rumbo a la Victoria
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You'll definitely need to swing azdarchid ideas by JohnFaa. ![]() Seals as in reptilian analogues or the actual mammalian carnivores? |
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Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea. "It is the old wound my king. It has never healed." | |
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| Margaret Pye | Mar 14 2010, 06:43 AM Post #95 |
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Well, the teeras are analogues of mammalian seals. And I suppose you could consider them "reptilian" - they're certainly amniotes, and neither bird nor mammal, but personally I'd rather keep the word "reptile" out of taxonomical discussions. |
| My speculative dinosaur project. With lots of fluff, parental care and mammalian-level intelligence, and the odd sophont. | |
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| Carlos | Mar 14 2010, 07:04 AM Post #96 |
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Adveho in me Lucifero
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"Reptile" is a stupid and useless word. If reptile is to be used, then birds should be called reptiles too. Taxonomy pisses me off, but people considering reptiles as valid in terms of classification is just too much |
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Lemuria: http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/topic/5724950/ Terra Alternativa: http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/forum/460637/ My Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Carliro ![]() | |
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| Margaret Pye | Mar 14 2010, 07:05 PM Post #97 |
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I think that by "taxonomy" you mean "Linnaean taxonomy". Cladistics is a form of taxonomy too. The word "reptile" can come in handy in informal contexts. |
| My speculative dinosaur project. With lots of fluff, parental care and mammalian-level intelligence, and the odd sophont. | |
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| Margaret Pye | Mar 24 2010, 10:12 PM Post #98 |
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Haven't gotten much done lately, but I thought I should repost these in the correct thread. ........ Icarids Icarids are a large, widespread and successful maniraptoran group. All of them are small, and most of them are predators. Here’s an extremely quick walkthrough of icarid diversity and evolutionary history, focussing on their development of high intelligence, tool use and civilisation: While the evolution and loss of avian flight is still rather mysterious, icarids probably developed from something very much like Archaeopteryx: an extremely primitive bird possessing teeth, three separate fingers, hyperextendible slashing claws and a long bony tail, which flew well but spent much of its time on the ground. Ruddy Jackybird One very common and familiar basal icarid is the Ruddy Jackybird (Snake Jacky, Carrion Jack, Jack Chickenhound…) It’s not a living fossil – it’s highly specialised in many ways – but its lifestyle and general bauplan are pretty close to its distant ancestors. This lanky quasi-avian weighs about 15 kilograms or 40 pounds. It has long legs, a long balancing-pole tail, and a long serpentine neck. Its head is small, with a long pointed snout, large eyes, and stiletto-shaped backward-pointing teeth. Its front limbs are a fascinating hybrid of wing and talon: aerodynamically functional as short broad wings with vaned feathers supported by the clawless third finger, but the first and second fingers projecting from the wrist oppose each other and form a pincer shape. These fingers are long and powerful, with long, fine hooked claws. Except in flight or display, the first and second fingers are exposed by folding the third finger back out of the way. Unlike more derived icarids, jackybirds retain a long, grasping hind toe on each foot. The slashing second claw is only an inch long, and not particularly powerful. A jackybird’s torso is covered in dark red, glossy vaned feathers. Its long bony tail has Archaeopteryx-style feathers banded in the same dark red and a rich cream, and it has a fluffy cream-coloured feather-boa-effect ruff round the base of its neck. Its head, neck, and legs are featherless and covered in glossy black scales, and its wing feathers are chocolate brown. Jackybirds live in long-term monogamous pairs, usually accompanied by a few adult offspring who’ve stayed on as nest helpers. The sexes are practically impossible to tell apart (even for other jackybirds – the first step in courtship is a little dance that basically translates as “I’m male, are you female?”) They lay five or six eggs at the beginning of the monsoon season, and incubate them in marsupial-esque pouches on either side of their ribcage. Families cooperate in childcare and territorial defense, but not usually in hunting. Jackybirds are opportunists. Their staple diet consists of small animals, anything from beetles to rabbits, which are snatched with the hands and/or mouth. They’re particularly fond of snakes, which they slash with their scythe-claws and grapple with their hands. Poisonous species are taken regularly, and they have some immunity to most venoms. They also eat a lot of carrion, and are happy to eat rotten meat if fresh meat isn’t available. They’ll eat fruit and seeds. Sometimes, usually in times of food shortage, family groups will cooperatively hunt larger animals by chasing them to exhaustion and then ineptly biting and slashing them until they fall over. Jackybirds have no idea how to kill big game: having caught it, they tend to eat it while it’s still wriggling, often starting with the intestines. Farmers are not amused. Jackybirds are terrible fliers. They need several metres’ runway to take off and land, can only fly very fast in straight lines, and tire after about a minute. Still, that’s often enough to make the difference between being eaten and escaping. Unless they’re in serious danger, though, they prefer to run away. Lacerodonts and Rhynchonychids Most icarids can be divided into lacerodonts and rhynchonychids. Both these clades are totally flightless. Lacerodonts can be recognised by their shark-like slashing teeth and their toxic saliva. They’re all strictly carnivorous and often social. Some are ambush hunters and some are pursuit predators. Rhynchonychids have powerful oviraptor-esque beaks instead of teeth, and the big-game-hunting species are sexually dimorphic with the males being about 75% the females’ size. Most of them are bone-crunching predators that moonlight as scavengers, although some of them have omnivorous tendencies and a few eat mainly shellfish. Rhynchonychids are a clever lot: most of them have basic tool use and reciprocal altruism (being nice to people who aren’t related to you so that they’ll be nice back). Military Ringhound One well-known lacerodont is the military ringhound. It’s not much bigger than a jackybird and quite similar in shape, although the arms are weaker, the head and neck more powerful, the hands are more robust and the scythe-claws much more impressive. The mouth opens a good 120 degrees, and the teeth are long, triangular and serrated: the jaw muscles aren’t particularly strong, but the head can be pulled backwards with great force. It has a striking colour scheme: its scaly neck, down-covered torso and archaeopteryx-style vaned-feathered tail have thick, sharply defined vertical stripes (rings) of cream, ochre and blackish-brown. The head and limbs are entirely dark brown (the head and legs are smooth-scaled, the arms are covered in long, shaggy, erectile down.) Ringhounds are pursuit predators that run in packs of up to 50. Each pack has just one breeding pair, who are the parents of most of the rest. They hunt fast, poorly armed ornithopods, and have impressive teamwork and tactical skills. Some of the larger packs regularly kill 300-kilogram prey (more than ten times the size of each individual). Their venom is quite mild. Its main effect is to dilate blood vessels and prevent clotting, and when spread systemically it increases heart rate. The venom wouldn’t kill anything on its own, but when it gets into the huge lacerations created by a ringhound taking a big bite and pulling away, it increases bleeding and speeds up death. Between the natty colour scheme and the impressive courage and teamwork, ringhounds have become an emblem of the brave and disciplined soldier in several countries. “Protohuman” This extinct rhynchonychid species, intelligent even by rhynchonychid standards, is particularly interesting because its descendents developed language and civilisation. (I really like hyaenas. I was really impressed when I found out they had reciprocal altruism and politics. I couldn’t figure out a plausible evolutionary pathway to make a hyaena sapient – how the heck would it make tools with those paws? This is the next best thing. Hawks, deinonychosaurs and oviraptors are all cool too.) “Protohumans” were basically the coelurosaurian answer to spotted hyaenas: clever, highly social carnivores, equally skilled as long-distance-running predators or bone-crunching scavengers. They were about the size of mammalian humans, but slightly lighter due to extensive air sacs: adult females averaged 60 kg, adult males 45 kg. They were mostly slightly built and gracile, but the neck was unexpectedly short and thick and the head unexpectedly large for the size of the animal, and the beak was a huge parroty thing with sharp, curved tips for wounding prey and thick, blunt sides for splintering bone. Protohumans had quite strange hands. The thumb on each hand had a long, robust hooked claw used for hanging onto prey, but the middle finger and opposable outer finger had short, blunt claws and highly sensitive scale-free tips. This may have been a grooming adaptation originally, or it may have been entirely due to selection for greater dexterity. At any rate, protohumans attacked prey and competitors with simple clubs and spears as well as their beaks and claws, and were very skilled at throwing stones. They lived in groups of 5-50. Most females in a group would be related, although outside females would occasionally join: most males would have come from other groups, and males who stayed in their birth group would remain celibate and help look after their sisters’ young. They usually formed long-term monogamous pairs, with the occasional trio (usually m/f/f, occasionally m/m/f). Pairs would cooperate in intra-pack fights and look after each other’s interests, and males did a reasonable amount of the incubation and caring for the precocial chicks, but extra-pair copulations and extra-pair fertilisations were very common. Males had mostly given up fighting over adultery for a subtler, more genteel method of competition: producing as much sperm as possible, and copulations as long and frequent as the females would permit. Females could store sperm for several weeks and had a lot of control over how much sperm they stored from any given mating. Rape wasn’t really possible: since protohumans were capable of killing things larger than themselves fairly easily, anyone attempting rape would get shredded. Protohumans had two main food sources: large ornithopods whose main defence was running away, and carrion (often stolen from another predator.) They’d also opportunistically attack small game or eat fruit and nuts. They ate all parts of a carcass, except the large intestine of large animals: small bones were swallowed, digested and absorbed, large bones were splintered into small ones, and keratinous parts were blithely swallowed and regurgitated as pellets. While they preferred fresh meat, they’d eat festering maggot-infested carcasses if that’s what was available. They had very distensible stomachs and could eat up to a third of their body weight. Icarosapient “humans” “Protohumans” were gradually selected for more sophisticated politics and more sophisticated tool use. After a certain point these things showed up, were wildly successful, and wiped out all their close relatives. A modern “human” is pretty much like a protohuman, except minus the weaponry. The thumb has lost its long claw, and has also become opposable and sensitive (the three fingers are about equal in length and thickness). The deinychosaurian slashing claw has shrivelled into a long, skinny hyperextendable toe tipped with a tuft of vaned feathers: it’s used in threat displays, but is no use whatsoever as a weapon. The bone-shattering beak and its immense muscles have practically vanished. Despite the bigger brain, the head has shrunk. A human has a tiny, narrow hooked beak – rather hawk-shaped, but several sizes too small for the head – and an immense ear-to-ear gape. The lower jaw is so frail and twig-like and the bite so weak that human mouths are no longer useful for food processing. They have to reduce food to swallowable chunks with their hands. |
| My speculative dinosaur project. With lots of fluff, parental care and mammalian-level intelligence, and the odd sophont. | |
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| Margaret Pye | Mar 24 2010, 10:17 PM Post #99 |
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They're narrating the story. They're the only sophonts in the story's universe. Of course they call themselves "humans". We can avoid confusion by calling them "icarosapients." General Humans are gracile beaked theropods. Adult females average about 60 kilograms with an empty stomach, adult males about 45 kg. They’re derived enough that it’s hard to tell their phylogenetic affinities beyond “deinonychosaurian”: as a matter of fact, they’re secondarily flightless descendants of very early birds. They’re built rather like troodonts, with lanky cursorial legs and an extremely long tail (equal to snout-vent length). The tail base bends 90 degrees in any direction. The rest of the tail contains no muscle and so cannot bend actively, but it’s whippy and springy rather than stiff and can be passively bent into a semicircle (necessary to reach the tip for autogrooming.) The long arms fold in maniraptoran style, but have exceedingly flexible shoulders with 180-degree arcs of movement in any direction, and they've evolved a ball-and-socket wrist joint that flexes, extends and swivels. Hand claws are short and blunt and usually filed to be shorter than the fingertip. The three fingers are of equal length and thickness, and the first and third are both opposable. Humans are effectively two-toed. The first toe on each foot has been completely lost. Much more recently, the deinonychosaurian scythe-claws were superseded by stone knives and shrivelled away, leaving a long skinny hyperextendible toe tipped with a tuft of contrast-coloured vaned feathers. This is used in threat displays. The most unusual part of a human is the head. They have a larger head and shorter, thicker neck than would be expected in such a slender theropod, with extremely weak toothless jaws, large forward-pointing eyes in a rather flat face, and an enlarged braincase taking up most of the skull. The beak is short, curved and hawklike, but disproportionately small and narrow for the size of the head. On the other hand, the mouth opening is huge: the gape extends literally from ear to ear, like a nightjar’s, and the twig-thin lower jaw opens up to 120 degrees. Humans are mostly covered in thick soft down, which varies wildly in length depending on climate and genetics. They have a few erectile vaned feathers for display purposes: tufts on the wrists and the vestigial scythe-claws, an owl-like “eared” crest, and a large diamond shape on the end of the extremely long tail. They have very long, erectile down along both arms, generally longer in females and independent of the length of body feathers. Fingers and palms of hands are naked: backs of hands may have short down or fine non-overlapping scales. The extent of leg feathering varies, and the same skin on the same individual can actually switch within a few weeks between down and fine scales, without changing colour. Rikhien Aheesa, who came from a cold-adapted racial background and habitually went barefoot in the Arctic winter, used to have fluffy feet and no visible scales whatsoever (then he moved to a temperate climate and moulted spectacularly – every surface was covered in off-white fluff for weeks.) Kate Pidgeon, heat-adapted and used to heavy manual labour in a tropical climate, used to have naked thighs like an ostrich. Ecology/behaviour Humans are carnivorous. They’re not hypercarnivores – they can digest fruit and seeds – but they can stay perfectly healthy on a totally carnivorous diet. The fragile beak is useless in food processing: they use their hands, usually with tools, to reduce food to bite-sized chunks which they then swallow whole. They eat all parts of their prey, except the large intestine of large animals: small bones are swallowed, digested and absorbed, large bones are smashed into small ones, and keratinous parts are blithely swallowed and regurgitated in pellets. While they prefer fresh meat, they’ll eat festering maggot-infested carcasses with no more distaste than a sentient ape would show towards stale dried-out bagels. They have very distensible stomachs and will regularly eat a quarter or a third of their body weight, digest it overnight, and then live off stored fat for several days. Their recent non-sapient ancestors were basically the coelurosaurian equivalent of spotted hyaenas: highly social in a complicated political way, intelligent and opportunistic, and equally skilled as cursorial megapredators and durophagous scavengers. Said critters looked pretty human, except with a bigger head and enormous macaw-looking beak, three-inch scythe-claws, and a two-inch sharply hooked claw on each thumb (but still with dextrous, blunt-clawed second and third fingers.) Unlike hyaenas, they had the manual dexterity to channel their intelligence into simple tool use (throwing rocks at ornithopods, whacking them with big sticks, throwing rocks at members of other packs and whacking them with big sticks…) Hand-brain feedback cycle ensued, and eventually they got good enough at tool-making that their beaks and claws were superseded, became a waste of resources, and evolved to near-nonexistence. They hung onto the l337 marathon-running skillz, though – a fit human could hypothetically chase anything on this mammal-dominated planet to exhaustion (although they'd have a hard time catching some of their world's ratite-analogues). Since the ancestral pack structure had most of the healthy adults pairing off and breeding, and the dominant pair were first-among-equals rather than a wolf-style alpha pair clearly defined and set apart, humans don’t have wolf-style “pack instincts.” Certainly some are dominant over others, and certainly they have a powerful hard-wired urge to cooperate with and protect their relatives, but nothing that would seem unusual to a good old bald chimpanzee. They do still have predatory instincts, even though almost everybody nowadays eats domestic livestock. They like to chase things that run away, grab small things that move fast, and throw projectiles. A lot of their sports and dances are easy to psychoanalyse as a mock hunt with one of the participants imitating prey. Rural humans also tend to be keen on actual predation, especially chasing fast, inoffensive herbivores to exhaustion and finishing them off with a knife (guns are just no fun). They’re not particularly aggressive towards other humans – the bloodlust’s directed at non-sentient beings and usually away from people. They have murder and they have war, but if anything they’re less violent than omnivorous sentients (although they’re much more prone to cannibalism, particularly serial killers.) Humans really aren’t fussy about their habitat. They originally evolved on the prairies of Keshiy, and they tend to prefer open country, but anywhere will do. Deserts? Swamps? The High Arctic? As long as there’s solid ground and meat, they’re happy. They don’t need much drinking water (bird kidneys y’know) and they don’t require technology to cope with extreme cold (they just grow more fluff), and what they can’t deal with naturally they will deal with by ingenuity. Swimming doesn’t come naturally to them, but they can invent it – and since they have a well-developed air sac system, they float. Humans are diurnal, have practically no rods and so absolutely pathetic low-light vision, and tend to really hate the dark. They have excellent, sharp, full-colour (including ultraviolet and infrared) vision in daylight – it’s not quite hawk-standard, but they can read books from across the room. Their sense of smell is rather weak, but definitely exists. It’s mainly used for food selection. Their hearing is average. Reproduction Humans are, surprise surprise, oviparous. Healthy reproductive-aged females lay one grapefruit-sized egg every few months, pretty much regardless of their sex lives. Laying eggs is a pretty minor strain, on a par with what certain mammals put up with once a month. They breed at any time of year, and have very little seasonal/cyclic fluctuation in levels of sex drive. They can store sperm for several weeks, in microscopic tubules at the vagina-uterus junction. Females have a large degree of control (mostly subconscious) over how much sperm they store from a given mating. They have rather strange genitalia: obviously based on the single-orifice, retractable-phallus design of primitive birds, but with some odd variations. Sexual arousal in females causes part of the cloaca to prolapse, placing the vaginal orifice outside the cloacal orifice: in standard procreative sex, the vagina is directly penetrated. The phallus extends hydraulically to about a foot long. It has a canine-style bulb at the base, preventing disengagement: inflation and deflation of this bulb are under conscious control. The rest of it is covered in tentacle-like projections which have a hydraulic muscle arrangement allowing them to wriggle under their own power. Incubation period is twelve weeks. They’ve never bothered to invent contraception: unwanted eggs (which, obviously, is most of them!!!) simply aren’t incubated. Humans are rather precocial: they can walk clumsily within hours of hatching, start picking up on house-training within a week, and will hunt and kill mice and lizards at a few months. However, it still takes them a year or so to start talking – before that, they’re a bit like really friendly cats. There are no obvious tertiary sexual characteristics. On average females are somewhat larger and coarser-featured than males, and have longer arm feathers, but there’s a lot of overlap and many individuals would seem androgynous without social context (ornaments, behaviour, whatever). Nearly all societies are unfairly female-dominated, although in this day and age the more “enlightened” societies are doing a reasonable job of gender equality. Men are traditionally stereotyped as violent, irresponsible and unable to control their sex drives: they may be considered less intelligent, or just considered too impulse-driven and sex-crazed to be any use intellectually. They’re often considered “closer to nature” and more naturally spiritual and artistic. Traditionally “masculine” roles generally involve fighting in defense of loved ones (most non-commissioned soldiers are male, most officers are female) and/or being an ornamental sex toy. In most societies, men dress better and dominate the performing arts. Humans are as sexually flexible as the more familiar mammalian sentients, but they seem to default to long-term pairs (small groups also work well, particularly groups of two or three females and one male). Unlike the mammals, they’re usually only mildly upset about their partners having extramarital flings. Absolute sexual fidelity is held up as an ideal in many societies, but not often attained in real life. Some societies hold that a man shouldn’t be tricked into raising children that aren’t his. Other societies hold that if a man can’t hold his wife’s attention then that’s his own fault. |
| My speculative dinosaur project. With lots of fluff, parental care and mammalian-level intelligence, and the odd sophont. | |
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| The Dodo | Mar 26 2010, 06:58 AM Post #100 |
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Prime Specimen
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So, are these just up-dated forms of some of your previous posts? |
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| Margaret Pye | Mar 26 2010, 06:29 PM Post #101 |
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Yes, I thought they belonged in this thread. Been too busy lately to do much. |
| My speculative dinosaur project. With lots of fluff, parental care and mammalian-level intelligence, and the odd sophont. | |
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| Margaret Pye | Mar 27 2010, 08:22 AM Post #102 |
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Azhdarchids Various horrocks (azhdarchids) are common worldwide. They all have long erect legs and broad shortish wings: they walk well, are good at rapid takeoffs, and fly rather clumsily but are good at soaring on thermals. Neck and beak morphology is more varied: a lot of them have the traditional long, straight, heavy beak (sometimes serrated) and long stiff neck, but several clades have evolved a more flexible neck or shorter beak, and the (insert name) have an unusual mid-cervical vertebral joint that effectively “spring-loads” the head. Some horrocks are viviparous, some are ovoviviparous, and quite a few varieties lay eggs that are already partly developed. The leehe (pronounced LEE-heh) is the world’s largest and most intimidating flying creature. Its wingspan is over 10 m, its weight around 250 kg, and it occasionally eats icarosapients. Leehe are fairly conservative in general shape, though with a shorter, more flexible and more muscular neck than usual. They have no crests. The face, neck, limbs and torso are covered with fur, length varying with environmental temperature, but the wing membranes are naked. Females are greyish brown all over, and males are glossy black. Both sexes and all races have long, fluffy neck fur that makes the neck look two or three times thicker than it actually is, blending into a long “cape” that grows just above the patagial attachments from the shoulders to the hips. Leehe, and their half-sized cousins the arashka, are adaptable omnivores who inhabit every biome on the western continent except dense forests. In summer, they range north to the limit of the polar ice sheet: northern populations are migratory, so in winter the most northerly leehe are found in areas where snow rarely lies on the ground more than a week. Leehe are tireless walkers, and can gallop quite fast over short distances in a strange rocking gait, placing the back feet inside the forefeet (hmm, the patagium would restrict their stride, does anyone think I should have them stick to pacing?) They take off from a standing start and land quadrupedally. Their powered flight is based on anaerobic respiration and they can’t keep it up for more than a few minutes, but by exploiting thermals they can stay in the air for hours at a time (although they rarely want to). Leehe spend most of their time striding across the plains, taking flight only when there seems to be no food in the immediate area or when they’re frightened. A leehe’s staple diet is 1-30 kg animals, grabbed with the beak and swallowed whole and often alive. They also eat a lot of fruit when it’s available, any carrion they can find, and occasionally tender young leaves. Animals over 30 kg tend to be too big to swallow whole, but if they’re conveniently available and don’t run too fast/fight back, leehe will tear them apart and eat them anyway. And yes, this does include the odd icarosapient: leehe have learned that icarosapients are dangerous and best flown away from, but they’ll attack from behind or go after young children. Leehe have a rather complicated reproductive life, hard to fit into neat categories. They are monogamous, with a pair defending a territory together: both defend mainly against individuals of their own sex, and an interloper who manages to drive off a territory owner during mating season will often be cheerfully accepted by the mate. Sedentary populations are often monogamous over the long term, whereas migratory leehe will often exchange partners between each litter. Most populations mate in spring, but tropical populations breed non-seasonally and asynchronously. Leehe lay 5-10 basketball-sized eggs, about eight weeks after ovulation and fertilisation. The eggs are buried in piles of rotting leaves and take another eight weeks to hatch: they organise simultaneous hatching by calling to each other. Newborns can fly weakly and are good climbers, with powerful grasping ability in all four paws: both parents will attend the birth, and the young will climb up their legs or fly up and cling to their long fur capes. Baby leehe continue to cling onto their parents most of the time for several months, even during flight, until they are strong enough to follow along. They’re fed regurgitated semi-digested food until they’re old enough to do their own hunting. They take three or four years to become independent, and another two to start reproducing themselves. Leehe often live to be 60 or 70. |
| My speculative dinosaur project. With lots of fluff, parental care and mammalian-level intelligence, and the odd sophont. | |
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| Carlos | Mar 27 2010, 08:57 AM Post #103 |
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Adveho in me Lucifero
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VERY GOOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Since pterosaurs had muscle fibers in the wings and therefore could expand and retract the wing membranes I suppose they'd be flexible enough to not offer any obstacle in walking and running. |
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Lemuria: http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/topic/5724950/ Terra Alternativa: http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/forum/460637/ My Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Carliro ![]() | |
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| Margaret Pye | Mar 28 2010, 06:26 AM Post #104 |
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Adult
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Less spectacular, but common and conspicuous and likely to be mentioned in the story, azhdarchid: Bantfels are a common species of Caenhar savannah and farmland. They’re around four kilograms and a metre tall at the shoulder, and conservatively shaped. They have light grey fur and naked wings striped black and white, with a vertical mane of white bristles extending from the tip of the stubby tail up to the back of the head: the hollow bony crest is longish, pointed and slightly curved, and covered in long white fur. Bantfels eat small animals, caught on land (they don’t hunt near water or in swamps). Mice, snails, beetles, skinks… that sort of thing. They live in territorial pairs, sometimes with a few adult offspring: territories are defended by flying conspicuously round the boundaries. Bantfels are ovoviviparous, giving birth to about 5 altricial offspring who are kept in a large, messy stick nest in a dead tree. |
| My speculative dinosaur project. With lots of fluff, parental care and mammalian-level intelligence, and the odd sophont. | |
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| Margaret Pye | Apr 1 2010, 08:37 AM Post #105 |
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Adult
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Therizinosaurs Therizinosaurs and ornithopods between them occupy most large land herbivore niches. The groups process food differently. Ornithopods chew their food thoroughly before fermenting it in a complex, expanded stomach (several groups have evolved rumination) or intestine (one group practises caecotrophy.) Therizinosaurs use their undersized heads only for food collection, biting off leaves and swallowing them whole. “Chewing” occurs in an extremely muscular gizzard with the aid of swallowed stones. The ornithopod system is lighter, more adaptable, and extracts more energy from relatively rich foods, but therizinosaurs are capable of eating larger volumes and supporting themselves on less nutritious food. Therefore, ornithopods are variable in size, much more diverse, and tend to feed selectively on high-energy plants like herbs and young leaves, whereas therizinosaurs are large (minimum 100 kg), restricted to a few species per biome, and indiscriminately devour tough foliage and dry dead grass. As a spectacular example, the vashke and varatke of the Keshiyan taiga live entirely on pine needles. Therizinosaurs practise extensive parental care. Young are fed for a few months exclusively on a nutritious secretion from their parents’ salivary glands, allowing them to rapidly reach large sizes. Vashke and varatke In the north of the Keshiyan Empire, there are endless, freezing pine forests. Their most striking inhabitants are two species of fairly conservative-looking therizinosaur: huge, slow, waddling bipeds with bulbous tilted bodies and impressive front claws. Vashke are enormous, up to fifteen tons. They have immensely long necks, and can reach over 20 m above the ground – the carotid and vertebral arteries contain several “accessory hearts”, valved chambers with pulsating muscle walls. The head is tiny and consists mainly of big green eyes and a strong sharp-edged beak. The whole animal is covered in long, shaggy, dark green down, with particularly impressive plumes on the arms and the stubby tail. They smell very strongly of pine oil, and mark their territory with loud infrasonic roars. Vashke eat nothing but pine needles, huge quantities of pine needles. They spend about 20 hours a day feeding, and about two asleep. Even so, there’s not much energy in pine needles, and a lot of what there is is wasted in detoxification, so vashke are rather sluggish creatures. Vashke are monogamous, and the sexes are almost identical. They lay eggs in enormous heaped piles of pine needles and dirt, and incubate the eggs (usually two or three, but only the strongest chick is reared) under their arms. Parents take turns to incubate. The peacock-sized young are quite altricial: they can regulate body temperature from before birth, but they take a few months to learn to walk, and they live entirely off parental secretions until the age of two or three. Young vashke are covered in long, viciously barbed quills among the feathers, which they lose at about five years old. They become independent around this time, and the parents will often start breeding again, but the young stay on their parents’ territory until they’re fully grown at age 10-15. Adult vashke have almost no natural predators. A large pack of dakirs could, theoretically, kill one, but dakirs are very rare in the taiga, and and those that do live there are found only in pairs. Icarosapients certainly can kill them, but they’ve never been common in the taiga either (although they cut down a fair bit of it for industry.) The young are very well protected by their quills, and by their parents’ massive predator-impaling claws. Varatke are a smaller, lower-browsing version, weighing around five tons and with a reach of 5-10 m. They have pale grey feathers with a fan-shaped down crest on the head. Pilotitans This group of therizinosaurs is distinguished by: Walking quadrupedally at least some of the time. Technically they’re knuckle-walkers, but the more derived members have strongly modified the hand, with the last two fingers strongly reduced and backward-pointing: the thumb points sideways and may also be reduced, or may bear a long vicious claw used for fighting and defence. A peculiar method of incubating their eggs. Most therizinosaurs use a standard maniraptoran method of incubation: they half-bury their eggs in the ground in a circle, lie in the middle of the circle, and cover the eggs with their long arm feathers. Pilotitans and their close relatives have a series of skin pouches along their sides: upon laying eggs, they immediately pick them up with their beaks and put them in the pouches. Many species have altricial young that continue to ride in the pouches for a few months. Teeth completely absent Tail often strongly reduced, sometimes missing altogether. Most of them are grazers Varks These extremely primitive pilotitan clade is highly successful: various varieties are common across the plains of the eastern continent, and the varklet and grey vark have been domesticated by icarosapients into important livestock animals. Varks have the distinctive “marsupial” reproduction and the toothless beaks, but they’re something of a transitional form in that they only knuckle-walk when grazing or moving slowly. They have long back legs, a long tail and a horizontal posture, and on two legs they’re quite good long-distance runners, with very little tendency to waddle. They retain long, vicious hand claws. These are mostly used for intraspecific combat – they prefer to run away from predators, although when brought to bay they can often fight off attackers. The grey vark has a confusingly large number of races, clines and morphs: wild ones vary from 200-500 kg, and from grey to blond to pale green. Males and females are similar, although the males tend to be more aggressive and have longer claws. All races have a wide flat head and a broad straight-across end to the beak, and a mane of long erectile down from the tip of the tail to the base of the beak. When they’re not feeding or displaying, they carry their necks in a swan-like S curve. Grey varks are found in large shifting-composition flocks, which keep up a dominance hierarchy (separate for males and females) by displaying, wrestling with their necks, and occasionally fencing with the long claws. The basic unit is a monogamous pair, which may or may not remain constant from year to year. Each individual has eight pouches, which allows a pair to theoretically raise sixteen young per breeding season. The four-kilogram chicks can walk and run at birth, and start nibbling on herbs at a few days old, although it takes about six months before they’re weaned. They’re independent of their parents at one year, when they’re about half-size, and adult at three or four. Domestic varks are very useful for meat and leather. They tend to be up the large end of the size range, and are available in a wide range of colours and patterns (mostly shades of brown.) The domestic ones are much less aggressive (although modern farmers often cut the last joints off young chicks’ fingers, just to be safe) and mostly noticeably less intelligent, not that wild varks are noted for their brainpower. They’ll still form monogamous pairs if given the opportunity, but if the supply of males is limited then they’ll mate promiscuously and females will rear their young alone. |
| My speculative dinosaur project. With lots of fluff, parental care and mammalian-level intelligence, and the odd sophont. | |
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1:53 PM Jul 11