Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]
Speculative biology is simultaneously a science and form of art in which one speculates on the possibilities of life and evolution. What could the world look like if dinosaurs had never gone extinct? What could alien lifeforms look like? What kinds of plants and animals might exist in the far future? These questions and more are tackled by speculative biologists, and the Speculative Evolution welcomes all relevant ideas, inquiries, and world-building projects alike. With a member base comprising users from across the world, our community is the largest and longest-running place of gathering for speculative biologists on the web.

While unregistered users are able to browse the forum on a basic level, registering an account provides additional forum access not visible to guests as well as the ability to join in discussions and contribute yourself! Registration is free and instantaneous.

Join our community today!

Username:   Password:
Add Reply
I haz a maniraptoran sophont!; And I let them name themselves!
Topic Started: Feb 12 2010, 10:05 AM (1,037 Views)
Margaret Pye
Member Avatar
Adult
 *  *  *  *  *  *
They're narrating the story. They're the only sophonts in the story's universe. Of course they call themselves "humans". (Not sure what we should call them to avoid confusion. Icarosapiens?)

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 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.) Janet Fitch, 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.
Edited by Margaret Pye, Mar 17 2010, 08:09 PM.
My speculative dinosaur project. With lots of fluff, parental care and mammalian-level intelligence, and the odd sophont.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Holben
Member Avatar
Rumbo a la Victoria

If they're narrating, why isn't it in the 1st person plural?
(We?)

I think Sapioraptors. But letting them name themselves, whatever means 'the kind', 'the people', 'the race' or whatever. if they communicate like dinos are assumed to, how about the Sakirii?
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."
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Carlos
Member Avatar
Adveho in me Lucifero
 *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Very interesting
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

Posted Image
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Margaret Pye
Member Avatar
Adult
 *  *  *  *  *  *
No, they're not narrating this description - this is my description of them, to be easily understood by apes. I just don't have a better name for them than "humans". It's a lot easier to write about sophonts that call themselves humans, especially when the main character keeps banging on about HUMAN RIGHTS HUMAN RIGHTS. "Sakirii rights" isn't going to have the same meaning to the reader.

"If they communicate like dinos are supposed to"? How's that?
My speculative dinosaur project. With lots of fluff, parental care and mammalian-level intelligence, and the odd sophont.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
The Dodo
Member Avatar
Prime Specimen
 *  *  *  *  *  *  *
I don't know if this was covered in the description and I missed it, but do they have a theropod like stance or a hominid like stance?
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Canis Lupis
Member Avatar
Dinosaurs eat man, woman inherits the Earth.

How about Raman? That's a name they could call themselves. Combines "raptor" with "human". And in the story, you could interrupt it and say that, instead of humans, they call themselves ramans. It's just a synonym.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
TheCoon
Member Avatar
Happy merry Jesusmas inhabitants of the Spec Forums!
 *  *  *  *  *  *
I like how you also called humans. It was a little confusing, but it gave it quite an interesting touch. And I also like the concept.

Raman? That sounds like instant food XD. I would like something like Homaptors. (Homo + Raptor)
Greetings young life form! Procyon Lotor at your service.

Posted Image
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
colddigger
Member Avatar
Joke's over! Love, Parasky
 *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
i really like this thing, will more descriptions be added?
Oh Fine.

Oh hi you! Why don't you go check out the finery that is SGP??

v Don't click v
Spoiler: click to toggle

Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Holben
Member Avatar
Rumbo a la Victoria

If it's off human rights, 'Raman rights' sounds like something from hindu mythology. "Homoraptor" sounds like a cheap shot, and "Sakirii rights" doesn't have a ring. How about "The Rights of the Kind"? They could call themselves "the people" or "the kind" or "the men" or sometyhing, much like "Inuit" means "the people."

That said, i've used "The Species" for my space age colony wreckers.
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."
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
T.Neo
Member Avatar
Translunar injection: TLI
 *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Interesting, a dinosaur sophont with a traditionally female-dominated society... kinda what I figured they would have.

And the lack of contraception (instead, simply not incubating the eggs) is wonderfully simple and makes quite a bit of sense. Apparently abortion isn't nearly as controversial for them as it is for some humans.

As for a name, they're maniraptors, not apes, so they'll probably have birdlike languages, probably one unpronouncable by humans. Likewise, they wouldn't be able to pronounce the sounds in human languages properly.

So, some name like "chirp chirp screech" or something. It might not be as good sounding as human rights, but it's a whole lot less confusing.

Edited by T.Neo, Feb 13 2010, 05:33 AM.
A hard mathematical figure provides a sort of enlightenment to one's understanding of an idea that is never matched by mere guesswork.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Margaret Pye
Member Avatar
Adult
 *  *  *  *  *  *
I'll be putting up descriptions of the world they live in. I need to roughly flesh out the following ecosystems in the tropical, monsoon-seasonal Caenhar Islands: savannah and farmland, woodlands, coastlines, and probably the nearby sea and the rainforests. In Keshiy, which is on a seperate continent and needs quite distinct wildlife, I mainly need a tundra ecosystem. (I'm putting the carnivorous wallabies in Keshiy - the tundra ecosystem gets a little white fluffy one of immense cuteness.) I should also flesh out the vast cool-temperate prairies. And Jerak probably grew up fairly near the east coast if she's visibly mixed-race (is she? I still haven't decided), so I should have at least a vague idea of what lives there.

I posted two Caenhar animals in this thread: jackybirds and ringhounds Can somebody please reply to that thread? In particular, what do people think of jackybird wing design, and should they have more vaned feathers and less down?

And I don't know if this site's the right place for anthropological notes, but I'll put them up if anyone wants them.

Definitely horizontal theropod stance, definitely horizontal theropod stance. There might be some plausible reason that theropods would evolve to stand upright, but I'm damned if I can think of one.

Don't know if not incubating a fertilised egg counts as "abortion" - more like taking a morning-after pill, surely? I've never heard that classified as "abortion", except by complete religious nutters whose opinions I have no respect for.

I have to confess, I didn't feel up to coping with an unpronounceable-by-monkeys language. It seemed plausible enough to give them avian syrinxes and the ability to pronounce almost anything, as a crow can.

Referring to them in-story as "the Kind" might work, but it still doesn't have quite the right connotations. I think I'll stick with "humans" in-story - what else are sophonts that have never met any other sophonts going to call themselves? "Homoraptors" will do for a non-confusing label out of story, though.

And the weird gender politics are mainly hawk-based, plus a few studies showing massive rates of extra-pair paternity in most colonial birds. I figured that RSD evolved in hawks, RSD evolved in owls, RSD semi-evolved in skuas and frigate birds, there's varying strengths of evidence of it in various theropods... there seems to be a good correlation between dinosaurs being predatory and dinosaurs having females bigger and tougher than the males but still taking the primary role in parenting. So most of my predatory theropods have RSD - the cat-analogues are quite spectacular, it's gotten to the point where cocks and hens occupy different ecological niches - and most of the rest have near-identical sexes. I did have male tyrannosaurs be bigger, just for a change.
Edited by Margaret Pye, Feb 13 2010, 09:19 AM.
My speculative dinosaur project. With lots of fluff, parental care and mammalian-level intelligence, and the odd sophont.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Holben
Member Avatar
Rumbo a la Victoria

Maybe a the impronouceable language could be represented by ~ or something? Like 'we are the ~~~~~'.

You don't have to bring abortion into this.

Sophonmts would probably call themselves 'people', as we usually did (or mankind) until relatively recently.
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."
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
T.Neo
Member Avatar
Translunar injection: TLI
 *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Well, it's termination of pregnancy (albeit in a very early stage). It's more like the nutters who get up in arms about embryos being used for stem cell research...

Quote:
 
Sophonmts would probably call themselves 'people', as we usually did (or mankind) until relatively recently.


So? I call humans "people", but I would also use the term "person" to describe another sophont.

A hard mathematical figure provides a sort of enlightenment to one's understanding of an idea that is never matched by mere guesswork.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Margaret Pye
Member Avatar
Adult
 *  *  *  *  *  *
That would lead to every single line of dialogue going "~~~~~~~~~."
My speculative dinosaur project. With lots of fluff, parental care and mammalian-level intelligence, and the odd sophont.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Holben
Member Avatar
Rumbo a la Victoria

~~~~~?

~~~ ~~~~~ ~.

I meant like place names and stuff, i'm not in a clear mood today.
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."
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous)
ZetaBoards - Free Forum Hosting
Free Forums. Reliable service with over 8 years of experience.
Go to Next Page
« Previous Topic · Alternative Evolution · Next Topic »
Add Reply