Posts tagged biology
How would a planet need to be changed (gravity, air pressure, air makeup, etc) to allow for the realistic flight and take off from a small hill of a gryphon with a human rider? You can assume the ...
A bit of backstory: I'm attempting to create a militaristic alien race composed of elite warriors capable of conquering the galaxy. They posses a variety of "enhanced" abilities such as immense str...
Giant Spiders are a traditional element of fantasy worlds. They prey upon most human's primal fears, and are easy to make as evil as possible. (Note: Not to scale) But are they actually plausib...
The island of Themascryia is a nation of amazons, an all-female race that spend their lives training for battle. They are currently under siege by foreign invaders. This army comes from a powerful ...
The original, irish lore around banshees has it that they merely foretell the death of someone, but do not cause that death. American pop culture has changed this, so they do bring death and destru...
I'm working on a roleplaying game in a medieval fantasy setting with a focus on crafting and I am having trouble visualizing how armor made from scales of creatures would be assembled; both for art...
So I have noticed that most herbs come from the Mediterranean as confirmed by this site and those that do not often come from either actual Mediterranean climates or somewhat arid ones. So my ques...
How would human appearance be different from what it is now if our circulatory system used Hemocyanin for oxygen transport instead of Hemoglobin? Limitations, restrictions, additional details, etc...
I've been thinking of the idea of creating and adding an alien species that's antimatter-based (being from a universe where antimatter became the majority instead of "normal matter"). However, I'm...
I'm working on a sci fi story where one of the species has batlike wings and comes from a moon around the size of Titan with roughly the same atmospheric pressure as Earth. Initially, I thought the...
So I have this underwater echolocation using species. I'm wondering if they could have a language partly based on recreating sounds from returning echolocation waves to 'talk' images at each other....
In the video game Dino Crisis 3, a recurring boss that the player fights called the Australis (a bio-engineered human-Tyrannosaurus Rex hybrid) that has skin exposing the muscles of its body. An in...
A group of scientists discover a heretofore unknown species of fungus. unbeknownst to them, let's say it is of extraterrestrial origin but it operates very much like certain fungi on Earth (e.g. op...
They are blue to gray skinned with four eyes, two of which can see in infrared, three fingers and toes on each appendage, and reptilian-like ears (eardrums are external), as well as a hair color ra...
Say I've got a creature with a 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit higher body temperature than a human. (Trying to figure out what a good temperature for this creature would be. Not good with number estim...
Within our society is a mad scientist obsessed with hybridization. His specialty is canids, and he could not get enough of the canid hybrids that had happened in the past--wolfdogs, coywolves, coy...
I've been reading about viral vectors and am looking to incorporate it into my setting. From what I can see, it's possible to use viral vectors as a form of gene therapy, and retroviruses can work ...
Just as in the real world where horses were tamed to travel long distances quickly across land, would it be realistic for an animal to be tamed and used as an aquatic mount for quick transport arou...
Let's see if I can explain my thoughts accurately with an example. Imagine that a mad scientist decides to kidnap a few men and women and decides, just for fun, to switch their sexual organs, but ...
Scenario : Due to the effects of a magical overload, there are people in my world who lose their magic. Those that don't go outright insane are left with damaged nervous systems and a high body tem...
Would it be possible for a creature to have a nervous system working at 250 volts? What kind of physiology would it need to sustain that? Could you use that creature as a power source, to power a ...
Here is Carolina Lang's interpretation of one of Britain's heraldic beasts, the enfield: For anyone not familiar with the creature, here's A Book of Creatures' basic description of it: It ha...
Real x-ray vision, the ability to (at least) detect X-rays as a 'visible' light (or any other detection system) seems it would be very problematic. X-Rays are a high energy form of electromagnetic ...
*By complex life, I mean something more complex than microorganisms. Something closer to what we have on Earth. Similar to this question: Is it possible for life to evolve on planets without water...
I am designing a 'fairy' that is a relative of primates (essentially a sapient flying monkey). It has a skeleton similar to that of a spider monkey, but with a larger ribcage and shorter limbs. It ...
In the grim darkness of the 22,d century, there is only war. humanity has waged war on itself for decades, turning many areas of the planet into wastelands. With every decade that passes, new weapo...
Due to the world being based more on magic than actual science, I have a "planet" with changing season everywhere. A "sun" orbits it roughly near the equator, but it only gives light, it doesn't ch...
I am interested in adding a race that relies on echolocation to sense the world around them in my scfi/fantasy setting. What I'm wondering is, how can a race protect against highly advanced sonic ...
On an Earth-like planet, an intelligent species evolved in symbiosis with another species that lives in their digestive system and act as the microbial gut flora in humans do. What implementations ...
I was having a discussion with several people on whether or not a lightning dragon can be biologically plausible, without any magic involved. We came to two main possibilities and I'd love to see f...
How plausible are naturally-evolved, biological, fixed-wing flying creatures? Could such a creature plausibly evolve in Earth-like conditions? If so, what method would it be most likely to use fo...
Just for clarification: when I say "designing", I mean just coming up with the idea of this fungus, as opposed to it being "designed" by humans. I've been very interested in fungi ever since findi...
Firstly, I'm not looking for an organism that gives birth to two separate species (like a human that gave birth to a human baby and a puppy) as I'm fairly sure that is impossible (though feel free ...
I'm building an alien world for an artistic project. The world circles an m-dwarf star, and so the flora have evolved to photosynthesize longer wavelengths of light than on Earth, primarily in the ...
In my fantasy world, there are several species - both sapient and non-sapient. They all originally evolved from a group of insects that, after millions of years of isolation and no competition, hav...
My setting has a lush rainforest planet, which houses some of the most feared animals in the galaxy. The abundance of food would make competition tougher and tougher over millions of years of adapt...
One of the Stack Exchange's most popular topics is remaking mythological and fantastical creatures with realistic, believable anatomy. Usually, the answers go that for an angel's anatomy to be bel...
There are two different varieties of angels"”the naked, long-distance flier and the feathered, short-distance glider (The Four-Winged Angel). But both varieties have the following anatomical featu...
The question about a diet of dust brought up a few creatures that survive on dust, however they were all insect-sized or smaller. This got me thinking about the Blue Whale, which survives on a diet...
I'm interested that some ULF (ultra-low frequencies, especially the 17 HZ zone) can cause humans to experience sensations of fear, trembling, or even claims of seeing ghostly apparitions. What an i...
Merfolk are one of the major species in my book. However, unlike in most depictions, they're fully mammalian and lack gills. Because of this, they need to breathe air, but I still wanted them to be...
If there were people with wings, who didn't want to be naked all the time, what clothing could they wear, without it interfering with their flying? Note: I am assuming arm-wings, like birds, but y...
We're in the United States, sometime in the next few years. Through a series of circumstances, a viral outbreak occurs in the country. For the sake of detail, this is how it happens: A scientific...
It has been said that one of the inspirations of the Cyclops of Greek mythology was from a skull of a dwarf elephant. Being twice the size of a human, people interpreted the nasal cavity (for the t...
Water, as is, with its physical and chemical properties, is the base of any living being on Earth. Water has a rather high specific heat capacity of 4.184 J/gC, which in itself has a great effect ...
Let's say that around 4-5 million years ago, members of the earliest proto-humans, maybe Australopithecus, get whisked away to another habitable planet/parallel dimension - doesn't matter how at th...
In my world, taking place sometime in the near future, scientists decide to mess around with genetic engineering. The goal is to create hybrid supersoldiers with animal genes ad have them perform e...
Could a species with an incredibly advanced electroreceptive organ (such as that of a shark) be able to use it above water? The gas-mix in which the sense works must be breathable to humans, and it...
I like the idea of elves having a distinct weakness against iron, to the point where they're intensely scared of it and can't stand the touch of it. My question is: Assuming the Elves are mostly...
Lately I have been thinking about possible forms of life on planets that would have radically different experiences than here on Earth. I was wondering if life based on transition metals was possib...
