Posts tagged biology
I'm designing a creature that is supposed to be able to eat "basically anything", within the realm of plausibility for what is essentially an organic creature. Its digestive system can be as compli...
Recently, I've taken a small break to establish a story bound universe, so that these questions can actually prove useful in the future Recently, humanity has discovered a vast earth-like planet,...
I am wondering if a species might evolve to deceive human technology - in particular, a set of night vision goggles. I imagine it is either cold blooded or it has thick fur - which doesn't trap air...
The dominant religion on my world (created by a race of dragon-like humanoids) believes that their species originates from an ancient being that sacrificed itself to defeat a great evil at the cen...
Tzeentch, the weaver of destinies, the architect of fate, originates from the Warhammer 40K universe and is the god of knowledge, change, and evolution. However, I will take away the god like attri...
The question is in the title, but I have bolded the main details to reality-check. I hope that makes it easier to read. Details: I had the idea of a fantasy/sci-fi animal that never stops growing,...
Nurgle comes from the Warhammer 40K universe, he is described as being the lord of plague or the god of diseases, decay, and destruction. I will, however, take away his god like attributes, and tr...
The neuro strain is a virus that affects the nervous system in drastic ways. Firstly, when the host is infected, their body will grow bigger than it would have originally been but not much bigger ...
I have a creature that is made of crystal. The problem is, crystal as I know it is structured in ways that don't allow for flexible movement as we are able to do. How could a lifeform made of cryst...
What needs to be improved or added to the structure (device) of human lungs to be able to filter toxic chemical compounds in the air (for example, in mines the air may contain nitrogen, methane, ca...
I'm working on a novel that takes place in a fictional universe which involves creatures with long forelimbs and short hind limbs. Some of these creatures includes amphibians , reptilians and mamma...
Basically, could a gas stick together enough to be internally coherent, and act like animal cells? Or is there zero chance of that happening?
I am writing a story where a person suffers from a medical condition where the gut produces too much of a liquid called diphosphane. Diphosphane is pyrophoric past a certain small concentration, an...
Reattaching severed limbs is a recurring theme in many monsters, but never has it been explained HOW they reattach their appendages. I doubt the neurons would magically realign and begin to functio...
So, I thought I had the hunger related bioluminescence for my Keplerians figured out. That once the hunger hormone reaches a certain threshold, the hormone receptors on some cells of a bioluminesce...
Ancient Man feasted on megafauna. From mammoths to every variety of deer and flightless bird humans have made the most of large wildlife, to the point of tragic excess. So what happens when the ani...
The saying goes "a wolf in sheep's clothing", which is a biblical idiom to refer to someone pretending to be harmless. This got me thinking about if the reverse could also be true. So I came up wit...
Sort of a follow up: What change in human biology would lead to wild gestational periods? In an alternate world during the middle ages, women are regularly with child for more than a year, with th...
Consider a race of humanoid, winged tree-dwellers. They can fly and generally spend most of their time either in the air or climbing around their tree-homes in the upper reaches of a forest. In ord...
An Earth mass terran planet is orbiting a sun-like star at 2AU. I understand the limit for CO2 greenhouse effects is 1.67AU for whatever reason (giving a conventional habitable zone limit), but per...
In a distant future, humanity has colonized and catalogued countless worlds in their home galaxy. However one day humanity has discovered a few habitable words in the Andromeda galaxy. After a wh...
I am a giant, intelligent, fortress-like, plant-based organism, able to forge many structures, defenses and organisms from my flesh by altering my own DNA and rapidly growing new constructs wheneve...
Nyarlethotep (the crawling chaos, the evil with a thousand forms, the messenger of the outer gods) originates from the literature of HP Lovecraft and is by far one of the most evil, sadistic, and i...
I am an alien from outer space who is visiting a planet called Earth. The species living here, humans, have a very primitive and strange culture. They seem to spontaneously burst into dance and son...
So I'm designing a world where the air has its own ecosystem, separate from the one on the land, because sky whales are cool. However, I'm having trouble figuring out what the plants and other prod...
Bringing a human child to term generally takes place over a period of nine months. They are marked by different stages, from 1st to third, and are marked by different events and expectations for mo...
This is a question regarding my little critters that hijack of their victim. By doing so they get direct access to a steady flow of nutrients through the bloodstream and get shelter with optimal te...
in the Cthulhu mythos, yog sothoth is depicted as a mass of splitting and fusing orbs, it is the past, present, and future and seemingly knows everything. but for the sake of trying to make it real...
Is it simply inevitable that on a planet organisms would split into motile and non-motile groups. I'm planning on creating slime-like amoebic chemotrophs for my light devoid-planet that are the "pl...
Reading this question about 1 mm tall people made me wonder: would a 1 mm tall person even be able to breathe? To someone of this size, the oxygen molecules around them would be much larger in prop...
So In Fiction, I think it's more common to see Humanoids with avian-like wings rather than insect wings. I was wondering if it's possible for a humanoid to evolve insect like wings and even if the...
In the future, humanity has discovered countless worlds, some filled with life and others not. Likewise, they discover another world that is habitable, they study its various ecosystems, it's var...
This question is supposed to explain the phenomenon in fiction that I affectionately call the "clean death", where a dead monster disintegrates after being slain. Normally this would be explained b...
When I was younger I came up with a creature that seemed to contradict itself. It was made of some frozen material, but it had a large back fin in order to get warmth from the sun. I'm revisiting t...
On a distant, habitable world, humanity has observed a biological marvel. A creature that is primarily carnivorous, roaming its planet jungles and deserts, has been observed to be capable of manip...
In the distant future, humanity has encountered, made peace and wars with countless advanced civilizations, but one civilization that still baffles them, is the race of intelligent centipedes. The...
It seems that people who live at very high altitudes have demonstrably "thicker" blood, highly concentrated with red blood cells to overcome the low concentration of oxygen in the air. Moving betwe...
Would it be possible to have a humanoid, a human looking species with a roughly equivalent brain to humans, without iron in circulation in its blood or body? I have found that reptiles could be a...
Suppose you became immortal* or came by the ability to live for thousands of years due to some inexplicable/irrelevant event (you still appear to be human by all standards except aging). What would...
Say one day humanity has found a planet that supports life. It's filled with luscious forest and barren deserts, and various ecosystems that resemble Earthly ones. After a single year of researchi...
To help imagine it and my inspiration, it's basically similar to pictures from Abrahamic religions with burning trees like this one. They can't speak though, they are just trees or plants that are ...
Is this even remotely possible? Source Outline: Coral Polyps (along with their copious Calcium Carbonate excretions) are the individual organisms that make up the super-organism we identify as...
A type of dragon in my world, simply named the Thick-horn, has a well-known mechanism to use to defend itself despite its clumsiness. They are freakishly large, tend to be slow, and find it hard to...
How quickly could a bacterial colony / virus / pool-'o-prions / [whatever] digest, disintegrate, or otherwise liquefy an ordinary terrestrial biological system? Think something along the lines of ...
On a terrestrial planet with a high amount of ammonia vapor in the atmosphere, would any organism have a strong enough incentive to develop some form of autotrophic chemosynthesis that derives ener...
Background info The humanoids in my Kepler Bb story have stronger muscles at every stage. This makes it much easier for babies to go through physical milestones and thus the shortening of time bef...
Most animals that glide are rather light and small. Flying squirrels, Colugos, and sugar gliders all weigh but a few ounces. The largest gliding predators are snakes of the Chrysopelea genus. Agai...
Let's suppose that a homo species divides in two separate species (like H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis) and they cannot breed. Could their descendants evolve to be capable of reproducing togeth...
Coming from an earlier asked question, I was wondering how long it would take (potentially a range) for two human populations that are separated from each other to speciate enough that they would n...
For my project there is an environment with a very rapid fire regime due to the usual stuff like a dry seasonal climate and dragons. While most animals escape the flames by running, burrowing, or f...
