Posts tagged fauna
Suppose all the humans in Britain suddenly disappeared. This gives the animals -- wild, domesticated and feral, free roam. What would the wildlife look like 300 years later? The starting conditions...
What if our planet was always lit so that there would be no nighttime? Assume that the scenario is like this, where A is the planet and B and ABb are the stars. And they are all aligned so that it ...
In this alternate scenario, five million years ago, a mass extinction hit Earth. Not a massive volcanic eruption or a devastating bolide impact, but a sudden cold snap, a transition from Miocene h...
I've always found animal intelligence to be fascinating, particularly that of the cephalopods, some of which show some pretty remarkable talents for tool usage, mimicry, and pattern recognition. A...
Birds, as we currently know them, build nests and lay eggs on the ground. People and things with sharp teeth live on the ground. There are also things with claws and beaks up in the air, but fewer....
This actually occurred in a dream last night, but I'm interested in what could come out of this. I'm not experienced with writing stories and have only read some Worldbuilding posts, so excuse me i...
The easiest thing to relate the creature itself to is a mixture of an armadillo and a bear. It's a large animal with essential physiology similar to that of a Spectacled Bear and large plates of in...
Domestication of otherwise wild animals go way back. Cats have been our best weapons against rodents for 10,000 years. We had been breeding sheep and goats for their milk and mutton for almost as...
I'm writing a story where Kradjin carnivorous flightless birds have been used as mounts by a nomadic steppe living people for millennia and I'm curious how this might have altered their morphology....
Briefly on world setting: Roughly classical age technology, magic is rare, difficult and shunned, flora and fauna is inspired by a remix of the Neogene period. Practical concerns for long distance...
Imagine an Earth-like society that has developed into the digital age. They have computers, the Internet and most of the conveniences of the modern age, but they still use a significant animal work...
The world is divided in several factions. Among them : Insects and Humans. When I say Insects, I don't mean insects : insects are the little creatures with six legs while Insects regroup all soci...
There have been questions about sizing giant animals, giant humanoids, giant flying creatures (also discussed particularly for dragons and giant floating mammals), and giant spiders, one type of i...
Sometimes I reminisce about the giant eagles from The Lord of the Rings and two things come to mind: Boy, I wish I could have my own giant eagle! Could a bird even carry something that heavy on i...
Virtually all animals on earth ranging from insects through to swimmers, fliers, mammals and reptiles, have a symmetrical body plan. In other words legs and wings come in pairs, as do most sensory ...
An idea for a story I'm working on involves a far away world that was once inhospitable. Scientists - likely alien ones - terraformed it so it could support life (coincidentally, Earth-like life). ...
Why would a creature that lives on the surface of a planet evolve limbs that can bend at many points (like a tentacle or elephant trunk) and still end in some sort of hand-like appendage?
In a world I'm designing, one of the eldest extant intelligent species is the Trolls. These are not D&D trolls, but something else. I have a number of basic characteristics for these beings, an...
If there was a majority of land on earth (66 percent land), how would it affect the animals and plant? Lets say somehow earth has been created with 66 percent land and 34 percent water? Would our p...
Linked: What would conditions on a methane world be like? Question: As mentioned in the linked question, Titan is the second most likely world in the Solar System to harbor life. One of the answ...
Far to the north, in a slushy and storm-torn wasteland, a city stands. Massive pillars jut hundreds of feet into the sky from their anchors deep beneath the rising and falling tides below the city....
In a world with humanized (or at least tool using) reptiles, how long would a tattoo be able to last on the scales? Would the tools need to be much different than what we use today? Would it be p...
Following up the ideas given in this question, we introduce a new gas to the mix of air. Meta: Assume an Earth-like planet. The proposed change is a pre-development change (meaning it's there sinc...
In an answer to this question Cyrus suggested that pre-technology merpeople might use shrimp or prawns in lue of maggots to eat away rotting flesh. Similar to how plants and (in some cases) anima...
So we all know that Lemmings are known for following blindly to their death but that is not the reality. I would like to create the myth in the real world, or rather I would like to know how suc...
I am building a fantasy world roughly the same size, elemental makeup, and atmospheric composition as Earth. In this world, there is an island (about the size of Australia) known by outsiders as th...
Region 2 is north of Region 1. River and lake description: In region 2 there is a crater lake on what used to be a huge mountain. 2 large streams go from the crater lake and merge into a little r...
Aliens have come to Earth, and decided that the most intelligent life on the planet must live in the water, because it makes up most of the planet. They encounter dolphins and, upon learning to tra...
How big can an underwater animal really get before physics get in the way? (I'm sure feeding would likely get in the way first, but ignore that!). The Blue Whale is currently the largest animal...
I have an area of my world that is essentially a large crater. It is a huge barren land surrounded by mountains. The ground is stone, then below are underground rivers, and below those are pools of...
Inspired by this question: Talking animals in a parallel universe I wonder, would it be possible, if there were more species which created their own abstract means of communication, would they b...
If I had a parallel universe that had all the basic ideas of our universe (gravity, friction, inertia, etc.), how could I logically have certain animal breeds not only talk, but communicate verball...
Where would you put the saddle? On the neck or on the hip? Thanks for the answers and comments.
Yesterday I was driving at night on an unlit road (nothing nefarious, I swear), and there was a truck behind me with a ridiculous amount of headlamps on, and catching a glimpse of it in my mirror i...
Could life survive on a diet of dust or some other substance that is both abundant and that we don't place any value on?
This is a terrible planet for animals to live on, with all the humans around. Someone should just put all of them down. There is a group of radical vegans/animal rights activists that want to kill...
So for the purposes of this question, the following items are already determined by our world: The humans and human society are in very beginning of an Industrial Revolution almost identical to o...
I have got a big rotating space station (radius is 5 km and length is 30 km) which provides its occupants the luxury of full terran gravity and atmosphere. The biggest part of the cylinder's inner ...
The setup: A thick mountain chain is permanently covered in smoke. The smoke comes from several active volcanoes within the mountains, and is kept from dispersing by magic (the magic plays virtuall...
During the early medieval age, the population of trolls is declining. These are savage creatures who aren't as cunning as humans, and not only are we part of their diet, humans are in fact their on...
There have been countless (literally) stories written that have contained within their pages monsters that are stronger, faster, and bigger than the human heroes. I can think of more than a few wh...
The basis of known life on Earth is water, clear and simple. But what about forms of life on other worlds? Not every world in the universe is as hospitable as the Earth. Suppose a planet had an av...
A creature the size of a bacteria has awakened and starts eating, it eats it's own bodyweight everyday, and it never gets smaller (Unless it mates). The creature is hermaphrodite but it needs a com...
If a human were cursed with the need to transform into a specific animal (i.e. a canine), would his DNA change after the transformation? I would appreciate help in answering this question. This i...
Inspired by this comment: What if every animal as large as, or larger than, a ice-age vintage horse, except for those that are acclimated to cold climates, went extinct during the last Ice Age? I...
In Pokemon, there are many different creatures. Nearly all of them will, at one point, reach a level of experience where they evolve into a more advanced creature. These evolutions are much more dr...
How do rats and mice see the world? Because their eyes are on the side of their head with a big nose in the middle, would they see two 180 degree images with a blur in the middle or would it be lik...
Based on my previous question here, which a helpful other person pointed out, which would make the question too broad, here comes a different question for that. Given a desert full of ore sand, wh...
I created a humanoid race called Lantoms for a fantasy world. They are about five feet in stature, have angular body parts, and an extra pair of arms. A layer of skin is attached to the arms, easie...
When you look at the history of earth, the last ice age had major impacts on the flora and fauna of the world as well as biological migration. If I am creating an earth-like world and am developin...
