Posts tagged creature-design
Quite simple really. How large can a bat grow before it is too big to fly. I would like a bat with a similar external and internal structure to a real bat just scaled up. I am willing to accept cha...
What natural environmental pressures or opportunities might drive an alien ophidian species to evolve sapience and caudal tool use? Conditions The species should be lacking limbs prior to the e...
Need ideas for the evolution of the kumiho, the Korean nine tailed fox that is native in the Korean peninsula. First of all, this species is sex...
Starting with a creature and its environment, how does one create its psychology? Evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology attempt to explain attributes that we observe in our fellow human...
Based on an answer of mine from a few months ago, I've been inspired to adapt the concept to my own Life Ball. Fair warning- this question and some of its links are not for the squeamish. May con...
There have been many questions of moving, floral animals, most of these focus on their intelligence, but what about their sense of sight. I fail to understand how a botanic based alien would be abl...
There have been a few questions on mobile plants on this site and even more on their intelligence, but one that has not been asked so far is related to the lifeblood of creatures: blood. Inside of ...
A plethora of previous questions have queried the existence of botanic (plant) intelligence and they all have created good solutions, but their still remains a even bigger problem to even the dumbe...
Cancer works by making cells split and reproduce at an accelerated rate, slowly and painfully killing the afflicted. Its true weapon lies in its ability to surpass the immunity system. As far as ...
Alternate question title: From Fungi to a Fun Guy So, I asked a previous question about which non-animal would be the likeliest to evolve sentience. The answer turned out to be fungus, since mycel...
On the Life Ball of my fantasy stories, a particular species of delphinidae- I call them black dolphins- have evolved and advanced at least as much as humans and other intelligent races. A prior q...
I'm going to borrow many ideas from birds to keep my dragon airborne, porous bones and feathers to keep it light while spewing balls of flame to create warm air currents at high altitudes. The prob...
A race of complete female humanoids have DNA that is similar to humans but distinct enough to be consider a different species (think donkeys and horses). This species can mate with humans and othe...
Let's say that there is a wind going 45 mph and the flight direction of the humanoid creature is in the same direction as the wind. As the flight is in the same direction as the wind, air resistanc...
I'm designing a sentient, aquatic creature, and trying to decide how many eyes it should have. This creatures biological strategy is one of redundancy - it has multiple mouths, multiple tentacles,...
Nature does some pretty interesting things with gender: This is a female trilobite beetle. Scientists have observed females extensively, yet for decades, scientists could not identify the male ...
I have two large continents on an earth like world. I would like for the dominate predator on the more desert continent to be a large cat. I have found the leopards and jaguars of Egypt, but am unc...
I have wondered what a terrestrial ecosystem would look like dominated by cnidarians and ctenophores rather than insects and tetrapods. In order to fulfill the same niches I imagine they would need...
I am a huge Minecraft fan and just realized, this hasn't been asked before, so I wanted to ask a live-long (31. August 2009) question, and pay my obulus to the Anatomically Correct series. I have ...
Simply put is there an upper bound for the largest possible living creature in a scientifically rational world without incorporating anti-gravity, magic, the force, or other physical concepts we ar...
This world is all water, and I want the trees to be the only thing that represents land. The trees are horizontally positioned, and start from a large self sufficient floating seed pod, much like a...
I'm trying to design human like race where all the children are born as girls, but later in life some of them switch to male, but no sooner then 15. Usually only the most dominant women switch, so ...
So I'm pretty sure your are all aware of what a cell is the microscopic organic units that make up all life. Well they don't have to be microscopic. An unfertilized chicken egg is a single cell. ...
Needs ideas for the reason for the different sizes for ninetailed foxes i Made up. . The Korean kumiho is sexual dimorphic as the males are big as a coyote while the vixens are as big as a red fox...
In a world I am building, I want the primary species to be 100% peaceful. The best way I have thought of for doing this post-sapience is to remove all identifying traits (skin, eye and hair color, ...
So take a creature like a werewolf or a Fallout deathclaw. Either through evolution or genetic engineering has claws with a graphene edge instead of keratin. The claws work like a more organic v...
Space nets are a theoretical space organism designed by Tim B, to quote him: Imagine a life-form shaped like a giant net. It gathers space dust into itself to grow, using light from stars bot...
There is a nocturnal mammal, about the size of a common red fox, which has evolved (by way of some unspecified-at-this-point selective pressure) the ability to see well in situations involving larg...
There has evolved a species of turtles large enough to maintain an atmosphere of their own and travel interstellar space. We have already discovered how they don't collapse under their own gravity,...
Slenderman is unarguably the most iconic creation of the early internet. It has led to games, stories and even books. But is his design evolutionarily possible? What evolutionary pressures would le...
The Problem In a world I am building, the days are 9 years long, this means 4 and half years of cold darkness following 4 and a half years of blistering daylight. I have asked questions on this Ye...
I'm imagining an electromagnetic wave that could deliberately alter its wavelength. It would be a totally unfamiliar type of creature, but actually, we material beings act because of the electical ...
I'm trying to figure out how fast my tiny critters from a previous question, Mistraille, can travel. Why? It's not that I'm detail orientated and want to know the exact decimal point of speed they ...
There was a good question and answer here: Does mermaid evolution come with buoyancy control? But I would like to expand the question. I got off talking with a friend, it got me thinking about mer...
I imagine such a creature would be composed of thousands, possibly millions of planets, gas clouds, asteroids and stars. Almost like a giant living engine powered entirely by gravity. Obviously t...
Humans as Ambush Predators Homo sapiens and many of our ancestors practiced a form of hunting known as persistence hunting where we just walk after an animal till it keels over dead from exhaustio...
I'll keep this one brief. I have an alien from a planet which has extremely cold nights and extremely hot days (the day and night cycle may be short or long, I haven't decided). When the alien get...
I'm looking for biological explanations for some traits I want to give to an alien creature. Description of the Creature It looks like a five foot tall praying mantis, or perhaps a centaur. It ha...
In lots of science fiction works that visit other planets we are often introduced to intelligent plant based lifeforms, be they humanoid looking or potted plant looking. I'm curious as to what par...
All organisms on Earth produce waste. Whether an organism's respiration has a byproduct, or it just doesn't process all food it consumes, it will always put some amount of matter into the environme...
To be clear, I'm not talking about AB, O, A, or B type blood. I'm not talking about different colored blood, either; I saw a bunch of those types of questions earlier. I'm talking about anoxygeni...
In the world I'm making I want to have very large creatures that will later be used in organic architecture as housing for the human equivalent in this world. In order to make this world realistic ...
I would like to have a humanoids with three pairs of eyes placed on the same horizontal plane like in Protheans not one below the other like Batarian. I was thinking of one pair being sensitive to...
Silicon is often brought up in science fiction as being very similar to carbon, just below it on the periodic table. The silicon-based "organic" molecules are more tightly bound and thus would fin...
I recently came up with a lizard that had a sort of crystal-gem like attachment on its back. The problem was finding a way for such a thing to have evolved to have a largish crystal on its back. ...
Suppose human beings have evolved markings covering the face and hairs. The cells contain a colony of bacterium capable of producing multiple arrays of visible light. Each bacteria reacts differen...
In a world inhabited by small grassland herbivores, night-time is a very scary time indeed. With no moon or other substantial light-source to illuminate the plains, they are in great danger of beco...
I'm designing creatures with naturally occurring white or pale grey irises and pupils so that it looks like their eyes are all white. What effect could this have their vision (colorblindness, light...
Disclaimer: This question is the third of a new series of questions of mine about introducing hexapeds to the fauna of my conworld. There are/will be other questions addressing i.a.: characteristic...
How to get humans that can change their skin color? Approximately 1.6 million years ago, hominids lost their hair and gained dark skin (so says the New York Times). Evidence shows several several...
