Posts tagged creature-design
How fast could run a humanoid being, how much damage could resist, how much weight could lift, how strong could hit, under the indicated evolutionary conditions? is there a limit? I have always tho...
Let's say there's a humanoid species that are essencialy humans but tiny, around 13cm tall. As their vocal chords are smaller they would have high pitched voices, but could that effect be minimized...
I'm designing a species of tiny humanoids. They are about 13cm tall. Normally that would make them have very high pitched voices but I want them to be able to also speak in a lower pitch. Siamang...
In my fantasy world, wraiths are a species of shell-less, regressed crustaceans. They lay their eggs inside animal skulls, using them as shells. The wraiths' bodies are incredibly weak and they can...
Agriculture One of if not the most important factor to our survival, it allows us to feed the very animals that we eat and in general it allows us to survive. But could insects learn or evolve to ...
So, there are creatures with insane regenerative abilities, like casually putting their severed head back on their neck and it's fixed in mere seconds. The reason for that is that it's not true re...
In my fantasy world there's the race of trolls, vastly inspired by the ones one encounters in Baldur's Gate 2 (see here). Millennia ago, they've been driven underground by orcs and elves, as well ...
My world is very earthlike and I am looking to create a bird that primarily eats bone marrow. I wanted my bird to crack the bones of the carcasses to eat the marrow inside. What would the ideal bea...
Someone in the comment section of my previous question pointed out the energetic problem of ectotherms with human intelligence (the brain needs a lot of energy). I still want to keep my lizardfolk...
Imagine that when Christopher Columbus sailed West in his Carrack to travel around the world to reach India, he had never made it to land, because halfway across the Atlantic Ocean between Europe a...
I was thinking of a situation, in which there is a mass extinction that wipes out all large land animals, and after this mass extinction some of the descendants of modern geckos evolve to fill the ...
So, I'm building this world where most of the lifeforms, for one reason or another, are reptiles. Now, I know there have been reptile dominant periods in Earth's history, so it isn't impossible for...
Real-life octopi can travel outside of water for awhile, but not permanently. My race is amphibious, living underwater primarily, but also coming up onto the surface if their environment becomes to...
I've got this ferret shaped land creature from a dream that can make its body expand so it looks sorta like a fat sausage with limbs. It sucks in air with its big mouth to expand. It lives on a wor...
I recently came across a few examples of a "quantum slime" entity, namely from Starfinder and Slime Rancher, that has the ability to make copies of itself via quantum superposition, and then cause ...
How plausible is a six-limbed flying animal roughly the size of hatzegopteryx to be aerial? In this case, an aerial animal will be defined as a creature that solely inhabits the sky. I will call t...
Part of the Anatomically Correct series of questions. Due to the nature of Superman having so many different powers, I wanted to focus specifically on one aspect of his character: the ability to...
Many mythological creatures have a popularity secondary only to the dragon (the one true global force.) Among them is the griffin, a half-bird-half-cat cut-and-paste. Now, in an alternate Earth, ...
This is completely ignoring the fact that lifeforms that aren't based on carbon are entirely hypothetical. Could these lifeforms breathe oxygen like us, or would they need to use some sort of techn...
Ignoring the plausibility of their evolution and sources of food, could a whale-like creature which internally consists largely of hydrogen bladders/gasbags realistically stay aloft? If these cr...
I am thinking of writing a story about a Martian civilization. It might involve humans, but, I think it will be more interesting if there are creatures adapted to the Martian lifestyle as well. So,...
I am working on a habitable planet that orbits around a red dwarf star and it is about 1.5 times bigger and more massive than the Earth. Gravity there is stronger and the atmosphere is thicker. No...
Researching a lot about fantasy, I've always had interest of mushroom humanoids, but I wanted to put my own twist on them. Instead of sentient mushrooms, I wanted to have a humanoid species infecte...
Dragons awesome (that's why sub-par writers and DMs use it as a substitute for an actually engaging story/setting) but they're still just animals, animals that reproduce. Besides it's painful to g...
And you thought I was finally done with centaur questions. I have a centaur race called the Draconitaurs. They're essentially centaurs, but with western dragons instead of horses. The dragon trop...
I'm fairly certain such a creature is impossible, but I was curious to see if anyone could come up with an explanation for such a creature. How would a two-headed giant evolve/function if it was a ...
I have a new creature from my complex remembered dreams. It's skin color is a dark color similar to the skin of a Silkie chicken. The thing I saw in the dream also has white feathers. It's body is...
In an alternate Earth, there are no bats. Instead, there are "flying monkeys" (which are actually lemuriform primates, rather like bushbabies or lorises.) And even though they have batlike ears, ...
Humanoids with more than 2 pairs of arms weren't an unknown concept in human culture. From ancient mythology, there are the hundred-armed Hekatoncheires (who have their own thread here) and six-arm...
Charge-type breath weapon: Creatures with this type shoot singular, high-damage, high-precision "charges" of (insert dragon's element here) that explode upon contact. Examples: Toothless from the m...
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...
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...
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...
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...
We know that Earth creatures can generate high-voltage electricity (your nearest electric eel can attest to that). We also know that ordinary air at Earth atmospheric pressure can be used as a las...
I need my jet-propelled squid to be an efficient glider, something similar to an albatross but he's built in the canard configuration like a real flying squid (below). His combined weight is 5 k...
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...
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...
I have been playing with the ideas of electricity generating/attacks for my characters using either electric organs similar to electric eels or some sort of bio battery using bacteria that produce ...
This question is a bit of an outgrowth of Can you simply scale up animals?, but it does approach it from a different angle. "All else equal" (which it of course never is, but we're good at pretend...
Basically, I have a creature that is larger than an average human, and smaller than a bigger shire horse. So, size is adjustable. The bodyplan is similar to that of a horse, except for a longer nec...
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 ...
A squid-like organism uses gravity powered flight but relies on jet propulsion for launch, pouncing, and evasive tactics. It's aerodynamically based on the way a true squid flies however it has ev...
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...
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 have an idea for an encounter in my world that goes like this... A weary group of adventurers are trekking through a great ancient forest. This forest is avoided by most due to strange tales of...
I was wondering if there is a way to have a person with added organs and systems to be able to shoot jets of compressed air out of their body without them needing a giant gas bag or massive lungs? ...
As part II of anatomically correct myths here we have the Angel. Angels appear in many cultures and are most commonly seen as simply winged humans. Is there a realistic way that angels could evolve...
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...
NOTE: I previously asked the same question regarding wheels, because I thought that the answers would still help me and that wheels were more applicable to a wider audience than propellers. However...
