Posts tagged xenobiology
What I'm thinking about is simply an animal,any with a protective bony-like shell covering its eyes. The shell must be openable for clear vision but when closed the animal still has the ability t...
On Earth, most animals have tongues, albeit in many forms. This is due to the evolution from a common ancestor. Tongues are not necessary for communication, be it auditory or otherwise. However, th...
There was an orbital station; a huge torus, as known from sci-fi. It was a luxurious place for people from dusty planets to relax at, and spend hard-earned money in environments resembling Earth fr...
I'm trying to create an alien which has external lungs. Air can be inhaled normally however, is it plausible that the material the lungs are made of is semi-permeable. Containing the nitrogen and o...
On an hot planet at the wooded poles are two aliens species that coexist in a mutually beneficial relationship. The Honey Mouths use gecko-like feet to hang from the far larger Thorn Shredders, wh...
If an organism weighing roughly 20kg existed (same weight as a dog), similar also to the structural composition a dog. How much muscle mass would be required within those legs for it to jump 20m? ...
Prototaxites. Giant, finger-shaped mushrooms. Painting by Mary Parrish, National Museum of Natural History. These monsters existed before trees did, and while there are a few theories on whethe...
Lots of animals, e.g. dogs, can hear sounds beyond the frequencies that humans can hear. Would it be realistic to have a basically humanoid species which had two sets of vocal cords - one similar ...
I have been told that the high proportion of O2 and CH4 in my atmosphere are unsustainable unless constantly refreshed by an active process. I would like to sustain the following atmospheric compo...
I'm thinking of a plot where the Earth is taken over and literally eaten by a race of giant alien beings who use mass-energy conversions to power themselves (These guys are as big as the sun, body ...
My previous question was how to classify a domain (now superdomain) of duocellular life named Duotorusa. Anyone who has taken high school biology know that all life on earth are divided into th...
Let's say a carnivorous species loses all available food sources, and they begin to eat one another to survive. Let us also say that prion diseases are not an issue for this particular predator. As...
Though my star is 1.71 LSol, my planet orbits at about 2.14 AU. Following a back-of-the-envelope equation for apparent brightness, this gives the surface of my planet approximately 30% of Sol's lig...
I want to have my aliens have a culture that clashes with human modern culture and one way I want to achieve this is having some extreme sexual dimorphism. For these aliens the sexual dimorphism ...
Everyone knows that water is necessary for life because it is such a good solvent, but could a lifeform use water vapor as a solvent instead of water, or any other gas that works a solvent instead ...
What would Germanium based life look like and what conditions would favor it. I know that it's not that common but I am going to handwave that. What would be the resulting look for such a lifeform...
What sort of life could live in a ocean with no bottom. In this scenario, there is no seafloor, no matter how far down you go. Once you exit the continental shelf, it plunges straight down into inf...
So, I don't believe that the "angelic" type winged human can exist (y'know, the kind with the feathery wings sprouting from the back). Too many problems of anatomy, weight, etc. But I am trying to ...
From the dawn of fantasy fiction, dwarfs have most often been described roughly in the same way: short and stocky, long beards, can smith stuff, good fighters, can live for hundreds of years aging ...
On my quest to make pretty much every single fantasy creature biologically feasible I have come across a hiccup. It wasn't angels, no you people helped me with that. Demons are easy, we have plenty...
This question assumes that there is complex, intelligent life on some other world other than the kind found on Earth. Carl Sagan allowed that silicon and germanium might replace carbon, and ammon...
Assume an Earth-like or super-Earth terrestrial planet in a state comparable to Precambrian or Archaen Earth. The atmosphere is mainly nitrogen and carbon dioxide, perhaps some methane, but very li...
I have done research on blood and in particular the component adding color and transferring oxygen. Hemocyanin is directly dissolved into the blood. This works for an octopus, but not a reptilian ...
I'm currently writing a short story about astronauts exploring a seemingly barren planet, which is covered in steep mountains with large flat areas in between. They soon find themselves hunted by ...
Original post: Imagine a world in which both left- and right-handed chirality appeared and evolved into a variety of complex organisms comparable to post-Cambrian Explosion Earth (both plant an...
I saw this video, and I'm curious what color bark would be if the sun was in one position constantly. The video explains that birch trees are white because of stuff in their bark. The reason is be...
The platypus do it, so it can and is done, some how. It would be a waste of energy to be lactating the entire time after the egg is laid up until it hatches, so how does my alien race know when to ...
In my story, a colony ship has made landfall on a planet. At first there is not thought to be any sentient life there, but after a while it becomes apparent that this is not the case. The idea I ...
First, I guess the conditions of the world are in order. It's approximately 85% the mass of earth and there is going to be a full ecosystem with all the usual types of bugs, insects, trees, and pre...
Those statues will be pretty darn heavy... but what about a flesh-and-blood naga? The torso of a human connected to a snake's body? I've seen some pretty extreme estimates on their weight... DnD ...
I am looking to have a creature which is basically a small human sized bat, something like man-bat from the batman series. It would ideally fly or at least glide and would regularly hang upside dow...
Let's say we have a binary star system, with a high mass star and a low mass, red dwarf star. High mass stars emit their light mainly in the ultraviolet while low mass stars emit mainly in the infr...
Recently I was pondering mermaids and was wondering how their respiratory systems work. Most importantly, how could their vocal chords continue to function? Secondly, how would they draw the water ...
Below is a diagram showing transverse cross sections of skulls representative of the two subspecies (A and B) of the Trilateral* species. Is it plausible that such obvious differences "“ noting the...
Alien and fantasy creatures can be designed in an infinite number of ways. But are there physiological traits that would be common among all tool-developing (technology-building) species? As an e...
Remember the Xenomorphs from aliens, how they didn't show up in heat vision? I was wondering how you could recreate that effect biologically... a creature which doesn't pop-up on IR (at least, not ...
Vocalization has a number of features that make it a very robust natural form of communication: Variable volume from whisper to shout, roughly scaling from direct to omnidirectional; Equally effe...
So I was thinking of a land animal with a biological harpoon, I'm not 100% sure why it would evolve with it. Details of it would be: Quadrupedal Medium-sized (similar to a pony) and would hunt s...
An organism lives and reproduces inside the body of other animals. This organism pays back its host by protecting the DNA from viruses and radiation damage in 100% of all cases. The organism itself...
Supercritical CO2 has been suggested as a potential alternative bio-solvent, replacing water, at high pressures and modestly elevated temperatures. But what about supercritical N2? ScCO2 is an ind...
Similar to Could Plants Develop Sentience? but slightly more general: I'm not interested in plants in particular, but want a more general understanding of the effect of motion on intelligence and v...
Quick sketch of how I conceptualize this creature's skeleton. Sorry for the chopped off head, the jaw design and such isn't finished. The 4 yellow bones on the tip of the neck are the base of the...
I'm not certain if it's possible, honestly. I know some cartilaginous fish like sharks and rays that have tooth-like structures lining their skin, called placiod scales, but I've never heard of any...
How scientifically plausible is this? A giant, self-aware fungal supercomputer made or evolved from something like the Blue Mountain honey fungus or maybe a slime mold of a similar size? Could some...
At the minimum, I'd like to create a creature with a jaw structure that splits into 4 moving parts (like a +-shape or an x-shape). In order to keep food in, the cross sections will have stretchy fl...
Some speculation on a neurological supercharger for a sapient alien species: The supercharger is a natural biochemical compound of some sort produced and stored in a specialized brain-adjacent o...
I am building a world where most of the wildlife is capable of flight and there is an ecosystem that is almost totally isolated from the ground. Is it possible to have a mammal, roughly the size of...
People have been trying to imagine elaborate alien biologically possible ecosystems for a while. A lot of people seem to both want but ignore one of those fundamental aspects of our own ecosystem, ...
Does anyone have any ideas on a world with clumps of different atmospheres? Like what if a world has weather patterns that move around different atmosphere types; a mostly sulphur atmosphere, oxyge...
Okay, I have a bipedal creature around 500 to 600 pounds (226 - 272 kg), and I wanted it to lift around 2 tons (1814 kg), preferably over its head, and throw the weight about 10 feet (3 meters) on ...
