Posts tagged evolution
Ok, so, some quick background... I'm not an evolutionary biologist or anything, but I'm helping a friend with some alien design ideas, and at least one of them she designed and wanted help to someh...
I was thinking of a situation in which an Extra Terrestrial plant life form evolves a nervous system and eventually a brain. This plant diversifies into a variety of different life forms with some...
Humans have some genes that allow for a precise sense of smell, but they were turned off millions of years back, just like in many other primates. To name an exeption, lemurs are primates with a de...
In a previous question - How might kinetosynthesizing "plants" look? - I introduced a worldbuilding thought experiment of mine centered around a habitable moon, heated by tidal forces, which orbits...
Quick Context Basically I need one of my charaters to produce a lot of chlorine trifluoride, but human biochemistry wont allow that, so I was going to get a micro-organism to do the job and produc...
In this world there has been a recurring population surge of ferocious insects every 20 years for many centuries. The setting is approximately our own time in relation to the existence of "cave men...
Darwin's hypothetical mechanism of inheritance was called pangenesis, whereby the body continually produced particles of information - gemmules - which aggregated in the gonads, and that that the o...
There are many tiny humanoids in fiction, the Arquilians of Men in Black, the Gargantians of Buzz Lightyear Star Command and a few others. This raises the question, is it possible for a humanoid sp...
I am currently designing a highly intelligent species for a sci-fi project I am working on. They are quite similar physically to prehistoric salamanders or similar amphibians, but I am having troub...
Between a species that is hermaphroditic and a species that has males and females, then what would be the pros and cons of either one from a biological standpoint? Anything not regarding the biolo...
My semiarboreal humanoids have a build quite similar to humans, apart from some more specialized arboreal adaptations. They live in rainforests quite similar to the Amazon Rainforest. Though trees ...
Surface gravity: 1G Info regarding of altitude, pressure, and atmospheric density: altitude pressure density (meters) (atm) (kg/m^3) 0 17 10 1000 15...
Premise Inhabiting my earth-like world will be humanoid beings that have a skin tone that is as dark as Vantablack. Let's assume these human-like beings share the same ancestry as humans and we ca...
For a highly intelligent avian dinosaur whose grasping and manipulating appendages have all but vanished, there are options : for the species to evolve beaks that are better fine manipulators, or c...
Could werewolves exist in a realistic world? All that is required for an accepted answer is the ability to change shape over night. Bonus points will be awarded if you can explain a bite spreading...
In the world I'm building, there's a non-human race that I want to have no concept of gender. Their language doesn't contain gendered words like "man" or "woman," and sexual attraction is not based...
A species of humanoid creatures with a strange skull structure and huge horns has somehow immense strength in their hands. The rest of their body seems to be strong in proportion to their weight an...
The jackalope is a mythical animal of North American folklore described as a jackrabbit with an antelopes horns. It's a popular mythological creature in hill folk culture and it made me ask a quest...
I've been thinking on the concept of the human race dying off (the reason doesn't matter), but most of the other living species on the planet survive. Although we die off, the remains of books, the...
Panotti so called from the Greek words πᾶν and οὖς for "all ears", were a mythical race of people, described as possessing large ears that covered their entire bodies. In the Natural Hi...
Atmospheric composition: | 2% Trace gases | 58% Nitrogen | 26% Oxygen | 11% Argon | 3% Carbon dioxide | Average surface temperature: 36 degrees Celsius Surface gravity: 1.36x Earth ...
Premise I'm creating a pre-history world to attempt to demonstrate an alternative sequence of events. I would like natural forces to somehow make natural selection view intelligence/technology as ...
Wild boars are well known for their large, bulky body, their aggressivity and their tusks. They are animals from which a predator would gladly stay away if some easier prey is available. And, las...
The succubi are popularly represented as women with horns and bat-like wings. They feed on the vital energy in myths, but could a humanoid creature resembling a woman evolve and feed only on human ...
In the Land of Metal, there exists a tribe that has upheld the gospel of Manowar with such zeal that it modified their bodies. Metalheads descend from humans, and may look human at a glance. A mor...
Looking to how I can make Nagas and Mermaids able to exist and evolve in my story, I came across this post which explains how Nagas could evolve from humans: Anatomically Correct Naga In the top a...
One of my fictional planets (which is largely terran in nature) is notable for an unique animal. Said animal is a dangerous predator that is notable for several things: It is physically separated...
All life on Earth is surprisingly homogeneous from a biochemical point of view. Every organism known to us is primarily built with carbon-based molecules that also contain hydrogen and oxygen, main...
EDIT: As suggested by L.Dutch, I turned the original post into a series of its own. Some Context Though the name "Shared Consciousness" is pretty self explanatory to me, the best I can do to desc...
EDIT: As suggested by L.Dutch, I turned the original post into a series of its own. Some Context A "Hive Mind" is an aggressive type of shared consciousness (for more information on shared consci...
I was wondering if it is possible for life to evolve in a world which lacks any transition metals. I am wondering this because, it could give a plausible explanation for a world which is very unli...
Let's say humans moved to Mars and have lived there for millions of years. Mars is of now uninhabitable, though in this case some terraforming has happened. The poles have been nuked to release gre...
Since having (eg.) two arms is a result of evolution, how can we, considering modern technology, force embryos to grow another limb? Polymelia is known to me, but it is considered a birth defect. I...
Europa's surface is marred with huge, curved cracks, called lineae, which may - depending on the thickness of its icy crust - expose the subsurface ocean to sunlight. Pictures like the one above...
If dolphins came out of the water again and evolved into something approaching human intelligence, how would that look, taking into account their physical characteristics and what happened evolutio...
In the fantasy culture it's not uncommon to find Giant spiders with the upper body of a human. There are many variants as the spider body having only 4 legs and the upper human body have 2 additio...
I have a story in a mediaeval setting with no magic. There are elves, but they are essentially just absurdly long-lived versions of humans with pointy ears and somewhat more acute senses. Unicorns...
There exists in folklore from various cultures of a condition in which rows of teeth are present in the female genitalia. The purpose of these stories, like most folktales, was to serve as a morali...
Let's say we have a group of high IQ individuals of a sizeable number. In what manner should they reproduce in order to maximise the odds of creating a genetically high IQ population over several g...
This is not a question on whether or not floating, balloon-like organisms are biomechanically viable - I already know the answer to that, which is yes. This instead deals with the plausibility of s...
Imagine a large room, perhaps 50 metres in length and 35 in width, with its ceiling 40 metres above the floor. On this ceiling, there are LED lights, rendering the brightness of the room to look so...
Starting in 541"“542 AD, the Plague of Justinian and a series of subsequent outbreaks killed between 13-26% of the world's population. The plagues were caused by Yersinia pestis, the same microorga...
Question: Could colonial organisms form into a sentient being, something like a human, for example? Could they evolve into beings with thoughts and feelings? A race of colonial organisms taking the...
This is a submission for the Anatomically Correct Series. Image credit: japhers.tumblr.com Originating from Japan, the majority of depictions of Oni (Kijo to refer female Oni/demons) are hideous...
In the setting I'm building now, then there's supposed to be a location where the natives had found three food staple crops within close proximity with one another, near a handful of rivers. Natura...
I saw a movie where oil companies stumbled upon these fictional underground aquatic deep-sea animals that survived on eating and digesting the oil where they lived. They had squid/octopus-like bodi...
How would evolution have changed without the "reflex arc", if all reflexes had to go through the brain instead of the spinal cord? Would intelligent species be able to evolve?
Aliens are very rarely portrayed as being furry, at least in proper xenobiology worldbuilding. They're virtually never depicted with feathers, and only sometimes with scales. Currently, there are...
I'm designing an alien tree species that produces small purple fruits at the edge of its braches. Now a few seconds after one of these fruits falls from the tree it makes a small explosion so that ...
Let's say there exists an Earth-like exoplanet which orbits a normal star, with a similar process regarding the evolution of life on earth, yet the star became a red giant during said evolution. A...
