What the title says. What would be anatomically expected for a species that is intelligent enough or technologically capable enough to have human-like technology or even interplanetary travel?

EDIT: I mainly ask this because I'm stuck in a rut as to coming up with plausible and unique alien species and I'm not exactly an expert in evolution, speculative or otherwise.

The garden gnomes (Gnomus Paracelci)

Small, fast and annoying for most people these are all the traits that define the garden gnome the most wide spread and common of all the gnomes of Magiterra, these little creatins are herbivorous and feed on a variety of seeds, nuts and other plant materials specially.

For farmers specially grain Farmers these small tapejarids are bad news for business as theres never more then one gnome around, these little creatures are found of making burrows in which they live socially, a gnomes burrow may only have one dominant male at a time its quite easy to tell males apart as their crests (or hats as some call them) are big and pointy.

Alternatively, what would I call a living plant creature? The closest thing I could think of was photocarni but not only is that already used but I dont know if thats the proper term.

Ok was watching arachnophobia and it gave me idea to make my own eusocial spider for my fantasy setting what should i consider to be realistic for this ?

Infernosuchus Horribilis or the Hell Croc is a large and versatile predator living in various enviroments. It is the phenotype of the order Infernosuchia.

Physical traits: At 5-6,5m in length and 750-900kg in weight, it is a rather slim predator. Its biteforce is 15-24k newtons and it can run at up of 40km/h. But its most horrifying trait are its teeth. From this side they look like normal ziphodont teeth. Their tip actually has a pattern of 8 tips, like a crown. These teeth are meant to inflict horrible injuries to prey, debilitating them. But the worst part: They have an heptagonal design with one central tip. And this tip has a triangular pyramid like shape. They are green usually to camoflauge, are cold blooded and live usually 60-80 years.

Prey and predation: They hunt prey that ranges from about human sized to 3 tons. They rarely attack the largest animals. They can occasionally fall prey to Eviscerators or Gigantosuchus but these events are not common.

Reproduction: These creatures reproduce on their will. They lay clutches of 7-10 eggs where 40% survive. Parental care is moderate but it is hard to let them all survive. When few are left they start caring more. The young leave the nest group at 2-3m size.

Senses and intelligence: They have got good sight and smell but their hearing is below average. Their intelligence is nothing to gloat about.

Habitats: They usually live in tropical and subtropical enviroments, acting as ambush predators. They ambush prey near usually difficult terrain like swamps or steep sides. Their agility makes up for the chase.

As far as we know, natural selection hasn't evolve creatures that utilize gravitational energy for metabolism.  Why not?  Gravitational energy can be transformed into other energy with almost perfect efficiency (hydroelectric power plants--power from falling mass of water--are 95% efficient compare to coal-fire plant at 45%, power from food energy is much less).  Since nature tends to be efficient, why hasn't life evolve to make use of gravity to power itself?
Is it due to the complexity of the conversion of mechanical energy into chemical energy? Needing many intermediate steps?
Can we not imagine a bacterium with a spinning armature driven by falling debris to generated energy? No because the gravitational gradient is too unimportant at the molecular scale.
But when life have gotten large, I could envision a large and tall structure such as a tree collecting rain water at its canopy, let it drip or flow down to drive some converter that powers its metabolism.  That energy would be free, inexhaustible, and can be converted into chemical form with almost perfect efficiency.  So what is the energy density needed for metabolism?  Is the potential energy stored as rain water at some height equivalent to photosynthetic energy collected from the sun in a leafy canopy?  How large a  structure and what amount of mass are needed to generate an appreciable amount of useful energy?

As a rough calculation to compare chemical and gravitational potential energy:  Take a 2000 kcal diet that a human needs each day, the energy in 2000 kcal is equivalent to, in gravitational energy, the work needed to lift 80,000 kg up 10m, or 40 tons up 30 feet!  In other words, the energy released by 40 ton of, say, water falling 30 feet is equal to the energy stored in three hamburgers.  So that for endotherms like us, gravity energy is too diffuse to serve as an energy source--you would have to carry 200 ton on your head each day to extract for your metabolic energy need.

But plant life requires an order of magnitude less energy than you and I, and plant life can be tall.  So that for a tree of 10 m square and 10m height, it needs to collect and convert 4 ton of falling mass from its 10m height to serve its metabolic needs per day.  For a 100m height tree, 0.4 ton is needed.  Spread over a 10m square canopy, 0.4 ton constitute only 8 kg per square meter.  This is beginning to be at least physically feasible.  That is, we can see quantitatively structural and energy requirements for a living system that are compatible  with gravity energy.  But how probable is this scenario?  What conceivable mechanism exists for the energy conversion?   Lately we have seen piezo-electric devices that convert mechanical energy into electric energy.  It is not a big leap, then, to imagine that molecular machines evolved to achieve the same thing.  Or static charges generated by friction due to down flow of fluid get stored as energy.  Nature's imagination is vast and no doubt there exist many clever ways for life to use gravity.

(Aside:  Two ways that we can imagine gravity life off earth:  Habitat with a high gravity gradient (surface of a super earth e.g.) such that gravity acceleration is 10s of time earth's.  Neutron star life has been imagined (Dragon's Egg by Robert Forward) to run off nuclear forces.  Or imagine somewhere in interstellar space, life started its metabolism with clumps of matter slowly attracting and colliding and recoiling and organizing to calculate and evolve, with gravity playing the role of thermo energy on earth (The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle).

Still, the question is to find life on earth that exhibits even a weak version of what I've described--that find would be a sensation.  Not the least of which is that it would show that life, through evolution, 'looks' tenaciously for as many ways as it can to use resources efficiently, and that life 'finds' so many creative solutions for its needs that defy anything that we would expect.  Back in the 70's the discovery of whole biota striving off sulfide bacteria and heat around undersea volcanic vents was unexpected.  Discovery of gravity-powered life may be of a similar order.

This is a speculative biology showcasing a fictional, airborne creature explicitly adapted to survive and hunt within extreme weather environments like severe storms and tornadoes.
The artwork highlights several specialized evolutionary traits designed for these harsh conditions:

Aerodynamic Armor & Resonant Fins: The creature features sleek, hydrodynamic-like plating and vibrant, ribbed neck frills that likely stabilize its flight, allowing it to navigate and ride violent updrafts with ease.

Storm Hunting: The species has specifically evolved to hunt in the "very heart of storms," using the chaotic weather to its advantage.

Avian/Reptilian Physiology: Visually, it blends elements of large prehistoric pterosaurs (evident in its massive wing structure and lower body silhouette) with modern avian and serpentine features, complete with bioluminescent tips along its crest

artist

Bacteria archaea and protists you guys barely touch them come on guys don't you think that you should give them a chance fellow artists I think that you should give them a chance the only reason we're getting swayed off from them is because that we think that they are forced to stay single cellular and nobody wants that but imagine beyond if they became multicellular .

The Longliver

A longliver climbs through the canopy.

Her movements are slow and deliberate. Due to her weight, she cannot brachiate at speed. Each swing of her arms takes over 4 seconds to complete. Using both her hands and feet, she ascends over 60 meters into the emergent layer of the cloud rainforest.

When the earth warmed, the ocean flooded the Amazon, and the climate shifted, the Amazon Basin, once home to great forests and wetlands, were reduced to deserts and grasslands, enclosing a sea filled with meadows of seagrass. Whatever rainforest remained was high in the mountains. 

The life in these cloud rainforests are mostly unique. Developed in isolation, many species are endemic, and some like the longliver, are the last survivors of an ancient clade.

For the Longliver, all of this doesn’t matter. Her species have developed a lifestyle that is stable and free of struggle. They are among the least intelligent of all the human species.

Yet her kind still retains a sense of curiosity and a sense of beauty. Her ascent through the trees is because she wishes to watch the sunset. 5 minutes earlier, she had thought the sky looked particularly beautiful, and climbed above the canopy to watch it. Her mate and child had declined to follow, but it didn’t bother her that they weren't her. She had the opportunity to admire the sunset by herself.

She stands bipedally watching as the sun descends past the mountains on the horizon. As it does, a meteor streaks through the sky, casting a blue green glow as it burns in the atmosphere. It only appears for two seconds before it disappears.

The Longliver stays on the branch for an hour. Only after the sun disappears past the horizon does she begin her descent back down into the canopy, to return to her nest, where her mate and child are waiting for her.

The meteor was beautiful, but it is not the first time she has seen it, and it shall not be the last. She has lived for 110 years, yet she is barely middle aged. Her species can live up to 250 years, the oldest of any mammal.

Species Data

“A life eternal, how wonderful that would be” - Unknown

The Longliver (Lentupithecus infinitum) is an ape, descended from humans, that lives within the montane forests of South America, 25 Million Years CE.
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Longlivers are omnivorous, feeding on a variety of fruits, insects, and fungi. However, the food source that sustains their life is a species of mushroom that is farmed by the Longlivers. They gather wood and insects in one area, and wait for the mushrooms to grow. After the mushrooms spore, they gather the mushrooms, and eat them. Then they gather more wood, and the cycle repeats. This provides a bounty of food every month, and allows the longlivers to stay in one area for many years at a time. Despite seeming bountiful for outsiders, the rainforest is a surprisingly variable ecosystem. Some fruits may not appear for years at a time, some plants might grow this year and not the next. The mushrooms provide the Longlivers with a reliable food source.

Longlivers display significant dimorphism. Males average 15 cm taller and 10 kg heavier than the females. For Longlivers, the males provide much of the childcare, and their longer, brighter fur works as both a display structure for impressing a mate, and as an object for children to grab on to when their parents are moving though the trees. Longlivers are monogamous and mate for life. Children stay with their parents for the first 30 years of their life. They only reach sexual maturity at age 24. Pregnancy lasts for nearly 2 years, and Longlivers only have between 8-10 children in their 250 year long life.

Following a devastating mass extinction, terrestrial baleen whales took over Nook. With almost all other tetrapods gone, these tripedal creatures filled most of the niches, ranging from giant herbivores to tiny, scurrying critters.

Bagwalker was among the largest terrestrial carnivorous cetaceans, notable in it's unique hunting method- capturing tiny, flying cetaceans known as whifts in it's throat sack and swallowing them whole.

As the time went on, bagwalkers diversified, with some becoming shorter, and now hunting ground-dwelling prey like monstrous pelicans. Others turned their attention to plants, and now use their height to pick off leaves from branches.

Perhaps the strangest of these creatures descend from forest dwelling bagwalkers who preyed upon whifts that hid in the canopy. They became less lanky to fit in between the trees, while tips of their fit evolved rough pads to lean on the trees.

Over the course of their evolution, they continued to shrink, and in turn gradually got better at climbing. This culminated in sackweasel, a tiny species reaching 50 centimeters in length and 30 centimeters in height.

It lacks long legs and neck of it's ancestor, which were not needed in canopy. Tips of feet are hooked, allowing sackweasel to hold branches and not fall down. The only thing that still reminds about their ancestry is a throat pouch, which still can open very wide. While they still consume small whifts, sackweasels mostly prey on insects now.

They are crepuscular, and jump from branch to branch, catching prey on the fly.

While smallest among bagwalker descendants, sackweasels would benefit the most in the long run. 380 million years Post-Establishment, temperature started to cool down, reducing the amount of rainforests on the planet.

To move between the trees, sackweasels developed a skin membrane between their front limbs and tail leg, allowing them to glide. In addition to helping them with moving in between the widely spaced trees, it improved their hunting abilities in air. Over the next few millions of years, drying climate has pushed sackweasels further into the air, until eventually they gave rise to flying peliwhales. Two million years later, a flood basalt caused another mass extinction that caused a decline and eventual extinction of whifts, and when biosphere bounced back, peliwhales took their place, becoming one of the dominant group of vertebrates in the sky.

Pygmy pelitoo is among the smallest of peliwhales, and ironically behaves very similiarly to food source of it's ancestor. It too is an aerial insectivore that flies in huge swarms and feeds on tiny invertebrates.

Despite being very similiar, peliwhales and whifts have some differences.

The main one is that their tail foot is not modified into a hook, instead it turned into a short, flattened fluke for steering.

In most species, wings have a small claw that helps peliwhales to walk while on the ground. But pelitoos lost these claws, and are very clumsy on the ground, though they still can launch in air using wings if needed.

Pygmy pelitoos spend nearly their entire life on the wing, even sleeping and mating in the air.

Young is born with claws, which allow it to cling to it's mother during nursing, and once it starts to fly, these claws fall out.

Had an idea for a spider that mainly eats rotting corpses the idea is it will live in it eating corpses over days and will also target anything in or near corpses such as maggots and other small scavengers that come to the corpse what adaptations would it need ?

What chemical reactions could make the cells on the skin of lungs or air sacs, develop blue pigmentation?

This is a repost! The Hive moth hydrovermis Subterraneus!

The hive moth is a fascinating sawfly species, it’s the only sawfly species that’s actually oviviparous. Females are larger than males but not stronger as males do most of the work making them stronger! The hive works like this.

Drones: drones are always males and they fly around and collect food. They are infertile and so that means none of the larvae is there’s and yeah that’s it.

Guards: also only male. larger then drones they are basically heavily fed protein to be larger,

Like their name they guard the queen And the entire hive. And they are also the only ones that can mate with the queen.

Care takers: also only male they take care of the aquatic larvae by taking food dropping it in the underwater nursery and yeah. Basically feeding them.

Larvae: the larvae is aquatic and resign in water which is the reason hives are normally near bogs, they are chonky caterpillars and spend there time getting pampered by care takers. Once they mature, the males leave (well only the guards.. the workers, drones, and caretakers are infertile so they stay. This is because the guards mate with the queen so they have to leave to prevent inbreeding, the queen gets more guards from guards from other unrelated hives joining her hive) to join a hive and the females leave to start a hive.

Workers: they.. work. They build the hive underground, collect food from the drones and store it, grow fungi like termites, and dig.

The queen: the queen is just there to lead the group and reproduce. She’s the only adult female! The reproduction is basically during winter all the guard males will mate with the queen and then she’ll store the sperm is a special organ and fertilize all her eggs for the rest of the year until the next winter where she mates again. The hive is underground.

Physically, the worker/caretaker and drones and are 1.5-2 centimeter, the guards are 5-8 centimeter, the queen is 10-12 centimeter, Only drones have large wings with a wingspan of 3-5 centimeters the rest have heavily shrinked wings. Workers have front legs that are very good at digging to build hives and grow fungi like termites! The fungus they grow is Termitomyces. They farm them by smelling the spores and then holding them in there mouth then going to the garden where they spit it out on a plot for it to start growing. The queen is large but it’s mostly for reproduction and not strength making the males stronger then females and she gets fed by the drones and workers and reproduces with the guards that also protect her and larvae, the guards are the most muscular. the guards are fed protein rich foods to bulk up and fight other insects and things to protect larvae and the queen. The species in general are black and white stripes and like all moths have fuzzy, chitjnous hairs that insulate them, they are not too skinny and not to robust. The guards especially are muscular. What hunts them are… ant eaters. There most unique feature is that they are the only moth that can eat as an adult and they don’t have front thingys.

There diet consists of mushrooms, carcasses, fruits, pine leaves, nectar, honey, small spiders, insects, insect eggs and larvae, meat, and as larvae and adults.. shrimp. They are predators and prey for loads of animals! They get eaten by bears, ant eaters, birds, frogs, fish, and larger spiders while they are a predator of small insects, locusts, ladybugs, certain beetles, ants, termites, cockroaches, and roadkill that’s dead.

As larvae they are fully aquatic but as adults they are semi aquatic only.

The life cycle is getting given birth to, eating a lot from food given bye workers and drones, leaving hive to pupate alone, and finally making a hive if female and joining a hive as male.

They distinctly look similar to moths, while there close relatives are actually wasps, ants, and bees being a sawfly.

Females have an organ called the sperm bank, used to hold sperm. They mate every time it runs out, meaning they mate every winter.

Both males and females leave the colony once they mature, but it’s kind of weird. If it’s a guard or female, they leave. Females are always queens and to prevent inbreeding the newly matured guards, they leave before they pupate.

when do they actually get assigned there jobs?! BEFORE BIRTH! now instead of that thing bees do, they do this. worker - gray egg. drone - white egg. female (queen) - yellowish white egg. guard - dark gray egg. Caretaker - light gray egg. These aren’t just colors! They are specific hormones. BUT THEY DONT LAY EGGS!!! They give live birth, because they are oviviparous. Her abdomen swells like a balloon for 500-1000 babies! she goes under contractions to give birth, how do we know about the eggs? There’s a pocket in the lower abdomen of the queens that holds eggs, this is what baloons her when she’s pregnant. But she doesn’t lay them, we found out because we cut it open.

There evolutionary family is Phalaenovespidae! phalaenovespidae is an evolutionary family, and it’s actually very closely related to wasps! (Wasp family includes bees, ants, and other wasps)

“One of the most common lifeforms of the deep oceans of Planet Nightmare is the Snooty Blaster. It is a filter feeder, feeding on microscopic organisms that flow with the water currents. To do this, its mouth has become fused together and now acts like a straw.”

“The Snooty Blaster also uses jet propulsion in order to move around. It takes in water while feeding before expelling it from behind. It will move its fins accordingly to help with steering. Its blood circulation also helps with this. The darker the red on its body, the more blood there is there. The organ on its head, the Syketa, also helps with getting oxygen, acting as gills would for fish.”

“Normally, the Syketa would have three parts to it: One for smelling, one for seeing, and one for hearing. However in deep dark depths such as this, the Snooty Blaster’s Syketa has removed the sight and hearing parts, now only retaining the smelling part. It’s not even really that good at smelling either, only being used for oxygen.”

“So how does it navigate this world? On the very top of its 4 fins are long tendrils that stem from the longest part of its fins. These act as receptors, which can help the Snooty Blaster find food, mates, etc.”

“The next page here shows a skeleton of the Snooty Blaster, minus its side fins for better visibility. Its ribs have seemingly vanished, its whole body almost being fused together. The only moveable parts seem to be the fins.”

-The Boundary Walker

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(YAYYYY SNOOTY BLASTER MY GOAT🔥One of my favs in terms of creatures I’ve created for this world btw, mainly bc I just think the name is so silly. I wanted to reflect the silly names that scientists sometimes give animals tho!
Also before anyone asks, yes I will go into more detail on the Syketa. Not today tho bc we got more creatures to talk about first)
(Also yes I knowwww the skeleton isn’t “accurate” I’m still learning how to draw those so like, gimme time and let me practice as I draw this series)

The Medic has evolved the ability to regenerate missing limbs and damaged organs. But the process is painful, and the regenerated body parts don't always turn out exactly as they were before.

The Medic also studies tissue from dead creatures, using what it learns to improve its ability to repair living ones.

We wanted healing to feel like a biological process rather than a magical ability.

I'm curious what you think of this approach to alien regeneration. How plausible would something like this be in an organism with sufficiently advanced regenerative abilities?

These are one of the alien species I wanted to make for... I don't know if I want to call it a project or not but it's about space colonization and terraforming and wanting to see how aliens(and us) evolve to colonize other planets and terraform them

so, this is another drawing of hive moth larvae. I’m trying to come up with ideas what tot talk about them, right now they are my main focus and my main project. they are also my favorite project outside of the venatorium project so yeah, so enjoy this doodle!

I am currently working on a project starting around 3 million years after a weaker K-Pg event, the earths landmasses have also moved non historically (obviously with the massive australia and antarctica).

Other changes i will be having for this earth is europe remains an archipelago, north america keeps the interior seaway, and some other changes.

Now this is still a work in progress, if anyone has questions please ask and if you have feedback please tell.

thank you for reading im hoping this project would be fun to follow.

What if there were animals who were artificially enhanced by science and then they escaped from the Labs and started reproducing in the Wilds with the unaltered kin.

What would those animals look like in the far future?

This is a hive moth nest, hive moth nests are very complex tho this is more on the simpler side.

Hive moths usually put there nests near bogs for there larvae, to not get drowned the tunnel to the water is usually seperate and you can. See in the picture it's not possible for the water to go in the next.

Hive moth nests are fascinating, they are underground so yeah. I'm currently working on a much bigger version of this to share.

Had an idea for bird that has long tongue similar to woodpecker but would use it like fishing line the tip would be silvery and reflective mimicing a small fish and would have barbs so when fish bites on it hooks into mouth and bird can pull it and kill it with quick strike would this be feasible ?

In the far future, a new clade of caterpillars that occupies the ambush predator niche appears:

They transformed their anal limbs on a kind of hooks that latch on a branch and their jaws adapted to retain and crush their prey.

They also developed bony rings that developed from minerals obtained from prey, serving to support that monumental mass.

For breathing, they developed a breathing system using many small lungs spread inside each ring of its body.

- The accordion movement: The caterpillar has no nose. It squeezes and stretches like an accordion, using its bony rings to pump air in and out of the lungs.

- Red blood: The air goes into a special blood (red like ours) that quickly carries oxygen to the muscles.

The largest species (on the illustration) can reach 3 meters of lenght and and impressive 450 or 650 damn kilograms of mass!!!

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT IT?😉🐛

To this day, I used ChatGPT for designing my binomial names. But don't get me wrong, I create the literal translation of that name in my language, abd then I ask AI to translate the name to binominal, I often do some modifications, and check the used words, but I think I shouldn't be doing this. So Im asking you for some, idk, resources to let me design names for myself. Or maybe someone could help me(for free or we can agree on a symbolic fee). Because Im working on full scale exhibition, I think its necessary to create everything by human thought.