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6/30/2025, 1:26:47 AM
>>8882528
If you're trying to use the word "reptile" to describe an alien, while being at all rational and scientific, you're already failing to understand what a reptile is.
Aliens can be "reptilian" or "reptile-like", but they cannot actually be reptiles. Reptiles are a class of vertibrates that evolved on Earth, and "reptile" is a description of evolutionary lineage, not quantitative of physiological descriptors. It's a reptile because it's descended from reptiles, not because of the features of its body.
The traits we associate with reptiles are a product of their common ancestors, and that's it, something that diverges from other reptiles, even on Earth, no matter how weird it is, is still a reptile.
People make this same stupid mistake with Dragons all the time.
And thus an alien with 'reptile-like' qualities that are the product of a completely different tree of life on another planet can have whatever other "un-lizardlike" characteristics that the writers want, and be just as plausible as anything else, like having opposable thumbs, an erect posture, split mandibles, or anything else that the fiction decides they should have.
Both because what a reptile is is more flexible than you think, and because aliens do not have to conform to our Earth-based evolutionary preconceptions.
If you're trying to use the word "reptile" to describe an alien, while being at all rational and scientific, you're already failing to understand what a reptile is.
Aliens can be "reptilian" or "reptile-like", but they cannot actually be reptiles. Reptiles are a class of vertibrates that evolved on Earth, and "reptile" is a description of evolutionary lineage, not quantitative of physiological descriptors. It's a reptile because it's descended from reptiles, not because of the features of its body.
The traits we associate with reptiles are a product of their common ancestors, and that's it, something that diverges from other reptiles, even on Earth, no matter how weird it is, is still a reptile.
People make this same stupid mistake with Dragons all the time.
And thus an alien with 'reptile-like' qualities that are the product of a completely different tree of life on another planet can have whatever other "un-lizardlike" characteristics that the writers want, and be just as plausible as anything else, like having opposable thumbs, an erect posture, split mandibles, or anything else that the fiction decides they should have.
Both because what a reptile is is more flexible than you think, and because aliens do not have to conform to our Earth-based evolutionary preconceptions.
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