Design Test: Crocatiels and, um, Space Dragons

... Well this picture makes me feel like a hypocrite.

I've always secretly HATED when people draw dragons, or wolves, or cats or some other really obvious animal and change a colour or add piercings and call it an alien species. Yet here I am calling something a flipping space dragon. X|

But anyway, ahem.

Waaaay back when I started putting together my scifi story/universe, in it the heads of the main milky way alliance were an elusive alien species who were quite literally dragons. In the sense that their people had visited Earth in the past and sparked our stories of the mythical creature.

Looking back at it now, I feel like such an awful writer for putting dragons in a scifi story... But I also still want to stay at least partially true to what I came up with...

So here I am, trying to make the 'Dragons' less generically dragon-y and a bit more alien. I've tried to go for a design a bit more like an upright salamander crossed with a pangolin. Their bodies are heavily armoured from nose to tail to protect them from the dangerous environment of their homeworld, which has very low gravity and a thin atmosphere, prone to letting in radiation and magnetic storms from space. In this very low gravity, the dragons are actually capable of flight, but on most other worlds, they are so physically inept that they have to drag themselves along on their bellies to even move.

The diagram shows a basic adult crocatiel (a separate but similar species for comparison), a young 'neutral' dragon, and the head of a mature 'queen' dragon.

TLDR etra info-

Their life cycle is a bit like that of termites- Every city or colony has a single breeding queen, and several females in waiting to take her place when she dies. In the vicinity of a mature queen, these females are hormonally blocked from reaching sexual maturity, however, should the colony become too large, the surplus females will leave the area, thus allowing them to grow to full size, mate, and fly away in search of a place to set up a new colony. Mature males act as aides to the females, and those that mate with a queen will stay by her to help her set up her new colony, or simply aid in running things should the colony be pre-existing. Basic 'workers' are gender neutral, but metamorphosis into males or females if the colony is in short supply of either.

These dragons have a long history of interaction with the Crocatiel species. They came across them whilst looking for a suitable planet to start a new colony. At the time the crocatiels were undergoing something similar to the industrial revolution, but had fallen prey to a pandemic disease that was decimating their population. The dragons took pity on them and ended up curing them and sharing their technology. To this day crocatiels hold the dragons in extremely high esteem and will do anything in their power to help them. The two species actually have an extremely distant common ancestor, and their discovery of this only strengthened the species' bond.


_{species © me.}