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Description

Over the past year I've been thinking up ideas on psuedo-limbs to create dragons or other hexapodal creature designs in a semi-serious spec evo scenario. I've focused primarily on the limbs specifically rather than ancestry, the point of this project is to create a blueprint that I or other people can throw onto a prefered clade to create dragons rather than modify an existing named clade. This allows for other settings with dragons to have a lot more wiggle room and can change ancestry depending on what aesthetic you want. This is meant to be reused and thrown into alternate scenarios and is more of a thought exercise I'm hoping I inspire other psuedo limb spec the same way snaiad inspired a lot of other people's xeno projects. All 3 of these are seperate unreleated lineages that do not exist in the same "canon". Some of these hypotheticals might get alternated or changed.

My first one was a non specific aquatic animal having polydactyl forelimbs similar to Hupehsuchians. They traveled far off coast for hunting but occasionally crawled up on rocks for extra safety and dragged about on land bearing weight on their innermost digits. They were gradually pushed back onto the coasts and later adapted their weight bearing digits were used for climbing/hooking to bark while their drepanosaur like metacarpals pushed the surplus digits into a wing for flying between trees but travelling on ground when the trees in your area end up getting super sparse with giant webbed digits can be clumsy and make you vulnerable to predation so they pushed back the ulna to allow the wings to fold up more conveniently for easier ground walking while supporting an even larger wingspan Image.

Second take was dermal armor row became vestigial as a colugo like gliding animal was coming into shape and those rows of osteoderms formed into a sorta segmented gliding lizard like ray wing structure and due to the earlier wings pointing down and making first contact when landing onto surfaces they became segmented to redistribute shock Imagesp

Most recent one is basically a rework of last year's polydactyls with much the of the broader strokes being the same but the main kicker being a polydactyl sea animal coming into the trees but this time immediately becoming a powered quadrupedal flyer (wyverns just stop here), later lineages drop back to the ground and find success in traversing a savannah like environment climbing up trees to snag whatever's living in there while being away from bigger preds. Their lineage was under extreme stresses to adapt to a new more speedy lifestyle so their wing digits fused parallel to get out of the way and when introduced to heavily forested regions again while retaining their tree climbing habits they re-evolved flight from their leftover digit tips with folding for convenient ground dwelling and weight bearing when landing

Description

Over the past year I've been thinking up ideas on psuedo-limbs to create dragons or other hexapodal creature designs in a semi-serious spec evo scenario. I've focused primarily on the limbs specifically rather than ancestry, the point of this project is to create a blueprint that I or other people can throw onto a prefered clade to create dragons rather than modify an existing named clade. This allows for other settings with dragons to have a lot more wiggle room and can change ancestry depending on what aesthetic you want. This is meant to be reused and thrown into alternate scenarios and is more of a thought exercise I'm hoping I inspire other psuedo limb spec the same way snaiad inspired a lot of other people's xeno projects. All 3 of these are seperate unreleated lineages that do not exist in the same "canon". Some of these hypotheticals might get alternated or changed.

My first one was a non specific aquatic animal having polydactyl forelimbs similar to Hupehsuchians. They traveled far off coast for hunting but occasionally crawled up on rocks for extra safety and dragged about on land bearing weight on their innermost digits. They were gradually pushed back onto the coasts and later adapted their weight bearing digits were used for climbing/hooking to bark while their drepanosaur like metacarpals pushed the surplus digits into a wing for flying between trees but travelling on ground when the trees in your area end up getting super sparse with giant webbed digits can be clumsy and make you vulnerable to predation so they pushed back the ulna to allow the wings to fold up more conveniently for easier ground walking while supporting an even larger wingspan Image.

Second take was dermal armor row became vestigial as a colugo like gliding animal was coming into shape and those rows of osteoderms formed into a sorta segmented gliding lizard like ray wing structure and due to the earlier wings pointing down and making first contact when landing onto surfaces they became segmented to redistribute shock Imagesp

Most recent one is basically a rework of last year's polydactyls with much the of the broader strokes being the same but the main kicker being a polydactyl sea animal coming into the trees but this time immediately becoming a powered quadrupedal flyer (wyverns just stop here), later lineages drop back to the ground and find success in traversing a savannah like environment climbing up trees to snag whatever's living in there while being away from bigger preds. Their lineage was under extreme stresses to adapt to a new more speedy lifestyle so their wing digits fused parallel to get out of the way and when introduced to heavily forested regions again while retaining their tree climbing habits they re-evolved flight from their leftover digit tips with folding for convenient ground dwelling and weight bearing when landing