Targon wrote:I still have some issues regarding the general Aera appearance:
Skin. "The Aera have a smooth, leathery skin not dissimilar in appearance to the bark of a birch tree". Nothing wrong here, but there're a lot of birch kinds. I've seen 3 or 4, for example. Next, is the "ashen-gray leathery skin" "with occasional yellowish patches " a good color scheme for the jungle dwellers? Their skin absolutely has to blur with environment.
I was envisioning a photosynthesis agent which (being something other than chlorophyll) caused vegetation to be predominantly yellow rather than green - hence yellowish patches. Likewise, I saw the bark of tree analogs, the stalks of vines, and other equivalent plants being predominantly in the grey-white range rather than often tending towards shades of brown. I was imagining, that, beneath the canopy, there would be a markedly higher ratio of "wood" tones to "leaf" tones, and colors in general would be muted by shadow - and the leaf tones somewhat lessened by the degree to which sunlight has been choked off by the tree-analogs above. Feel free to shift the description more towards any particular aspect of the interplay between vegetation, stalks, trunks, and light.
as for which birch, I was referring to both the gray and white birches, maybe the silvers too, but not to the yellow birches, which are more bronze-brown colored than anything else. When I think of birches, I tend to think of the gray and white underfoliated plants that were what passed for "greenery" in the courtyard of the apartment complex where I spent the first several years of my life. My apologies for not being then, and really still now, very specific. The key features in my mind were the patchiness of shades between ash-whites and charcoal grays, the smoothness of the bark, and the obvious lenticels - that aside, it doesn't have to be birch. So, a somewhat different looking skin for a very different looking jungle - use your best judgment when it comes to how it would all work out - I'm sure we can reach some sort of reasonable conclusion
Eyes. "The wide, narrow eyes are almost universally a milky green, with wide, narrow pupils, and are largish in size relative to the head. ". Wide, narrow pupuls are not characteristic for creatures living in comprehansive 3D environments.
I'll trust your knowledge of optics far better than mine. Ditch the pupil description.
Mouth. "The hinged portion of the mouth is, in contrast to that of terran species, the upper portion". How does the creature with stocky legs and almost absent neck drink? Turning to the back? And, regarding "The corners of the mouth are usually open, and provide the normal breathing route": poor creature will choke trying to eat something.
Apologies, apologies - I seem to have really missed what I was aiming for with my "almost absent neck" remark. It was intended to be primarily visual, in the same way that it is sometimes joked that Rugby & American Football players and weightlifters "have no necks". Likewise it was to denote that, due to similar girth of both body, head and neck, when not bending, the neck is a rather subdued entity visually.
As to the stockiness of the legs, I was using the "Solidly built; sturdy." meaning of stocky to denote thickness and substance to the legs, which was perhaps not the best diction, as the other meanings inferred from "stocky" cloud the picture and make one think of crocodile legs when instead I was thinking more along the lines of "imposingly sturdy, large and solid" legs which are actually of quite reasonable length, given a shoulder height of 1 to 1.25 meters.
That the jaw is at the top shouldn't affect drinking much - but no one other than I could know that, because I didn't describe the head well enough... The head tapers in thickness more rapidly in the vertical than the horizontal as it goes forward, and a good portion of the mouth is forward of the rest of the head, and while the top of the head at that point, is assuredly not the highpoint of the head, and the frontmost teeth should be near to the vertical halfway point of the head.
As for mouthbreathing and choking - note that this gives "the corners of the mouth" a rather different meaning than I take you to have envisioned. Also, drawing from a lifetime of chronic nasal congestion due to alergies and such - breathing through one's mouth (as I normally do) doesn't interfere with eating as much as one would think - mostly just with the good manners of keeping one's mouth shut while doing so. Likewise, as the corners of the mouth are all the way towards the side of the head, one could imagine that the air passage forks to draw somewhat more directly from these regions and out of the way of the bulk of foodstuffs, the lips (and airways) only actually sealing for drinking liquids.
But this relies on a head entirely unlike the one you previously created, and quite unlike any remotely anthropoid head.
Forebody. "upper body bends up from the rest of the body just past the middle limbs at about a sixty-degree angle". Sadly, this kind of spine build means no Aera can be a powerlifter. LOL. The spine is bent too much to safely support the weight. It's almost like a mad bodybuilder doing a deadlift with barbell far from the legs.
Next, Aera has "forelimbs sprouting from about two thirds of the way up the upper body" but jackS "envisioned a (visually) all-but-absent neck (obviously, there's a neck, but of very limited length and understated differentiation of thickness from the two pieces it joins)". What's in between the shoulders and the head? There's a 1/3 of the upper body left.
In no particular order - there isn't 1/3 of the upper body left - the upper body is quite short, probably on the order of ~36 or so centimeters, and with the arms beginning 2/3 of the way up, the only thing between the shoulders and the head is the neck. The shoulders are in part responsible for the side-side limitations of movement of the head on the neck, but up-down should still be fine.
Yes. The Aera aren't likely to ever win in any sports reliant on upper body strength. That said, the shortness of the upper body segment probably does allow for some interesting stress shifting to skeletal structures immediately preceding the upper body section. There's also no need to assume that they have to follow the same single-vertebrae column design that we do. Feel free to toy with novel designs for skeleton structure and arrangements of tendons & ligaments. Long and short of the situation as I see it - quite weak upper body relative to size of animal and strength of other limbs, but neither would it be so frail as to not be able to pick up and manipulate common objects, as would be necessary for gathering and preparing food and general tool use. So, no caber tossing (well, no Aera in kilts either
) but no cane issued at birth - besides, the Aera bodies don't need to have a design that favors decades of long term durability - prior to advances in medical technology, the Aera would start dying off in droves past the 25-30 year old range, so anything that, even prone to causing wear&tear, might last (even if it has started to degrade) until 25-30 years of age wouldn't have been species detrimental.
Ecology. "The Aera evolved in a nearly continent-wide dense rainforest/jungle." All right, but this kind of animal isn't very well fit for the jungle. I may be wrong of course. But the kind of living described by jackS requires really good gripping capabilities so claws seems to be must. BTW, there's the opposite finger comes handy (like the birds claw).
Indeed, having 6 opposable thumbs (even if two are weaker, and on weaker limbs) should be quite nice for finding purchase. Claws seem not unreasonable, but one imagines them to have become rather vestigial on the fingers+thumbs of the manipulator limbs in comparison to those on the toes and toe-thumbs - claws make it difficult to have good manual dexterity.
Aside from the previous discussion of camoflauge and the eyes, is there anything else that is very anti-jungle in your eyes?
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With any luck, that answered some of your questions, and raised some new ones. Let me know what your next set of worries and suggestions are, and if this was more helpful or more confusing. As I first said.. I'm thinking I'm going to have to do a lot of writing to describe my mental pictures - and probably make lots of changes - I'm not a xeno-biologist