>>51679781

>Candleflies
Luminescent flying insects that lay their eggs in dead flesh, giving their larvae ample food supply when they hatch. Candleflies and their larvae produce a small amount of necromantic energy, not enough to raise anything on their own but well-known to reanimate a corpse in a colony given enough time to fully develop.
The mature flies do not usually stray far from the host corpse, instead breeding in and consuming its rotting flesh until the undead kills another or strays across another corpse whereupon the mature flies will migrate and form a new colony.
Cultures in the regions Candleflies are found consider it especially important to bury or incinerate their dead, as large-scale infestations can quickly lead to undead uprisings, blights upon the land and even attract liches and necromancers.

>>51679785

> Ash Moth
This rather hideous moth shares certain similarities to the legendary phoenix. Seemingly covered in lumpy ash, this moth is known to travel miles after maturity seeking out sources of open flame. Once found, these creatures throw themselves into the fire, experiencing a brilliant transformation whereupon they are more pleasantly called Flame Butterflies. Their smoldering form is beautiful to behold but lasts little more than a few hours before they produce their eggs and die.

>>51679798

Gotcharock
A small mysterious creature that lives under rocks. No one has ever actually seen a Gotcharock, aside from two long antennae, two bulging blue eyes and long spindly arms with tiny but strong fingers.
The only known behavior of this strange creature is to either grab or pinch things.

>>51679781
What happens if you smoke them?

>>51679812

>Dire Kiwi
This magical experiment gone wrong is roughly six meters tall when standing, and weighing almost a ton. Otherwise, it is a perfectly normal Kiwi in diet, appearance and temperament

>>51679815
it creates microfractures in all your bones. After healing your bones are stronger and studier.

>>51679781
>The Swamp Salamander
Everyone who hears the word salamander think "Oh, those little amphibians that look cute?". WRONG. In this case we're talking about the cousin of the giant fire salamander. The Swamp Salamander, though smaller than the literally hot-blooded mass of rage and fire that is its cousin, is still big enough to kill and eat an adult.

Living in the deepest parts of the swamps, this specimen ambushes its prey by attacking from the water and biting into it. Not only is it like the more traditional water-dwelling salamanders, it is capable of producing a corrosive saliva. This saliva burns nearly as much as a troll's stomach acid, and even if the prey somehow manages to escape, the colossal pain caused by the burns will sooner or later kill it. And if not the pain, then the immediate blood loss caused by dissolving tissue (and to that extent veins) will finish the job.

Needless to say, mages who cannot afford troll acid or cannot get it anywhere have to rely on adventurers to get a swamp salamander's saliva.

>>51679781
>Balloon Frogs
Like many frogs, they inflate their throat pouches in order to dissuade predators with an apparent increase of size. Unlike your typical frog, though, baloon frogs can actually inflate enough to drift on the breeze, gliding sedately through the swamp. On a hot day, they can get enough lift to stay up for hours, which they use to migrate.

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Bump.

>>51679781
I somehow expected spiders that do crack

>>51679781
>walmartabeest
This strange, blob like creature that covers itself in red and blue patterns and eagle feathers inhabits swamps, grasslands, and wooded hills, yodeling and making odd banjo like noises during mating season. At higher levels they gain fireball spells and donkey carts for improved firepower and mobility.

Crackspiders are the spiders who take crack

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>>51680092
>walking along a road outside one day
>off to do a quest for the power of good or something like that for the local lord
>see a shadow pass over, then another
>somewhat round with things sticking out
>look up
>frogs, hundreds of them migrating gently on the breeze
>mfw

> Walking Pits
A walking pit is a magical creature close in appearance to a frog crossed with a bulldog. These bizarre creatures naturally produce a dimensional storage pocket inside of their gullet similar to a bag of holding or a portable hole. Never content to sit on an empty stomach, these creatures eat anything they can get their mouth around, seemingly showing no preference between traditionally edible or inedible matter.

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I find many actual living or extinct creatures a lot more interesting that most fantastical ones, as fantasy critters have to stick to what the author can imagine (which usually boild down to "it's [one animal], but with the head of [another animal]" or variant thereof), while nature has no such limitations, producing truly outlandish things like Azdarkhid pterosaurs or all of those freaky deep sea fish.

>>51684258
where's the new humankind thread?

>>51679785
I read that as canadians at first.

>>51691498
I think your opinion of fictional creatures and their creators is far too low, but I feel you. Strange and horrible are old hat for the natural world.

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>>51692003
It's not that there aren't interesting or original fictional critters, but the "animal A with bodyparts from animal B" is more common than wholly alien ideas. Even in science fiction, "human but with weird forhead" or "animal but bigger/weird coloured/bipedal" is the standard for alien life.

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Mind you, I am biased since I'm a huge biology/palaeontology nerd (to this day I regret not going to study marine biology like I always wanted as a kid), so I prefer actual animals over fantastic ones for actually existing/having existed. I've done threads where I provide random trivia about deep sea fish semi-regularly, but then I ran out of new material so I probably won't be doing that for the for the foreseeable future. Instead, I've lately I've been taking said trivia and illustrating it with pictures of horrible deep sea mermaids, because that's apparently something I do nowadays.

Also, bump because despite what I wrote I want to see what interesting fantays critters people can come up with.

>>51679781
> Crack Spiders
>animate crack rocks
>successful attacks against enemies dose them with crack
>the more they get damaged the higher they get and the closer to over dose
>however it is a gamble as there is a sweet spot in the number of doses, somewhere between somewhat high and over dose, where the target gains immunity to pain, and is capable of unnatural feats of perception and athleticism

>Oculemurs

>Standing at around 3 feet high at maturity, these small monkey-like creatures possess remarkable magical properties.
>While herbivorous and peaceful, several tribes has been hunted to extinction for their eyes and hands, which are known to be able to pierce illusion and deflect corporeal magic.
>The eyes are often embedded in thin hoods, and the hands mounted on parrying shields.
>Legends claim that these properties came about thanks to generations of escaped magical test subjects.

>>51692741
Cute. You got more of these?

>>51688103
>They're all linked via the extradimensional space inside their digestive tract. Crawl down the throat of one and find a massive maze of tubing leading to the throats of all other Walking Pits everywhere.

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>>51693458
I've made two others (Stomiiformes, i.e. dragonfish&friends and black swallower), and intent to do at least one more (gulper/pelican eel, as soon as I fugure how the hell to translate the main notable feature of the fish, the weird as fuck head, into a humanoid form). Also a bunch of random comics about deep sea roleplaying game (which people have requested more of, but I haven't gotten any good ideas yet).

Not wanting to derail thread for poor quality doodles, so if you want to see them you can go to my DA page (http://elder-thing.deviantart.com/gallery/61982319/Random-Doodles) where I got them (and other stuff I've done for drawthreads) posted.

>>51692741
>>51694008
Futa mermaid girls? /tg/ will like this.

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>>51694180
I don't do futa, or anything really explicit really (everybody's got a line drawn somewhere, and that's mine). Although if I do a page with trivia for all the deep sea fish I don't have enough material to make a full page each, I should probably mention tha the tripodfish is hermaphroditic (it's even capable of self-fertilization. Also, it has long fins that are normally flexible but can be hardened to use as a tripod to prop the fish above the ocean floor. Deep sea critters are weird).

>>51679829
Wouldn't these traits make it a nice form of cattle?

Mate do you know anything about regular kiwis? They do not tolerate anyone touching or getting to close to them and have enough strength in their legs to break yours, now imagine scaling all that up.

>>51695192
Fuck seriously?

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>>51695192
>>51696605
I'm fairly certain you're mixed up and thinking about Emus. There's a world of difference.

>>51696699
No I'm talking about Kiwis admittedly only the biggest species actually have the leg strength to potentially break yours and while they don't tolerate people they generally have a live and let live sort of attitude.
Emus will fuck you up.

>Stony Toaddrake
>A large toad like dragon subspecies that devours rock using it's large diamond hard maw
>Curiously, they cannot digest and do not like the taste of metals and gems, and regurgitate them back up
>stony toad drakes are valued by Dwarves.

>>51692741
Wait, are you the author of "Lord Nomic's Nautical Compendium"?

I'm broadly sympathetic to your position, being PhD student in paleobiology with a long background in biology, but I have to say that pic related seriously challenged my actual-animal bias.

(I'm betting /tg/ hates it.)

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>>51698529
And of course I forget the image.

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>>51687907
>It eats hive fleets.

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>>51700954
>Fantasy religion claiming that god created the world as bait to attract tasty eldritch abominations.

>>51698529
>>51698546

Yes, Lord Nomic is Lord Nomic. Also, you've got my interest. What's that about?

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>paralyzed shitposting liches

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Let me post fucked up animals that truly existed.

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>>51707272
Biology nerds are welcome to cry impotently in the corner because I called them "fucked up"

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>>51707284
This motherfucker was huge. It could fuck your shit up if you met it.

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>>51707298
I bet that's not how you imagine a whale.

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>>51707209
>He can't type, and gets stuck on /r9k/ and /pol/ for a thousand years
>He becomes the greatest shitposter and meme magician of all time
>By merely thinking of a greentext, it becomes real.
The autism arcanist cometh.

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>>51707306
Make way for the buzzsaw shark

>>51707347
Y'all are just jealous that you can't do that.

>>51707329

Wait, what if this guy is the reason for meme magic becoming real?

>>51707347
>A shark with a buzzsaw for a jaw

To what end?

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>>51707347
It took ages for scentists to finally figure how the hell that tooth-whorl was supposed to work (that picture isn't fully accurate, although at least it has it in the right jaw).

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>>51707428
OH SHIT

>>51707444
so which one is the favored interpretation now?

>>51707464
We now know with reasonable certainity that the whorls was in the lower jaw. >>51707347
is mostly accurate, although I don't think it should protrude that much (most of the whorl would be hidden by soft tissue).

>>51707435
Early installment weirdness in the shark evolutionary tree. While modern sharks replace worn-out teeth by having old teeth fall off and new ones grow in their place, by the time Helicoprion lived that trait hadn't evolved yet. The tooth-whorl was one evolutionary solution to the problem, where the shark's jaw just grew in a spiral shape, producing new teeth as it grew, with the older, worn-out teeth being left on the inside of the spiral and embedded into the jaw tissue.
Not very practical, which which is why you don't see a system like that in modern sharks (or any other animal for the matter), but at this point evolution hadn't really gotten a hang on how to shark (jawed fish in general were a pretty new thing).

>>51707209
>>51707329
>>51707428
>>51707459
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donovan%27s_Brain

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>>51679785
This idea is pretty cool, love how it explains a "natural" undead uprising

>>51679785

Stealing this

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>>51704227
It is a very weird sort of monster manual. I shall try to provide some short summaries of a few of the creatures in it, but no such summary can do the actual entries themselves justice, and all of them are, in a way, spoilers.

>Ambassadors from the deep sea which collect spines (as in vertebral columns), particularly deformed ones, for obscure reasons. This is their official business, but they have a weakness for permanent sources of light— gentle light, not bright light.

>Gaseous golems of stupidity, created as byproducts of a magical rite intended to excise the idiocy from human minds.

>Giant intelligent snakes whose mouths contain innumerable hands instead of teeth. Mature ones are typically phenomenally skilled artisans, and, while wearing their pseudoteeth of armaments, deadly combatants.

>Masked, civil creatures resembling enormous nematodes who collect art and information. The world they hail from is actually a person's skin, and they must continuously maintain the spell or refrain that keeps them here in the backs of their minds, lest they return to their place of origin.

>Mouse-sized intelligent spiders that sleep in your pocket and catch stray thoughts and memories in their webs. They wrap them up in cocoons and offer them to you to eat, and are quite put out if you refuse.

>Stealthy, clever bird-things whose hatchlings can be used as perfect lockpicks. The adults are so stealthy that they are almost totally unknown; it is not entirely clear that they exist. (Obviously, the hatchlings cannot be kept for long, as they will eventually escape from any attempt at confinement.)

>Creatures whose bites cause no pain and very little bleeding. Any wound they inflict is denied by the victim or rationalized away. It is entirely possible to be eaten alive by them without acknowledging it, although the process would be a slow one.

This is an entry, but not one of the really good ones.

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>>51710902
My favorite:

>A creature which is very fast, endlessly distractible, and always behind schedule. It claims to be a scientist, and confiscates spells and spellbooks (ostensibly for the good of their possessors). It translates these spells into equations, bakes the equations into little men, and eats the little men. It uses a "holographic flame" breath weapon, which breaks things into copies of themselves, and claims that this flame is not magical, but rather a technique that anyone could learn, with sufficient time and practice.

Posting more sharovipteryx.

>>51679781
>doesn't know wood can split