YES YES YES!!!! OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE SOMEBODY ELSE HEADCANONS PANGOLIN CARDASSIANS YESSSSSSSSSSSS
let me go ahead and tack on some of my thoughts to this: this is EXACTLY my headcanon and has been for some time. there’s pretty abundant evidence that cardassians – though very lizard-like – are actually mammalian. disregarding the fact that tng’s “the chase” points to a common origin for all humanoid life in the star trek universe (which would infer that - at the very least - humans, klingons, cardassians, and romulans have a common ancestry, which makes their status as mammals pretty inarguable), interspecies breeding between cardassians and other humanoid species (humans and bajorans) proves it. they also clearly have body hair on their head and face, which no reptilian species would exhibit. cardassian “scales” are likely made of keratin, like your fingernails are.
my theory has always been that cardassians are monotremes – mammals that, like the echidna and platypus, lay eggs, but also nurse their young, a theory that would seem to be supported by the fact that cardassian females appear to have mammaries. (true reptiles would never have these.) like earth-bound monotremes, cardassians have a low metabolic rate which leads to them having a lower internal body temperature than other mammals, and evolved in extreme isolation from other mammals, which lead to them never making the placental evolutionary crossover. cardassians even have passive electroreception like the platypus. (that’s what their forehead spoon – or “hunter’s eye” – does!)
so how do i account for the fact that cardassians clearly can’t regulate their own body temperature? that’s a pretty standard mammalian trait. well, as it turns out, there is an earth mammal that can’t regulate it’s own body temperature: the mole rat.Â
like cardassians, mole rats need to be kept at around 34°C in order to survive. mole rats appear to have lost their ability to regulate their own body temp through generations of living underground, where the temperature is much hotter and less variable than it is aboveground. my theory is that cardassians are similar: since their desert planet is punishingly hot all the time, they began to lose the ability to regulate their own body temp, since overheating was a much bigger liability than being too cold. cardassians have been shown to have a much greater ability to endure extreme heat than other mammals – i’m pretty sure that this is why.
in summation, cardassians are almost definitely mammals, they’re just the WEIRDEST FUCKIN MAMMALS IN THE GALAXY.Â
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