so i was thinking about some Speculative Biology Stuff and i have an idea for my AU saga thingy—i love @ totallyottie99’s illustrations and i really like the idea of the goblins as owl-like beings, but i was thinking that maybe in my AU i could just have them resemble birds in general. like, any bird that isn’t an owl, that is. i want to think that the owl thing is something exclusive to the royal lineage—i was thinking that in this AU the owl king could be a great horned owl instead of a barn owl, and skubbin could look more like his father for sure.
as a matter of fact, i’m not even fully sure i want them to resemble, like, modern birds. we’ve seen and heard of a few goblins that have wings and can fly, but part of me really REALLY wants to exercise my paleontology muscles here and base the vast majority of them off of theropod and ornithopod dinosaurs. most of them will have feathers, of course, and all of them will be warm-blooded; but the ones who can fly, like archaeopteryx or aurornis once were, are outliers. most of my AU goblins will have dinosaurian bodies but will have feathers influenced by modern birds—that is, they’ll have things like crests and flashy mating colors and whatnot
i’m also thinking that many of them will maintain mammalian features like muzzles and whiskers and maybe claws and stuff, possibly even fur—but like, they’ll still very much be dinosaurian in appearance, i think
