The species for this Fantasy Biology post has been chosen by my supporters on Patreon.
The Wyvern is a lesser known dragon-like creature with no forelegs and a barbed tail. Some legends say the sting is filled with venom, some say it has a venomous bite and some say it breathes fire.
How refreshing to have a quadruped instead of a hexaped to talk about.
A wyvern is basically, at its core, a funny looking bird. It’s got a different head, and the wind arangement is more bat-like than truly bird-like, and the stinging tail is different, but the core they have the same basic structure as a bird.
It would also be quite reasonable to create wyverns with feathered wings. Maybe a little cockatoo crest for good measure.
Whether the wyvern has bat-like or bird-like wings makes little difference to it from a structural standpoint. The pattern the beast flaps in will change, but either way will work.
(Image source)
A venomous bite is no huge stretch of biology, other reptiles have accomplished that very well. Between the Komodo dragon’s bite with venom glands in the lower jaw, to highly specialized snakes, you have lots of different, real world examples to draw from for the wyvern.
The stinging tail is a little more complicated. Though often pictured as a scorpion-like stinger, this presents some biological difficulties.
A scorpion is an arthropod and an arachnid. It has an exoskeleton with squishy inside bits. The rest of the wyvern is basically a very strange bird, with all its squishy bits on the outside wrapped around an endoskeleton. Suddenly switching from an endoskeleton to an exoskeleton is an extremely challenging piece of anatomy to pull off. It males more sense to have anatomy that only resembles a scorpcion stinger, but isn’t actually all that similar too it.
Hmm, if only there was a real world example of a species, ideally a reptile, that has a tail that ends in a hard, fleshless knob, ideally something kind of hollow...
... that will do nicely.
Modelling the anatomy of a wyvern tail after the rattlesnake instead of a scorpion makes much more sense. You’re already dealing with a reptile, you don’t need to switch from endoskeleton to exoskeleton and the scorpion has it’s anus located at the base of its stinger (highly inconvenient). All that has to happen is the shape of the rattle, which is made up of keratin, needs to change into something more hypodermic
Venom glands are not that big of a deal. We know reptiles do venom very well, and our friends the amphibians do too. It’s not unbelievable to coat a stinger in secretory venomous skin like the poison dart frog, or to just have a simple venom gland activated by pressure.
So with these points in mind, I offer these variants on the wyvern:
Tropical Rainforest: These wyverns vary in size from the size of house cats to the size of jaguars. They have feathered crests used to expand their body language, and often congregate in semi-social flocks. The underside of their wings are very brightly colored, with pattern varying by age and species. They rarely touch the ground, often clinging to broad tree trunks with their talons and the claws on their wings, waiting to hunt passing birds and monkeys.
Canyon and cliffs: This rather plain looking wyvern variant spends most of its time lurking as high as possible in the canyon wall, waiting for prey below. It prefers to strike prey already precariously perched on cliff walls to use the resulting fall to its advantage. When it has glided down to feed, it will spend the rest of the day finding its way back up the cliffs to roost.
Micro: Barely bigger than a sparrow, often feeding on similar sized birds and large moths, these miniature wyverns adapted well to human settlements, often taking up residence in the roof of taller buildings. Their population has expanded with this increased habitat available to them in human cities, and a healthy population of rodents down below. Slightly concerning is the species emerging trend of social behavior with such a regular food supply (including people feeding them in the park), and there are reports of some flocks working together to take down larger prey.
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