I Have An Important Question About Possible Chicken-Dragons!

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Hey guys! Got a worldbuilding question for you.

So while the Obligatory Giant Young Adult Fantasy Epic languishes in despair of finding an agent, it's mostly ready to be looked at--probably it could use an editor to point out things I've missed, but I've got it pretty polished. But I can't resist making a few tweaks while I wait, and there's one tweak that isn't so important for the actual book, but for the world.

The OGYAFE is portal fiction because, hey, I like portal fiction, but I'm trying to make OGYAFEland as independent as possible anyway. I want there to be a balance between their world and ours--some things are better there, others here. This extends to people, cultures, technology, and ecology and geography and so forth.

But one thing that's pretty darn fun about OGYAFEland is the dragons.

I really like the idea of dragons as a biological clade--not just a species. Not even a few varieties of intelligent creatures, like in the Dragonology books or similar pretend field guides. I'm thinking of them as but a whole dang taxonomic group distinct from reptiles, birds, and mammals--and with as much diversity, because dragons have been speciating just like all the other animals have. In OGYAFEland, dragons (with the exception of one notable species) are as commonplace, and as varied, as birds.

Which got me wondering.

Should OGYAFEland even HAVE birds?

I admit to going back and forth on this. It wouldn't take much to change it around in the story--a couple of place names would have to be changed, and one character's feathers (don't ask) would have to be specified to look like "dragonfeathers" (a modified scale that many dragon species have evolved--which is more or less how feathers work anyway), but that shouldn't be hard. And I like that our world would then have a biological clade completely foreign to OGYAFEland. Plus, while I'm not going for a one-to-one correlation between bird and dragon species, it's really fun to have them fill similar ecological niches that have the displaced characters from our world trying to make analogies and referring to "chickendragons" and "hawkdragons" and "hummingdragons" and "penguindragons."

But ... to be honest, I'd sort of miss birds.

I guess the whole idea is to have something be better in our world. But I wanted some other input. What do you guys think?

Comments

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

It's hard to imagine a world without birds, or something similar. It's such a huge niche that you'd expect something to fill it. Of course, dragons, being flighted, could fill it, and if they're anything like the hexapodal, armor-scaled, fanged nightmares of traditional fantasy, they could fill it so well that birds might never arise. Provided that at least some of them are also herbivorous.

But the really important question, I think, is what did the dragons evolve from? Dinosaurs? If so, they could be an alternative path to birds that developed at the same time, with the two groups perpetually competing against each other, somewhat hampering the evolutionary diversity of each. Perhaps all dragons are beast and insect eaters, while birds are seed and fruit eaters. Perhaps it's dragons that prey on birds rather than hawks and falcons. Perhaps dragons circle and seek roadkill rather than vultures.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I mention this in another comment, but dragons aren't actually native even to OGYAFEland. Their ancestors actually started out in another world entirely, but they found their way to this particular world millions o years ago--possibly just in time to battle birds for dominance. The question of whether either group completely won is kinda what I'm looking at here.

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

But that still leaves the question of what they evolved from- or at least, for story significance, what niche they filled originally. That would determine what they were able to do when they crossed over, and how effectively they were able to displace original wildlife.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

True! That's part of what I'm working on.

The question of how effectively they could displace original species is kind of what I'm considering right now.