WTF?! None of these things actually exist in the fossil record! No kidding, these critters are all from my fantasy world.
For those of you who already know the story of how a Libyan monitor lizard was embellished into a fire-breathing winged monster by medieval artists, you've probably already figured out that this post has nothing to do with that. A long time ago, I tried to reconcile how a classic European dragon (two wings, four legs) could possibly exist. I came to the conclusion that it would either have to be created via intensive genetic engineering far beyond anything science is capable of today (but it's getting there, read up on homeobox genes if you don't believe me), or it would have to have evolved on a planet that has a hexapod vertebrate paradigm, instead of a tetrapod paradigm as we have on Earth. For the complete story, check out my WordPress post on the subject:
https://kjworldsong.wordpress.com/2018/12/14/fictional-phylogeny-part-1-how-to-create-an-alien-ecosystem/
There are links to relevant past and future posts there as well. If you don't feel like reading all that stuff, here are two pictures from the above post:
These are both so far beneath even my low standards for 2D art that they ought to be buried in the planet's mantle. Therefore, I decided to completely re-draw them. I'm not finished, but here's a start:
I had to mess with it quite a bit to get the names alone to fit. However, I took all the curved lines, put them together, and started playing around with them:
This became an alternative design:
Green circles are undifferentiated dinosaurs, red circles are dragons, and the blue circle is the clade of birds. Most of these have red outlines, indicating that they're extinct, while only the four circles with black outlines still have living specimens by the time that The Nine Empires takes place.
The reason I decided to share this stuff (other than trying to meet my new goal of one post every day) is because I set out to create a phylogeny for my fictional world, starting at the beginning and figuring out from there what sort of animals would arise. I intended to make dragons, but what I came up with were even weirder, like six-legged dog-lizards, scorpion-crocodiles, and even critters that look like Tyranids. You'll get to see them soon.