i wonder if someone here who knows a bit more about the art history of dragons can help me out with this --
what irl animal are these fin/frill type things based on? it doesn't quite match any lizard frills or fins i've found, they're usually covered in scales and have much denser spines (see 4th image). are they just an artistic flourish that hundreds of fantasy artists have converged on?
dragon fin update: apparently i was tunnel-visioning on lizards. turns out fish can have pretty rad fins
fish are heckin cool, yo
fish are cool, cuz like. they're totally different from any of the land boys. anything amphibians onward has 4 legs or leg-derived things (wings), and bugs are cool but you kinda get the gist of em after the first hundred thousand
but fish! fish can diverge wildly from your standard animal cookie cutter. want 18 fins? have we got a fish for you. want a little glow in your life? got fish for daaaays. were you lookin for a little something completely divergent from most animalia entirely? got you covered fam
@chr it's because fish should be subdivided similarly to how we subdivide land animals into birds/reptiles/mammals/insects/etc
they have lots of variety, but we just call them all.... fish
@A_Staccato_Semibreve @lizardsquid @chr I mean, bony fish and tetrapods (land vertebrates) are more closely related than bony fish are to cartilaginous fish. So by cladistics, you, and I, and cats are technically fish (or else, sharks are not fish).
@A_Staccato_Semibreve @lizardsquid @chr It's kind of like, either birds are reptiles, or there's no such thing as reptiles. (I lean towards sharks are not fish and there's no such thing as reptiles, but hey.)
@lizardsquid yeah there's just a shitton of morphological diversity that you barely ever see outside of an aquarium, it's incredible
@lizardsquid @chr IIRC the field biology has given up on fish as a classification; What is or isn't called a fish is so hopelessly haphazard that you couldn't really give it meaning in the tree of life without pretty much every animal in those other categories being a fish as well.
@chr As a bonus, they're also delicious!
@chr a skeleton made entirely of cartilage? Get over here
@chr FUCK YEAH! UNDERWATER THINGS!
@chr what about cephalopods, molluscs, corals, sponges and crustaceans of several orders?
@troubleMoney @Efi i'm lumping them under the umbrella term of "fish" although strictly speaking "sea creatures" might be a more inclusive term
@chr want to camouflage yourself as a chunk of seaweed? and also be a dragon?
we’ve got seadragons for that too!
@chr weedy seadragons are a little less flashy, but they’re still great floaty boys.
@chr More sci-fi artists etc need to look underwater for inspiration for alien life tbh