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Worldbuilding | Fantasy | Writing
How I Developed My Lizard People
As a biologist, I love to use real-world biology to create animals, plants, people, and monster species for my speculative fiction stories and roleplaying games. I used my knowledge of biology to develop a sapient humanoid species of lizard people called Lacernids for the setting of my hybrid fantasy/science fiction novel. The major inspiration that started this process was a documentary I watched several years ago about iguanas and other lizards that colonize remote tropical islands.
Parthenogenesis
I chose to start with parthenogenesis as a means of reproduction for the Lacernids. For those unfamiliar with this term, parthenogenesis is the ability of some species of reptiles, amphibians, plants, insects, birds, and sharks to produce offspring without fertilization from a male partner. The prevalence of parthenogenesis in species like Komodo dragons is a point of interest today, especially for zoologists working with endangered species.
Parthenogenesis occurs in several ways depending on the genetics of the animal. For the Lacernids, I chose a form of facultative parthenogenesis that results in genetically identical clones in the second and later generations due to segregation and duplication of individual chromosomes. In simple terms, this…
