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Description
My take on the Taronyu, a species of extraterrestrial from the SCP Foundation's Ad Astra Per Aspera canon.

This one was a toughie. I wanted to do the species justice, but I didn't want it to be a rubber forehead alien. Trying to make an evolutionarily sound extraterrestrial humanoid is notoriously difficult because designing a humanoid without using a human as a basis can be very hard. A humanoid species from another planet would evolve from different phylogenetic origins and principles, and it's most likely that none of them would look human even with a roughly human-powered shape. Chances are that all of them will have muscle groups and skeletal structures very dissimilar to ours. With that in mind, I took a LOT of liberties in my take, redesigning various aspects of the Taronyu physiology to make them more explicitly alien. I wanted their resemblance to humans to be purely vague and a grand cosmic coincidence. For example, I completely altered how their shoulders work. Rather than their arms being placed at the top of the ribcage just below the neck, their arms are situated midway down the ribcage due to the way their shoulder girdle evolved. This alien shoulder anatomy also influenced how their upper body muscles evolved, with analogues to pectoral and shoulder muscles that do not resemble anything seen on earth. They evolved their sense of smell differently from Earth organisms as well. Rather than having a nose that connects directly to their respiratory system (their actual nostrils are just above their first pair of ribs), they possess a retractable scent organ in place of it. This organ is analogous to (as well as strongly resembling) the forked tongues of various squamates, and periodically flicks in and out as the Taronyu smells the air. Due to how Taronyu sexual dimorphism works, I decided to make them look rather androgynous. Their bodies lack secondary sex characteristics, and their rather yonic-looking gonophore helps add an extra sense of confusion and questionability as to how their reproduction works exactly. I could definitely believe that their appearances and body proportions would vary slightly depending on the sex, but none of the variations among the sexes would register anything male or female to us. Them having six sexes would confuse us, but us having only two sexes would probably confuse them just as much.

The Taronyu were created by NatVoltaic.

Description
My take on the Taronyu, a species of extraterrestrial from the SCP Foundation's Ad Astra Per Aspera canon.

This one was a toughie. I wanted to do the species justice, but I didn't want it to be a rubber forehead alien. Trying to make an evolutionarily sound extraterrestrial humanoid is notoriously difficult because designing a humanoid without using a human as a basis can be very hard. A humanoid species from another planet would evolve from different phylogenetic origins and principles, and it's most likely that none of them would look human even with a roughly human-powered shape. Chances are that all of them will have muscle groups and skeletal structures very dissimilar to ours. With that in mind, I took a LOT of liberties in my take, redesigning various aspects of the Taronyu physiology to make them more explicitly alien. I wanted their resemblance to humans to be purely vague and a grand cosmic coincidence. For example, I completely altered how their shoulders work. Rather than their arms being placed at the top of the ribcage just below the neck, their arms are situated midway down the ribcage due to the way their shoulder girdle evolved. This alien shoulder anatomy also influenced how their upper body muscles evolved, with analogues to pectoral and shoulder muscles that do not resemble anything seen on earth. They evolved their sense of smell differently from Earth organisms as well. Rather than having a nose that connects directly to their respiratory system (their actual nostrils are just above their first pair of ribs), they possess a retractable scent organ in place of it. This organ is analogous to (as well as strongly resembling) the forked tongues of various squamates, and periodically flicks in and out as the Taronyu smells the air. Due to how Taronyu sexual dimorphism works, I decided to make them look rather androgynous. Their bodies lack secondary sex characteristics, and their rather yonic-looking gonophore helps add an extra sense of confusion and questionability as to how their reproduction works exactly. I could definitely believe that their appearances and body proportions would vary slightly depending on the sex, but none of the variations among the sexes would register anything male or female to us. Them having six sexes would confuse us, but us having only two sexes would probably confuse them just as much.

The Taronyu were created by NatVoltaic.