Star Wars is, without a doubt, one of the most famous fantasy sagas in the history of cinema. So much so, that it has its own day of tribute, May 4, ‘May the fourth’, which they would say in English, very similar in pronunciation to the first part of the phrase ‘may the Force be with you ‘ , or ‘ May the Force be with you’.
In the fictional universe of George Lucas we find a large number of sociopolitical, economic and even philosophical analogies , to the point that ‘the Force’ —thus, with a capital letter— is considered a metaphysical and omnipresent entity of which the Jedi are its adepts, that they venerate in a practically religious way.
Of course, as a good work of fantasy, it is not restricted to the laws of physics in the real world , and there are beings with completely supernatural abilities, or even organisms from which such abilities emanate, called ‘midi-chlorians’ , which would be somehow analogous to real-world mitochondria : endosymbiotic organisms that give cells a capability they wouldn’t have without them—the Force, in the fictional midi-chlorians, cellular respiration in the mitochondria.
However, and always taking into account the fictional universe, many of the creatures that we find in the saga are reflected in real creatures, or maintain a certain credibility. Beings that present a mundane biology and nothing supernatural , that could have existed in the real world and that, in an exercise of speculation, based on real scientific knowledge, we could frame in some group of modern or prehistoric animals.
porg
First appearing in Episode VIII, porgs are a species of beakless bird , with short wings, webbed feet, and completely covered in dense feathers. They have some vocal ability.
That porgs are quite plausible creatures is no coincidence. While shooting on the rugged Irish island of Skelling Michael , the film crew encountered a large number of Atlantic Puffins , a relatively common bird species off the coasts of Europe, Greenland and Canada, closely associated with the marine environment and presenting a conspicuous red, yellow and black bill.
They couldn’t just kick the animals out, nor digitally remove the animals one by one. So they decided to create these small, flightless birds, do a simple edit of the puffins in long shots, and include them as an integral part of the story, starring in various scenes, mixing puppetry with CGI.
However, while the idea stems from puffins, the porg design has a hodgepodge of traits from different animals , including bats, flying squirrels, seals, otters, beavers, and most notably, penguins.
Although no beakless bird currently exists , in evolutionary terms, it is not impossible. In swifts we find a surprisingly large mouth for its size, but a tiny beak. In the same way that birds of the past had teeth and evolutionarily lost them, there is nothing that could prevent the same thing from happening if the beak turned out to be an evolutionary inconvenience —and the right mutations occurred in the population to make it disappear.
In fact, we know that the morphology of the beak of birds presents an enormous morphological variability, and has an evolutionary relationship with many variables , especially in mechanical terms, and not only in feeding, as was thought until recently.
Tauntaun
A more difficult animal to reconcile with terrestrial biology would be the tauntaun . The mythical animal that, in Episode V, Han Solo uses to save Luke from hypothermia by cutting him open and using him as a sleeping bag.
The anatomical aspect of the animal invites us to think of a reptile . The hind legs, which descend vertically from the hips, covered with scales and with four fingers ending in claws, as well as the long and muscular tail, evoke some type of dinosaur. But it is completely covered in fur, like mammals , and the head and horns are reminiscent of certain modern animals such as mouflons.
What is certain is that they are warm-blooded animals . A cold-blooded animal could survive Hoth ‘s cold winters by enduring freezing to a state of dormancy, like some amphibians. However, in the film we see a very active creature – enough to run and be used as a pack animal – and this behavior is only compatible with a homeothermic metabolism, like that of mammals or birds.
However, today we know that many species of dinosaurs were indeed warm-blooded, partially or fully covered in feathers . We can rely on the anatomy of the legs and tail, assuming that we are dealing with a dinosaur covered with filamentous protofeathers that would resemble those of some theropods such as Yutyrannus . Regarding the appearance of the head and antlers, it would be an evolutionary convergence, like the one that exists between the crest of Corytosaurus and those of modern cassowaries.
varactyl
One of the most curious creatures in Episode III is a huge lizard-like reptile, which Obi-Wan Kenoby uses as a mount. The creature’s name is varactyl . Its general anatomy resembles that of a large lizard, with the legs of a gecko and the feathers of some kind of tropical bird.
Today we know that the ability to produce feathers is a primitive trait in archosaurs , a large group of animals that includes pterosaurs and several other groups of extinct animals, crocodilians, and dinosaurs, including birds. So the presence of this type of structure could indicate that we are dealing with an animal of this group.
What most attracts attention are their fingers, with an extraordinary adherence capacity that allows them to climb vertical walls without difficulty. In the case of geckos, this happens thanks to tiny fibers, called setae, which they present on the scales of their fingers, and which take advantage of van der Waals forces . These same types of structures have also been observed independently in other groups of reptiles such as anoles and skinks. From all this we can deduce that other animals could, also independently, acquire these capacities. It would not be incompatible with our archosaur varactyl.
The problem would arise with the size of the animal. Geckos can maintain grip due to their lightness , but, using the same system, maintaining the weight of a reptile several meters in length would require a much larger grip surface than their fingers can provide.
REFERENCES:
Autumn, K. et al. 2002. Evidence for van der Waals adhesion in gecko setae.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99(19), 12252-12256. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.192252799
Benton, M. J. et al. 2019. The Early Origin of Feathers. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 34(9), 856-869. DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2019.04.018
Navalón, G. et al. 2019. The evolutionary relationship among beak shape, mechanical advantage, and feeding ecology in modern birds*. Evolution, 73(3), 422-435. DOI: 10.1111/evo.13655
Pugno, N. et al. 2011. Normal Adhesive Force-Displacement Curves of Living Geckos.
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Xu, X. et al. 2012. A gigantic feathered dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of China.
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