The Anatomy of Aliens: Skeletons, Bones, and Other Remains
The universe is filled with surprises—planets with diamonds raining from the sky, planets with oceans of petrol. However, life is not totally unbounded. Life follows its rules. If you understand what those rules are, then you will know something about what aliens’ fossils look like.
The most crucial rule is that life arises by natural selection. Life adapts to its surroundings. Complicated aliens will have transformed from simple aliens to fix the problems on their planet—problems such as hunting for food, preventing becoming somebody else’s food, and reproducing.
Those Earthly issues are also concerns that should be solved on alien worlds. If you look at how our animals solve them, then you can see how aliens might do it as well.
What Does Alien Skeleton Be Like?
Have you heard of the Atacama (Ata) skeleton? Ata was named after the Chilean desert, where the alien bones were discovered. A normal person has twelve ribs, while it has only ten pairs. Further, its skull narrows to a ridged peak.
Her bones are as fossilized as those of a kid between six and eight years old. Still, the apparent age of her skeleton is strange with her size. If Ata stood, she only stood six inches high, tall enough to look over a spring crocus.
Her unique features attracted extraterrestrial investigators and alien hunters, who suspected her bones might show something magnificent. As much as people think that she’s one of those alien remains, Ata is a human.
The DNA analysis on Ata discovered that she’s a human after all. A sample was extracted from her ribs’ bone marrow and used to perform whole-genome sequence analysis. It was compared with primate and human genomes and identified to be a human female, a fetus, with Chilean ancestry.
The dating initially estimated the bone age of the bones at between six and eight years. However, the researchers discovered that the remains had an unusual bone-aging disorder, which made them seem older than the individual they belonged to.
What REAL Alien Anatomy Might Look Like?
As your understanding of the universe develops and the outlook on existence is in turn humbled, many scientists are starting to theorize what these aliens might look like. Opinions can surely differ, but they are forming theirs on the foundation of biological and environmental clues instead of science fiction.
Does that suggest we are closer to the answer?
They can swim and fly
In the show Aliens: The Definitive Guide, an astrobiologist at University College London, Dr. Lewis Dartness, laid out some possibilities for extraterrestrials that might come from planets like Earth. Creatures from water worlds might evolve along the lines of the organisms we see in our sea, and a planet with a massive gravity could support more powerful, bigger, and massive flying creatures, which take advantage of the dense and thick atmosphere.
They might be silicon-based life forms
It is reasonable why most scientists would partake in the concept that aliens would look like humans, especially based on what we already know about life as it exists on our planet. However, most of the life seen on our planet is composed of sulfur, phosphorus, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon. Thus, scientists have discovered multicellular organisms that didn’t require oxygen in 2010.
That opened several questions about the way people perceive life and how it could exist. Scientific hypotheses exist today that recommend non-carbon-based life could be present in the universe. There might be silicon-based life forms—something that has never been found on Earth.
They might look like smart space dinosaurs
Did you know that dinosaurs used to be the dominant species on our planet? That only changed due to the freak extinction event. Thus, if evolution had been permitted to continue unimpeded, dinosaurs could have transformed our level of intelligence later on.
If there were any other Earth-like planets outside the universe, then couldn’t dinosaurs have continued their revolutionary growth there without an accident? That theory is not just proposed to explain the novel Dinosaur Brothel Planet. Nonetheless, the prominent chemist Ronald Breslow find out why the building block of life on the planet all exist in one particular orientation and shape.
For instance, all amino acids have what is called a left-handed orientation, and one of the huge mysteries of life is why. Another theory is that life was brought to the planet by a meteorite, which slammed into the planet, and so the only genetic material we could work with was what was accessible on that rock.
Imagine if other planets were seeded the same way, but only with different orientations of such building blocks. You might end up with smart dinosaurs.
They may have the composition of a jellyfish
Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who works for space company Astrium, extremely believes that extraterrestrials would be marine-type animals, along with pulses of light for communication with other aliens, bodies that enlarge in sunlight, mouth type openings to scape chemicals from the atmosphere for reproduction and growth, orange undersides for camouflage, lenses for detailed viewing of their environment, and metallic surfaces for absorbing lights.
She bases that on her theory of how life started in the sea here on Earth and draws the conclusion that organisms could engage with a foreign atmosphere the same way creatures in our seas engage with water.
They may have the qualities of a bug
Did you know that cockroaches are among the most indestructible creatures on Earth, thanks to their thick exoskeleton? They can survive a huge array of intense conditions, such as nuclear war. That makes a bug-style life form with robust armor a good bet, especially when we talk about the myriad of environments that our universe has.
Many species have been subject to incidental locking down during their development, which makes body plans become inflexible and stereotyped with evolutionary time. Unraveling the functional from the incidental is one of the major outstanding questions in evolutionary biology—and might help us better know how alien lifeforms could be different from humans.
