Leviathan

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, Leviathans are intelligent crocodilians. Like crocodiles and Alligators, leviathans are armored, swimming predators, but Leviathans have longer and more powerful legs, allowing them to walk bipedally like some crocodilian ancestors.

Leviathans are closely related to gygeans, another species of intelligent crocodilians in Squawk. Leviathans are much more robust than their stealthy cousins, with stocky bodies, thick tails, compressed snouts and short but still heavily muscled arms.

More pictures and information about leviathans...

Gygean

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, gygeans are intelligent crocodilians with the ability to change skin color and pattern rapidly like octopus, squid and cuttlefish. In spite of the difficulty of depicting this ability in action, Gygeans are one of our most illustrated Squawk species.

Two gygean features are coincidentally found in that other dinosaur science fiction franchise, Jurassic Park. The late author of the Jurassic Park books, Michael Crichton, hints in the original novel that the velociraptors have some active camouflage ability like a chameleon. (In real life, velociraptors were covered in feathers like a bird.) In the second book he gives the Carnotaurus an even more dramatic camouflage which makes them nearly invisible when they hunt at night.

In the movie adaptation of Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg gives the Dilophosaurus a neck frill which can be erected. This feature is present in the real-life Frilled Dragon and some of the Squawk gygeans. The creators of the movie knew that the real life Dilophosaurus almost certainly did not have this frill (or the ability to spit poison) but including these features in their fictional dinosaurs is an homage the revelations that come as we learn more about prehistoric life.

More pictures and information about gygeans:

• general information
• gygean anatomy
  

Draconian

Squawk Draconians are intelligent crocodilians with short snouts, strong legs that allow them to walk bipedally, and short powerful arms with opposeable thumbs. The strange long-snouted creature in the lower right with extra arms is a genetically modified (chimaeric) draconian. Draconians are comfortable both on land and in the water. When they wear clothes, they prefer garments that minimize drag while swimming.

My intelligent crocodile is a strange idea, but there were real crocodile relatives who ran around on long legs, climbed trees, looked like ichthyosaurs or sharks, had short snouts (and ate plants) and even a giant crocodilian filter feeder who caught tiny prey like a baleen whale.

Here are some more Draconians I scanned in recently. My earlier draconian drawings were more anthropomorphic with shorter bodies and longer arms than they should have.