The Biology of James Cameron’s Avatar

hello guys and welcome back to another installment of tre the explainer hey let's randomly talk about James cameras avatar you know for science I for no particular reason rewatched the 2012 science fiction movie recently and thought it would be neat to examine what in my opinion was the strongest part of the film not its acting not its plot or story but the creature designs of the aliens of the fictitious planet or should I say moon Endora in which the film is set as a person fascinated with biology zoology paleontology and evolution I found Pandora's life-forms absolutely fascinating in no doubt I felt this way because many of the designs are created by my man science fiction illustrator Wayne Douglas Barlow whose amazing work I am well-acquainted with particularly his creation of this speculative field guide for the biology of the fictitious world Darwin for the expedition which was later adapted in Discovery Channel's alien planet and watched habitually everyday by childhood mean a meow I decided to take the time to analyze some of the creatures of Pandora in the same way I did with the races of Game of Thrones not too long ago by looking at the information given in the film as an evolutionary biologist would if these aliens were actually real and making scientific speculations and models based off of this info as merely a thought experiment yes I'm doing this under the assumption that evolution exists on Pandora I know I should expect some Navi young earth creationist protesting my findings but please remember this is just for fun I will mainly be using images from the film but also promotional material to draw my conclusions I know some of this stuff might already be covered in external material like books and stuff but right now I'm going in otherwise blind limited to what is shown in the film a pandora's zoology will you'll be tackling mainly the megafauna Pandora animals that appear in the film that are relatively large enough for us to observe and analyze alright let's get to it space marine scientists Pandora before we talk about the creatures of Pandora we should briefly talk about the moon itself Pandora is one of the fictional gas giant Polyphemus moons it is roughly the size of Earth though slightly smaller and the planet it orbits orbits a single star our seemly very similar to our own son due to the presence of surface liquid water on the moon Pandora likely exists in the Goldilocks zone and as a result of this Pandoran life has evolved very similar to Earth's in the sense that it likely originated in its several large oceans and migrated onto land gradually plants or analogous photosynthetic organisms exist in wide amounts on pandora forming massive jungles grasslands and so on curiously they are green and pigment which further suggests that Pandora's star in atmosphere is very close to our own planetary conditions keep in mind if we were to discover plant like photosynthetic organisms on other planets likely they will not always be green and pigment plants on earth are only this green color dude it being the most efficient pigment to absorb the wavelengths of the sun's light that reaches the Earth's surface typically strongest and the red and blue visible wavelengths plants on other planets might be red or blue or infra red in color depending on the stars they would get their energy from the life on pandora has evolved in addition to plant-like organisms terrestrial quote-unquote animals I use animals as an analogy because the word animal should really only apply to the multicellular kind of earth as these would be wholly unrelated the animals of Pandora seemed to have independently convergently evolved into complex ecological niches analogous to those that have evolved in our planet with grazing herbivorous scavengers apex predators and even domesticated animals by the looks of it for this reason multicellular life on pandora seems old at the very least a few hundred million years with a lot of time to evolve organs for specialized tasks and then reduce them to vestigial remnants or use them through different functions we'll talk about this later it is interesting to note that due to Pandora's smaller size and lower gravity these animals are able to grow taller and larger than animals of Earth resulting in Pandora's creatures commonly attaining mega sizes now in the film we see that there are more or less 12 different large animal species that make up the ecosystem of the specific jungle habitat that is the setting these go as follows the Rhino Lake hammerhead tight an earthy are the pterosaur like Banshee as whale sized cousin the greatly and op directs the smaller bat like sting bats the primate Lake lemur s coyote Lake Viper wolves the lion Lake giant predator Thanet or ecwid like dire horse fan lizard antelope Lake hexa feed Buffalo Lake strong beast and the sexy blue cat people themselves the Navi hexapods looking at the creatures of Pandora it appears that all the large terrestrial animals of this planet are closely related and descend from a shared common ancestor without even making this assumption from the get-go we can infer this from the body plan of Pandora's megafauna as all of them with a few scant exceptions possess many of the same physical and morphological traits bilateral symmetry a mouth and head towards the front with an anus and the back towards a tail and a backbone an internal skeleton of some kind six muscular lens with digits at their ends two pairs of eyes located on a defined head a single mouth with teeth two antennae that protrude from the head and curious nostril like openings at the base of the neck for respiration of breathing called in-universe upper Coulomb interestingly unlike the earth tetrapods these pandora animals have a respiratory system evolved separately from the digestive system as opposed to our rather inefficient and dangerous setup where the two are intertwined i couldn't get much confirmation on the digits in these animals on their hands the Banshees seemingly have five digits while the Navi have four the viper wolves have four and so on this description fits the majority of Pandoran animals and it appears that the common ancestor drew all these species looked a bit like this a six legged creature with four eyes upper coulomb a mouth two antennae in a tail from the speculative ancestor the animal species found in modern Pandora evolved and diverged from modifying and specializing organs and body parts for roles best suited to their ecological missions just like what happened to our ancestors the tetrapods on earth digits became wings and claws mouths and teeth evolved to eat meat or plants and body proportions were scaled up and down to best fitted tasks I dubbed this superclass of related species on pandora hexa pata or the hexapods which simply translates to six legged now I'm going to break down these species in separate sections and speculate how these species might have diverged from one another over time then revisit them to create an overall evolutionary family tree life for Pandora carnivores and herbivores it seems Pandoran hexapod Akemi first split into two distinct main groups that diverged from one another early on in development these are hexapods that evolved to be carnivorous and those that evolved to be herbivorous carnivores like the viper wolf themt or banshee etc seemed to be more closely related to one another morphologically than herbivores like Dyer horses hammerheads sturm beasts hexa peds and so on one group evolving to eat plant material and nectar while the other group specialized to consume this class of plant eaters this split is again rather similar to what happened more or less in mammals on earth both the herbivores and the carnivores not hunt them on pandora that convergently evolved remarkably with mammals hunters evolving claws teeth and a lean build for chasing and killing while the plant eaters evolved strong muscular legs sprout raiding their predators armour plating living in herds and even defensive head structures titania is the scientific name i'll give the herbivore group of pandora due to their large size and after James Cameron's Titanic based on physiology I would suggest the sturm beast and the hammerheads are closely related to one another then either are to the dire horses both sturm beasts and hammerheads have distinctive head crest structures that probably serve both as defense and sexual display this is I think further clarified by the fact that both sturm beasts and hammerheads have at least three visible toe digits while the dire horse has possibly only two in their hoof like feet it appears that just like the horses of Earth Dyer horses descend from an ancestor with multiple digits but subsequently lost these digits well it's closer relatives retain their original tone numbers the placement of the hexa peds on this tree is unclear due to our limited information of this creature looking at the toe digits might allow us to tentatively place it on the tree Zeno Terra Soria and Phil ok nated on the other carnivorous side of the tree I suggest the carnivores can be broken up into two possibly three we'll get to that later main groups Zeno Terra Soria which means alien pterosaur and the filo cannons an amalgamation of the scientific names of cats and dogs these two groups are best separated by the fact that although they are both predators Zeno Terra Soria has evolved wings filo canid has remained completely terrestrial I speculate that Zeno Terra Soria consists of van Chi sting backs in the greatly enough directs well feel located consists of Thanatos and new Viper wolves let's break these two groups down further below Canada the Thanet or and viper wolf appeared to be close relatives on account of their very similar body shapes physical traits and misha's the Thanet or has filled a role in the ecosystem akin to the earth lion or tiger appearing to me mostly solitary while the viper wolf has filled the role of kenta hyena or coyote or jackal scavenging and hunting and large cooperative attacks to take down prey a curious thing of note is the fact that the Thanet or appears to have only a single pair of eyes as opposed to the typical four eyes of most creatures of pandora if you look closely the viper wolf still has a second pair of eyes like most animals of pandora but this pair has been reduced in size illustrating a possible transitional form between the more Bassel four-eyed hexapods and the only two identities this seems to suggest that the Thanet or and viper wolf descend from a common ancestor with four eyes but have started to and in the case of a thinit or fully lost this pair the reasons for this exactly are unclear xeno pterosaurs perhaps the most fascinating and interesting to Pandoran life due to several strange quirks banshees greatly in up der exes and sting bats are all superficially similar and no doubt closer related to one another than to the other animals of pandora but if we look closer they throw us some curveballs these carnivores fly on for large membranous wings derived from four of their ancestors six limbs the four limbs evolved into a pair of massive primary wings while the second or perhaps third evolved into a pair of smaller wings the last third pair of limbs remained as talons and feet this is visible in sting backs and greatly enough direct says however we run into a bit of a problem when we take a deeper look the makeup of the four wings differs between banshees and Leonato exes and those of sting bats banshees and of directors have a four limb made up of something I will dub a finger fin wing a very very unique wing structure made up of several elongated unconnected digits while the sting bats seemingly have a more traditional member Swayne closer to the pterosaurs of earth where the digits are not part of the wing this is the possibility to mean many things did the wing evolve two times independently in these animals or is the finger fin wind structure and improvement built upon the pre-existing one of the sting bets I suggest the latter is probably true with the finger fend winged banshees and lean after X's being closer related to one another and the sting bats retaining the relic ancestral wing structure the finger finger of this clatter very very unique as wings and these animals evolved seemingly completely backwards when compared to earth membranous wings on earth and bats pterosaurs other mammals frogs etc evolved from a single plane of webbing between digits or other structures that grew more and more pronounced over the generations until the webbing became an entire wing on pandora however though it appears wings might have initially evolved in this way this design was improved upon so that the digits themselves individually evolved into long and flat separate digits fins that form a complete wing by overlapping with one another something that as far as I know has never been seen on earth perhaps the closest we have gotten is the feather wings of dinosaurs one very strange thing to observe is that the banshees only have four limbs primary and secondary wings unlike all Pandoran life with the exception of the Navi it appears the banshees have lost one pair of their limbs similar to the whales of Earth losing their hind limbs both the greatly in optics and the sting Ducks have retained this third pair of non flight limbs as talons implying that the trait in banshees is a derive structure rather than an ancestral one I bet if we were to look closer to banshee internally we might find the vestigial remnants of this third pair of limbs this is we can find them in whales today this would further vindicate this hypothesis fan lizards it is unclear where the relatively small reptilian hexapods called the fan lizards fit into this tree they still have the six limbs typical of hexapods but have evolved a crazy back structure that functions like a helicopter for flight and to confuse predators we have very little information on these animals we don't know if they are carnivorous or herbivorous so they could exist pretty much anywhere on our speculative hexapod tree from near the beginning to on the carnivore side to even on the herbivore side we just don't know the crazy mess that is the Navi all right now under those dreaded cat people the Navi are perhaps the hardest to fit into our tree in overall biology of Pandora in general unlike all of their animals they have four limbs only two eyes nowa per coulomb no antennae and so much else non-typical Pandoran life they are more or less tall lanky humans with cat ears eyes and Tails seemingly tacked on the Kahala wean costume they are so so a typical pandora and typical of Earth that some have suggested that they aren't even native to Pandora or related to its species being an alien race that is aggressed after landing on this alien planet though an interesting theory I find this unsatisfactory obviously James Cameron and the many other people behind avatar didn't want the race of creatures we as the audience are supposed to relate to and sympathize with the most to look like gross squids or bats or crows or insects like actual aliens would likely look to us especially if one of these human characters were supposed to have a romance with it so they designed them to look more or less identical to humans of Earth and appealing to our primate beauty standards which is likely unlikely for any aliens to evolve in such a manner yes convergent evolution exists and is visible on Pandora but convergent evolution can only account for so much the Navi if they are closely related to Pandora's other megafauna should have the same distinctive four eyes and six limbs and collar nostrils and so on but we don't they are tetrapods with four limbs two eyes and nostrils above their mouths as well as breasts exactly where humans have ours I'm sorry it's incredibly incredibly borderline impossible that independent evolution between two planets would result in bodies that are so done close my personal opinion is that the story would have been more interesting if the Navi looked far more alien an animal to us as they should or would in reality but that would be implying a weird bestiality tone to the film that some people might want to avoid digression aside based on their morphology alone the Navi appear to be either completely unrelated or only very distantly related to most other Pandora in life or are related but are an incredibly diverged branch of the hexapod lineage evolved to lack many of the quintessential traits typical Pandora's hexapods and there are some evidence for the latter theory it seems that the Navi are closely related to the tree dwelling Pearlie murus the six-limbed primate like Pearlie muris could represent a transitional form between the norm traditional hexapods of Pandora and the very unique tetra Patil body plan of the Navi as the lemurs appear to lack upper coulomb and only have two eyes and this is fitting with the parallel evolution of the Navi and humans both evolving from tree dwelling priming like creatures but if this is the case what happened to the third pair of limbs and the Navi may be like whales and the tail bones of humans they have been retained internally as vestigial remnants like I speculated for the Banshees if this isn't the case though I suggests two main models of Navi evolution to explain this quirk number one that somewhere along the line a genetic quirk deleted a part of the navi's body structure and number two possibly that four of the nobbies limbs fused into a single limb theory number one gene malfunction we don't know how Pandoran genetics work or how these creatures develop in the embryonic stage but it seems likely that these animals probably have a sequence in their genetic code that maps out where organs are placed in their body in earth animals these genes are called Hox genes and there are essentially instructions on where to put things during organismal development they tell the body to put the legs here or the eyes here or the anus in the back mess with these genes and they could severely alter the placement of organs on the organism for instance there's a ton of horror stories about scientists altering the Hox genes of fruit flies causing legs to grow where they're and ten I typically belong or eyes to form on the kneecaps or a second thorax and pair of wings hope you sleep well tonight knowing this could probably be done on a human if we wanted to now alterations to Hox gene has occur very very rarely in nature because it can be very dangerous and overwhelmingly unhelpful to the organism but it might have happened at the very least once more on that in the second theory number one speculates that perhaps through some gene malfunction likely in something analogous to Hox genes a part of the body was deleted and simply did not develop in the embryonic stage of the Navi resulting in the missing pair of limbs unlikely as this may seem weirder things have happened in evolution on earth tardigrades those strange little water bears appear to have undergone a rather curious evolutionary path they are close relatives to arthropods like crustaceans and insects and on the outside you can see it kind of however when geneticists looked at the Hox genes the genes that created the layout of an organism's body they found something strange in water bears the tardigrades are effectively missing a part of their ancestors body it turns out that the Hox genes that code for a chunk a region that corresponds to the entire thorax and most the abdomen of insects got deleted in their DNA along the way resulting in their stumpy compact body plan as a result of this nearly the entire body of tardigrades is effectively just the head region in its insect relatives yes water bears are pretty much heads with legs perhaps something happened to the Navi with the deletion of limb Hawks genes or a Hox genes for an entire section of the body and like the water bears part of their ancestors body was quote-unquote deleted theory number two limousine my second theory is that the fore and middle limbs seen in the pro lemurs fused into one in the Navi the fusing of several separate limbs together does not seem to have occurred on earth except as a birth defect called cyrene Emilia or mermaid syndrome which is almost always non advantageous to those it occurs in so just like the Hawks gene alteration deletion this is rare to persist naturally in the animal kingdom but it could and be favored by natural selection if such a thing is advantageous in an animal's environment the reason I bring up this theories of possibility is mainly because the illustrator who designed the Navi has played with the idea before Wayne Douglas Barlow in his the expedition back in 1990 a book filled with speculative alien creatures living on a planet called Darwin for probably a major factor in James Cameron deciding to hire Barlow for the film gave an alien design called the gyro sprinter where a quadrupedal animal with four limbs initially evolved in a way that caused the front and back pairs of limbs to fuse together into only two perhaps something similar happened to the Navi where the two limbs are fused together in a similar manner I know using this external information is kind of cheating but it suggests that such a thing is possible in the universe Barlow creates to determine which theory if either are correct we will have to examine the navi's anatomy internally genetically to better understand this to see if we find fused bones or abnormal muscles or vestigial limbs or so on regardless if these two theories or unknown ones are behind the navi's loss of limbs I suggest the Navi possibly originated from the drier savanna lands of Andorra and convergently evolved very similar to humans as a result of this only to migrate into the jungle regions over time this speculative xeno primate branch consists of Pro lemur s in the Navi likely splitting off very early on in hexa pata before the titania and carnivores split losing their second pair of eyes in a per coulomb over time conclusion so after all that based on my research and speculations my Pandora and evolutionary tree should look something like this it's probably wrong somewhere if not entirely and keep in mind all this was a neat little thought experiment to test my evolutionary biology skills but you could create many many alternative theoretical trees to truly test this hypothesis we should further study the internal morphology of these creatures bone skeletons muscles organs etc as well as fine genetic evidence and compare them all together than to try to solidify this tree make alterations where needed and yeah that is my examination of the native creatures of Avatar from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist I hope you enjoyed this fun little thought experiment as much as I did it tell me if you agree with my findings what do you suggest alternatively maybe some of this will be addressed in those other 16 avatar sequels and development man they better bring back Barlow for these creatures designs or I'm gonna riot anyways thanks for watching and for more biology anthropology paleontology evolution religion and science stuff check out my other videos and make suggestions for future ones and with that thank you so much for watching and have a great day I hope you learned something new call her moon child dancing in the shallows of a river lonely moon child dancing in the shadow of the willow talking to the trees of the cobweb strange sleeping on the steps of a fountain waving silver wants to the night bird song waiting for the Sun on the mountain

Channel: TREY the Explainer

Views: 1,933,839

Keywords: Avatar, biology, science, evolution, James Cameron, biological, evolutionary, Pandora, Na'vi, Paleontology, alien, aliens

Id: Hm1JFLpkofs

Length: 22min 47sec (1367 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 26 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/_Guara_Wolf_]

I did see this video yesterday and I couldn't agree more with it. Every time I watch Avatar I think the same think, " The Na'vi do not fit in the evolutive tree of Pandora." But.. he maneged to give a plausible explanation about how the Na'vi could have emerge. I really enjoyed this video, I recommend his channel.

[u/Hereticrick]

Omg! The Navi biology bothered me SO MUCH! It just looks like lazy creature design. You’re telling me no one could find a way to make these guys relatable and still alien? 4 arms would be no big deal. No nose (with the “nose holes” on their necks or shoulders) is no big deal. Even an extra set of eyes is not a big deal as far as things you could add while still maintaining a relatable human face/form.

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