#the stories kept a record of them even while science was stumbling around clueless in the dark

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

How scientifically plausible do you think andalites are?

Do I think they literally exist somewhere in the universe? Nah. I'm agnostic on the question of alien life existing at all, but I assume those aliens in particular are the product of K.A. Applegate's imagination.

Do I think they could exist? Sure, but at least partially because it is hard and weird describing an animal for which no one has any direct experience. Like how everyone spent centuries going "unicorns don't exist!" and then historians were like "Okay, so imagine describing a rhino to someone who has never seen one, and then that person describes your description to a poet, and the poem gets stored in a damp room but someone finds it a century later with half its words missing, and that person makes a drawing of the poem, and someone else finds that drawing and writes a description..." And next thing you know, we've got unicorns in the historical record. Same goes for griffins: it's kind of sensible for a person to look at that

[Image ID: A cassowary, a flightless bird with black plumage and a blue-and-red head, walking on a beach.]

which is the same height as a human, and go "Okay, dude, imagine if a bird was somehow also a horse..."

So I think andalites make sense, in the sense that we never get this absolute perfect taxidermic description of one. Instead we get Cassie or Marco or whoever going "Okay, so suppose there's a deer that's also a scorpion, but human-like, only the kind of human-like that has hoof-mouths and snail eyeballs, and then imagine blue..." And there's a ton of room to interpret that description in hundreds of different ways. I've seen art where andalites look sexipedal or quadrupedal, where they have chins or snouts, where their tails are rattlesnake-like or where their tails are tentacle-like, where they have four human-like eyes or two owl-like eyes and two deer-like eyes. So on and so forth. So, like, I think there's room in that description for any number of interpretations, and some of them are closer to real biology than others.