Fire lizard
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The Fire-lizard is a lifeform indigenous to the fictional planet Pern featured in Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series of novels. The DNA from fire-lizards was used to develop the much larger dragons needed to defend Pern from the deadly Thread organism. After being discovered by the Sean Connell and Sorka Hanrahan when Pern was first settled, their benefits as pets were acknowledged, and their natural abilities were augmented through 'mentasynth' to allow better communication with people. These enhanced fire-lizards were originally referred to as dragonets because of their likeness to the dragons featured in old myths from Earth. However, their ability to breath fire led to the eventual use of the name fire-lizard.
Fire-lizards average around 2 feet from nose to tail, although size varies with age and colouration (sex). The female fire-lizards can be gold or green in colour while the males are either bronze, brown or blue. While both gold and green fire-lizards can lay a clutch of eggs, only the gold or queen fire-lizards devote enough time and energy to protecting their eggs until they hatch. In size the golden queens are the largest followed by the bronze, brown and blue males to the greens which are the smallest. They have six limbs: four legs and two wings.
Fire-lizards have two stomachs. One for digesting food, and one for processing a phosphine bearing rock referred to as firestone because the major by-product of this process is a flame of fire that burns up the deadly thread organisms. This was one of the main reasons that the original settlers of Pern used fire-lizard DNA to create the much larger dragons. The other reason was the intimate bond between a fire-lizard and it's human partner. This bond which can only be formed shortly after hatching in fire-lizards, was developed into the much stronger telepathic link experienced by a human rider and their dragon. The bonding process is known as 'impression.'
Unlike the dragons which are capable of speaking telepathically with their human riders, fire-lizards are limited to coveying 'images' or emotions to their human friends. Consequently, the bond between humans and fire-lizards is weaker than with dragons. This allows people to impress more than one fire-lizard. The impression of nine fire-lizards from a single clutch by Menolly, is at the centre of Anne McCaffrey's novels Dragonsong and Dragonsinger.
Fire-lizards also have the ability to go between, or teleport themselves from one place to another through the dimension known as between. Theoretically fire-lizards should also be able to move other objects through the process of telekinesis, but only dragons have demonstrated the intelligence required to move objects from one place to the next.
