Mitekai

Okay these things have been rattling around in my head for something like a decade now, ever since I was a dorky teenager reading Predatory Dinosaurs of the World and getting pissed at that way-too-humanoid dinosauroid thing. Uh, about time I formally introduced them.

Sometime in the Eocene, ~50-ish mya, there was a large island sitting in the closing Tethys Seaway, home to a relict fauna held over from the Mesozoic. It was eventually pushed beneath Asia by the Indian subcontinent, all fossil evidence of its existence now crushed beneath the Himalayas. Before that happened, however, it became home to Earth's first sapient lifeforms, a species of troodont that called themselves the mitek/mitekai (haven't decided if the latter is a variant term or a plural, I should probably do that). Some aliens got involved, the little stinkers got space travel and other insanely advanced technology, but eventually they mysteriously disappeared save for a population of about 6000 that survived on a cloaked, time-dilated island in the South Pacific. And now they have to put up with being a minority species in a galaxy full of humans.

Anyway, here's a skeletal drawing of the critters (based on G.S. Paul's Sinornithoides with a large number of alterations) and some (shamefully naked) life restorations. These differ a bit from my previous conception in that they have a fully feathered tail and a bit of a beak on the front of the jaws - not a full toothless beak like /'s dinosauroids, but enough to be cute, dammit.

So uh a real physical description:

The mitekai are descended from heron-like wading piscivores, and as a result they have long legs, small conical teeth, slightly-webbed toes, and a cultural preference for a fish-heavy diet.

The hallux is lost, and the second toe has a large, dagger-like claw much like a cassowary's. The hand has rather blunt claws, the thumb is much more opposable than in other theropods, and the third finger is somewhat opposable too.

The mitekai's ancestors had a breeding strategy like an emu or a phalarope, with most of the child-rearing done by the male - as a result the females tend to be larger, with longer fancy wire-feathers on the side of the head, while the males retain a juvenile-ish cryptic color pattern with striping down the back. Mitek women enjoy a large amount of social privilege due to their larger size and historical exemption from child-rearing, and thanks to this socialization are often huge sexually-aggressive douchebags.

Note the color difference is not sexual dimorphism - mitekai have both red and gray color morphs - with some interesting co-dominance present in heterozygous individuals - and a large variation in melanin. Individuals with darker, richer plumage like the male here tend to be privileged in mitekai culture, as they are traditionally considered more attractive, desirable, and virtuous than their lighter counterparts.

(It must be noted that the Mitek's traditional social hierarchy, with dark women on the top and light men on the bottom, is a total inversion of the usual human pattern, and this causes much political grating between the two species. Somehow I will milk some hilarity out of this.)