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| - The Reptilians are one of the stock Humanoid Aliens, sporting reptile-like features and popping up frequently in Science Fiction and abduction stories. They share quite a few similarities with Little Green Men and The Greys in terms of appearance (human-like, large eyes, baldness, strange skin) and modus operandi (abduction, invasion), but they have enough unique features to set themselves apart. Compare Lizard Folk and Snake People, which are generally the Fantasy Counterparts to this trope. The former also tend to be more like dumb scaly orcs in contrast to the advanced Reptilians.
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| abstract
| - The Reptilians are one of the stock Humanoid Aliens, sporting reptile-like features and popping up frequently in Science Fiction and abduction stories. They share quite a few similarities with Little Green Men and The Greys in terms of appearance (human-like, large eyes, baldness, strange skin) and modus operandi (abduction, invasion), but they have enough unique features to set themselves apart. Since they are reptiles they, of course, are almost always evil. Unlike their Grey and Green cousins, though, The Reptilians tend to be portrayed as even more vicious and sadistic, often abducting humans as a Slave Race or as a food source. They are frequently shape-shifters, changing into human form in order to infiltrate our ranks and take over the world before we even realize it. Sometimes, like Little Green Men and The Greys, they can be more enigmatic invaders whose only direct contact with humans is through abductions. The trend nowadays, though, has been to give The Reptilians a more detailed culture than those two, typically as either Scary Dogmatic Aliens or as the vanguard of a vast but decadent empire. They commonly have hidden bases Beneath the Earth, which probably stems from a fusion of the Primal Fears of both reptiles and the underground. If the biological history of The Reptilians gets mentioned, they are frequently revealed to be dinosaurs who attained sentience, somehow survived the K/P Extinction event, and moved elsewhere among the stars, not necessarily in that order. Such dinosaur-derived creatures are sometimes called "Dinosauroids," a term first popularized by paleontologist Dale Russell's hypothetical Troodon-descended humanoid. Naturally, those dinosaurs often turn out to have been descendants of the carnivorous ones such as Velociraptor or Tyrannosaurus Rex (it helps that many theropods are considered to have been the most intelligent dinosaurs there were). Alternatively, they evolved on a planet whose evolutionary history is just like that of Earth, but stalled out before mammals could take their rightful place at the top. Depending on just how reptilian Reptilians are portrayed to be (and depending on a program's budget), they can run the gamut from bald humans with weird eyes to full-on Lizard Folk with a human-like gait. Also, a rule of thumb to keep in mind is that the more reptilian the aliens are, the less likely they are to be portrayed as good guys, in line with Reptiles Are Abhorrent; sympathetic Reptilians are more likely to have Non-Mammal Mammaries, among other things. Compare Lizard Folk and Snake People, which are generally the Fantasy Counterparts to this trope. The former also tend to be more like dumb scaly orcs in contrast to the advanced Reptilians. Examples of The Reptilians include:
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