I think this suffers from "Interesting, but why is it an SCP?"
Sounds like something perfectly apt for the normal scientific community to handle. New rare species found, yay. No interest to the foundation.
SCP-346 / Discussion
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-346.
It's ridiculously cute, but keeping overly cute animals away from the public is not a Foundation mainstay. Yeah, I don't know either. Aside from being an unknown species and possibly a surviving descendant of a lineage thought to have been extinct for 65 million years, there's nothing particularly anomalous about it.
By now it's more Dr. Rights' pet than an actual SCP anyway, and if you want to stay alive, you won't suggest it's termination in a way she could learn that you were responsible for.
There's absolutely no need to terminate it. It presents no threat whatsoever and other personnel routinely exhibit far more outrageous behaviour than keeping a tiny, harmless pet on-site. I'm merely musing what qualifies it as an SCP rather than a curious pet.
Well, there is that whole bit where the article says that it's the only one that's ever been heard of, only one to survive of its clutch, and no one else knows where they come from.
Bit of mystery makes it viable, I should think, eh.
I'm not so sure. I mean, it's got a nice picture, and it's very cute and interesting, and yes, it's the only one of its clutch, but in and of itself the animal is just .. an animal. Why would the foundation care about a rare but otherwise normal animal? I'm not sure how it's something the Foundation would want to contain. I know Rights really likes it, but my vote is that this isn't an SCP, and author can't be a consideration when judging an SCP by its own merits.
Perhaps an addendum where it turns out the source of the colony is through some form of time/dimensional portal, and the foundation seals it off while Rights gets to keep this one specimen?
Who's to say it isn't like that already?
It was found in a seedy black market-dealie, and its origin is completely open-ended. SCP items shouldn't have to be explained into the ground, eh. Also, if in fact it is a relative of the pterodactyl, why isn't it in some kind of fossil record? It would have had to be a very spontaneous adaptation.
The vagueness and mystery are what give this one an actually interesting point, and writing out paragraphs to explain every little detail of where it comes from sort of turn that mystery into regular science fiction-style drudgery. Two cents, eh.
I agree with Pair of Ducks. There is nothing here other than something imagined that makes it an SCP. It's just an animal. The fact that a miniature, somehow mammalian, pterodactyl exists is not a threat to the public in any way, and the suggestion that more might live in South America makes it strictly an animal with no strange qualities other than looking like a pterodactyl. It wouldn't just be "mysterious." Biologists would study it. Keeping it from the scientific world would just be silly. Weird animals pop up all the time. No one tries to hide them.
I agree with ieverin and Pair of Ducks.
Granted, this is slightly hypocritical (as scp-355 has received similar criticisms before), but in my defense, my reasoning is that there's no real reason this couldn't be an actual cryptid, while 355 (and, for that matter, 165 and 143) have something about their articles indicating an origin contrary to "normality".
Not to mention the problem that this thing really doesn't come across as anything more than a cute mascot pet thing. I vote for vultur10's idea (below).
How long has the Foundation had it? Long enough to know that it isn't carrying some slow-onset disease?
DO IT.
Also because I look back at Pterry and think "yanno, my first SCPs weren't that good." and I seem to recall having plans to write more for this entry, maybe introduce a whole colony or something, but I never quite got around to it.
If somebody could work up a good primordial disease or twist to this article, though, I'd be more than happy for it to get better :D
If you're looking for a reason to keep her as SCP, say isotopic testing of the eggs indicate general levels of component elements that would be expected for the area she was purchased from roughly 100 million years ago, indicating there's more going on than just another survivor like the coelacanth.
It's a boy, not a girl.
And its food is modern, so the isotopic composition of its poop is modern.
S'why I said egg. I assume the agent who bought it would have grabbed the eggshell too, if it was there.
Alternatively, consider the following: pterodactyls were around 150 million years ago. During that time, the oxygen levels were at about 15%, roughly 60% of the levels nowadays; similarly, CO2 levels were between 200% and 500% of what they are today. Perhaps a note that Pterry appears to be adapted to a low-oxygen high-CO2 atmosphere? This is assuming that it would be good to make this more anomalous.
if your reading this your gay
I definitely feel like this should be an anomalous item or something. I've even got its log written up right here to help out:
Item Description: A mammalian creature resembling a small pterodactyl.
Date of Recovery: ██-██-████
Location of Recovery: ██████, South America
Current Status: Being kept as Dr. Rights' pet.
I definitely feel like this should be an anomalous item or something. I've even got its log written up right here to help out:
#1: It's not a mammalian creature resembling a pterodactyl. Pterosaurs did indeed have psuedo-'fur'.
#2: Fuck that. I see where you're coming from (I wondered the same a month or so back), but I think if the metric for 'anomalous item' or 'SCP' is how interesting it is, this definitely qualifies for SCP status.
It would be a shame to lose a fairly well-written article for no reason. Yes, recently the old crowbar was moved to the anomalous items list, but it's just as interesting there as it was as an article. Much more would be lost by eliminating this.
Expanding this could be cool (even the author says as much earlier in this discussion). But deleting it entirely would suck.
I have some suggestions to make this cute SCP a little stranger.
One idea is that anomalous traits don't appear unless more of the pterodactyls (maybe a weird flock effect). An addendum could be included on the discovery of more of the species, which may hint on why 346 needs to be contained.
The article mentions that 346 comes from an isolated species, but perhaps the females of the species have some kind of scary sexual-dimorphism that make the females larger and more dangerous than the males.
Or maybe you don't want to go the dangerous route. Not everything needs to be scary and harmful.
But if you like the dangerous sexual-dimorphism, I have an idea to make the females a bit more supernatural: make them Thunderbirds. The females would be predators that shoot lightning and the males harmless breeders and nest-tenders.
I know that we already have some electric animals (SCP-594), but I think this one could easily be adapted to become a unique member of that club.
I like this one. Nothing threatening about it, but I think that there need to be a few SCP objects like that just so that there's a reason for people to wind up getting hurt by a seemingly harmless artifact. ^_^ And engender a bit of healthy paranoia for those who are convinced that there must be something more sinister going on…
I don't know if SCPs are supposed to make you go "d'awww", but… d'awwww.
As to its status as an SCP rather than an anomalous item or needing some dark twist to make it work as SCP, I personally don't think it's necessary. Reading through the SCP list, one of the things I've found is that a lot of the animal-type SCPs seem to be contained and their existence covered up not because knowledge of their existence is in itself dangerous, but because it would make people Freak The Hell Out. Things like the atmospheric jellyfish or the tumor molerats? You could just as easily say "These are horrible, dangerous animals, but there are plenty of horrible, dangerous animals out there in the real world." In fact, covering up their existence arguably makes people less safe because if people knew about them, they could try to avoid them. But they're contained and covered up because knowing about something that vile and dangerous and just plain creepy would cause people to panic, they'd be firing guns at clouds and dousing the meerkat burrows at the zoo with gasoline and generally going crazy.
So the comparison here to other thought-extinct animals like the coelecanth doesn't really fit, because basically before it popped back up I'd guess almost no one outside a narrow section of the scientific community even knew what a coelecanth was or that it had existed in the first place. Heck, the only reason more people know about it now is because it's notable for not being dead. (Talk about setting your goals low, nyuk-nyuk.) But darn near everyone knows what a pterodactyl is, certainly enough people know that the headline "LIVING PTERODACTYL DISCOVERED" could cause people to Freak The Hell Out. Especially if it got sensationalized into "DINOSAURS ARE ALIVE!" and people thought a T-Rex was going to come stomping down the street to eat their kids.
So SCP-346 is probably suitable for containment at least for avoiding a (possibly relatively mild but still damaging) FTHO event. It does add to it that it's theorized he could be the result of a space-time rip they haven't found yet, because then releasing him to public knowledge would mean someone in the normal scientific community might get funded to go find out where he came from, and wind up stumbling into the past and stepping on some butterfly and ahhh hell.
The "dark" and "spooky" knobs have not always been set so high. Josie the half cat, the Puffer Kittens (THEY'RE MAIN LIST ARTICLES IN MY HEAD CANON! SHUT UP!) and quite a few others still exist from when it mostly "Weird" and "Wonderful"
Well said,
I was about to downvote for the reasons expressed above. I want a tiny dinosaur pet and don't consider an outbreak of cuteness to be a SCP problem.
But Aridorn, you convinced me that this is acceptable as an SCP, if only to maintain the status quo in the world. New beatle species get dealt with by biologists; elephants the size of a human hair get dealt with by SCP. I don't want too many friendly fuzzy harmless SCP's, but I'm ok with a (very) few.
Why did the agents not investigate further than just the eggs came from the black market. Wouldn't they track down where it came from and investigate that more? I'm not suggesting a whole story type log or anything, just maybe something like "investigations are ongoing" or something? Idk, just my thoughts.
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page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06
