INFO: The Nosaurians were a sentient, bipedal, reptilian species native to the planet New Plympto in the Core Worlds. A Nosaurian was easily recognized by a row of long horns, a covering of tough scales, and a beakful of sharp teeth. Members of the species had the ability to produce a brief flash of light from inside their mouths, a knack they used for silent, long-distance communication. Nosaurians were colorblind, although few found this bothersome.
Their language's phonemes consisted of hisses, barks, and warbles, and its syntax commonly used metaphors related to weather, nature, and the seasons. They were capable of speaking Basic yet generally chose not to. When on their homeworld, they had an inexplicable ability to tell when the sun was setting and an overwhelming urge to "sing it down" by braying. This behavior persisted offworld, but the disturbance in a Nosaurian's internal rhythms often brought it on at inopportune times with no real tie to New Plympto's day–night cycle.
Nosaurians were naturally even-tempered. However, a long history of what they viewed as marginalization and exploitation at the hands of Humans left them bitter and angry. This began soon after the Nosaurians met their first offworlders, the Corellians. These Human neighbors became enmeshed in New Plympto's trade of rikknit eggs, a valuable component in ji rikknit and other recreational substances. As the rikknit population on New Plympto plummeted and the Galactic Republic imposed sanctions on the trade, the economy crumbled. The Nosaurians saw little choice but to join the Confederacy of Independent Systems. After the group's defeat in the Clone Wars, the Nosaurians tried to carry on the fight, only to be crushed by the 501st Legion and enslaved by the Galactic Empire. Decades later, when they opposed an invasion by beings known as Yuuzhan Vong, the aggressors unleashed a deadly virus on their homeworld and rendered it uninhabitable.
Nosaurians who made their names on New Plympto included the resistance leaders General Rootrock and Fefar Blackeye. However, economic hardship and enslavement forced many Nosaurians to emigrate over the centuries. Some gravitated toward thrill-seeking professions, as exemplified by the podracer pilot Clegg Holdfast. Others drifted among the galactic fringe, as in the case of Bomo Greenbark, who left his homeworld searching for his family after the end of the Clone Wars.
RACE: Nosaurian
HEIGHT: 1.3 to 1.5 Meters Tall
SKIN: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, brown, white, gray, black
DISTINCTION: Horns, luminescent mouth lining
LANGUAGE: Nosaurian
HOMEWORLD:New Plympto was a temperate terrestrial world in the Core Worlds region populated by Nosaurians. It was discovered by Corellians in 10,019 BBY - although the Jedi Order apparently had contact with it since at least 25,000 BBY, using the native population as potential recruits. The planet was also the home world of podracer pilot Clegg Holdfast. Its capital was the city of Phemiss.
Prior to the Clone Wars, New Plympto was welcomed into the Galactic Republic as a source of rikknit eggs, the Nosaurians' chief export. However, they were denied representation in the Galactic Senate and eventually grew alienated. Soon enough, the market for rikknit eggs evaporated and New Plympto was, for all intents and purposes, abandoned by commercial interests.
With the outbreak of the Clone Wars, the Confederacy of Independent Systems recruited New Plympto to their cause with the promise of reviving the rikknit egg market and rebuilding the planet's economy. Jedi Master Dass Jennir led a battalion of clone troopers on New Plympto against the Nosaurian rebels but Jennir sought refuge with the Nosaurians after his clone troops received Order 66. The Hajial Chase, an old stretch of forest 400 km from Phemiss and surrounding woodlands served as shelter to renegade Nosuarians.
Following the Clone Wars, New Plympto begrudgingly became an Imperial world. The resistance was quickly and easily quashed by the Nosaurians' new Imperial masters. An Imperial governor ruled the planet from a facility on Karsten Moon, where corporate scientists conducted experiments to synthesize the drug called ji rikknit from a few captive rikknit species, though their best result was an inferior narcotic with harmful side effects. The planet continued to be under Imperial control until the defeat of the Empire and the rise of the New Republic.
Before the Yuuzhan Vong took control of the planet, it had a population of about fifteen million living on its surface. When the Vong attacked, a resistance movement under Numa Rar was formed. The Vong grew tired of the fierce resistance on the planet and used a biological weapon on New Plympto, killing seven million on the surface. The planet was rendered uninhabitable.
BIOLOGY AND APPEARANCE:The Nosaurians were a species of sentient bipedal reptiles who stood slightly shorter than the average Human at 1.2 to 1.55 Meters Tall. They had lithe, long arms and short legs in proportion to their bodies. Each hand featured three or four fingers and an opposable thumb, and each birdlike foot three forward-pointing toes; some members of the species had a fourth, backward pointing toe as well. All of these digits sported sharp claws. Nosaurian musculature was similar to that of a Human. Their hides were tough and covered in scales. Light green to black pigmentation was most common, but other scale colors included blue, green, yellow, orange, red, brown, white, gray, and black. Nosaurians often had markings of another hue such as a lighter belly and chin or a mask about the eyes. Members of the species were nimble acrobats with acute combat reflexes.
One trait that distinguished Nosaurians from other reptilian species was a crest of horns that grew atop their heads. Most members of the species displayed six bony spikes of varying lengths, although children could have fewer, and some adults had many more, often growing on the back of the skull as well. These horns were quite strong; the Nosaurian Bomo Greenbark once broke chains over his head spikes, and members of the species used their spikes as defensive impaling weapons. Nevertheless, they were not indestructible, and Nosaurians often wore protective gear to prevent horn damage. The older and more pugnacious the Nosaurian, the more likely he or she was to have suffered a broken horn. Some individuals featured hornlike protrusions on other parts of the body, including the cheeks, chin, knees, and shoulders.
A pair of small eyes lay below the horns. The sclera and iris could be of any number of colors, including pink, yellow, white, brown, and gray. The species saw only in black and white, although they typically learned to distinguish the subtle differences of what other species perceived as color, at least much of the time. Nevertheless, this monochromatic vision sometimes led to problems interpreting technological devices such as datapad screens that assumed the user had color vision.
A long, beaklike snout full of sharp teeth and perforated by two nostrils was another distinctive Nosaurian facial feature. The lower canines sometimes protruded from the mouth even when closed. Nosaurians had the ability to light up the lining of their mouths at will. The resulting flash was bright enough to briefly illuminate a room and even blind someone, but it could not be sustained for long.
Nosaurian children were covered in a coat of downy feathers of the same color as their scales. As the Nosaurian aged, these feathers fell out, lingering latest on the head and elbows. During adolescence, beginning at age 11, the remaining feathers molted, leaving the Nosaurian bald by age 13. Nosaurians were considered adults at age 13 and reached sexual maturity at 16. On average, they lived to be a standard century old. Most members of the species wore clothing as a matter of habit, and females sometimes hung long, diaphanous ribbons from their horns.
CULTURE AND HISTORY:Among friends, Nosaurians were perceived as cool-headed and congenial. To outsiders, however, they were known to disdain Humans—and, to a lesser extent, other species—for what the reptilians considered a history of mistreatment. This attitude began in the days of the Old Republic and festered and deepened under the regime of the Galactic Empire. By the time the Yuuzhan Vong War broke out in 25 ABY, Nosaurians still had a reputation for surliness and hot-headedness from outsiders. The despoliation of their planet during that conflict deepened this sullen humor and plunged many Nosaurians into a miasma of hopelessness and dismay.
Nosaurians tended to live in the mossy, coastal swamps of their homeworld. Their population fluctuated with the times. New Plympto was home to some one billion Nosaurians in the days of the Old Republic, but this number dropped to a mere 20 million after the Clone Wars. Under Imperial occupation, the numbers fell to 7 million.
The species was divided into clans. Some of these lived in isolated villages, while others banded together to create city-states, the highest form of government on the world. The city of Phemiss was considered the planetary capital. Nosaurian cities featured domed, earthen homes with rounded entrances and window-bearing turrets. These buildings were typically amassed into rings that centered on a shared courtyard used for communal feasting and childrearing. Although these arrangements made Nosaurian cities feel disorganized and difficult to navigate to offworlders, Humans made up 4% of New Plympto's population, and most cities featured offworlder districts that followed a layout more familiar to non-Nosaurians.
The Nosaurians relied on outside traders for much of their food, communications gear, high technology, and weapons. In exchange, they offered simple products and their world's major export, the eggs and ovum sacs of a native species of crustacean known as the rikknit. These eggs were a component in the production of several intoxicating substances, including the spice known as ji rikknit.
Upon molting his or her down feathers, a Nosaurian typically apprenticed to a master from his or her clan for a few years to learn a trade. Many Nosaurians took up mundane vocations such as candlemaking, fishing, or piloting local transports known as swoopshaws. Others took darker-tinged occupations such as raiding. A few Nosaurians were clanless, and thus outcasts in Nosaurian society. Xant Flashheel, for example, operated from Phemiss and took risky jobs to make ends meet. Many others relied on the rikknit trade or rikknit hunting for their living. Rikknit harvesters became experts at arboreal locomotion, climbing trees using crampons known as tree-claws and brachiating to get into position. They then spread a net a few meters below a rikknit nest. Bracing themselves in place, the hunters used a sharp harvest blade to cut the food caches and slit the ovum sac of the rikknit above. When done properly, this harvesting did not kill the animal. Nevertheless, rikknits could and did fight back, so rikknit harvesters learned to fight skillfully despite the staggering heights, bracing themselves against the tree bark with their foot claws. Their harvest tools doubled as deadly weapons, and even a few non-Nosaurians used them for combat purposes. Some Nosaurian harvesters worked illegally; Glarc Leapfar was one of the more successful rikknit poachers and the leader of a group who operated in a forest called the Hajial Chase; nevertheless, his group made efforts to harvest rikknit eggs sustainably.
Marriages were monogamous and typically arranged by the partners' clans. Young males sparred with one another in public bouts of head-butting to prove their physical prowess and, they hoped, their desirability to the clans of unmarried females. Members of the species could form fierce bonds with their mates and their families; the Nosaurian Bomo Greenbark traveled to three different worlds to track down his wife and daughter, who had been sold into slavery after the Empire took control of New Plympto.
Nosaurians were proud of their culture and conscious to keep their old ways alive. They were not afraid to fight to protect that which they valued and could be determined combatants when provoked. A Nosaurian could turn claws, horns, and teeth against an adversary, and young males were known to cross horns with rivals in a skull-bashing display of dispute resolution. In times of war, Nosaurian forces employed everything from simple axes, force pikes, knives, and polearms to advanced blasters. Their armies used guerrilla tactics: they kept to jungles, subsisted on locally available substances like nectar, communicated silently over long distances using mouth flashes, and set up only temporary camps of domelike tents. They were not beyond torturing prisoners of war.
The Nosaurian voice was typically high-pitched and twittering, and spoken Nosaurian sounded like a chorus of musical hisses, trills, tweets, and warbles. Nevertheless, their vocal tone dropped into bass, coarse honks and woofs when angry, disturbed, or upset. The written form of the language employed two separate alphabets that could be used in conjunction and relied on metaphors and imagery related to nature, the seasons, and the weather. Nosaurian morphology allowed the species to speak Basic; most Nosaurians knew the language, but preferred to avoid it due to its Human associations. A typical Nosaurian had both a personal name and a clan name. Personal names tended to be non-Basic terms, such as the masculine names Bomo, Clegg, Fefar, and Moco; and the feminine names Mesa and Resa. Clan names, on the other hand, were often compounds of two Basic terms. Examples included Blackeye, Farlock, Flashblade, Fishgather, Greenbark, Holdfast, Leafhorn, Leapfar, Limbfree, Minkfruit, Riverwander, Rootrock, Seawatcher, Sunsinger, and Tallmeadow.
Nosaurians retained an ingrained trait from their evolutionary past. When on their homeworld, twilight triggered the overwhelming urge to "sing down the sun." Although the compulsion could be resisted, most Nosaurians brayed as loud as they could as day turned to night. The behavior was so ingrained that Nosaurians went through the nightly ritual even when indoors or out of sight of the sun. Nosaurians who left New Plympto did not lose the behavior, either, but their distance from their homeworld threw their internal rhythms off and resulted in their "singing" at strange, seemingly inexplicable times. This compulsion could all but counteract a Nosaurian's attempts at stealth; if the pursuers knew of the quirk, they could simply wait for the Nosaurian's vocalizing to give his or her location away.
