Best Fictional Lizard Tournament! (Zaurnament?!)

Welcome to the Best Fictional Lizard Tournament, otherwise known as the Zaurnament!

The full list of candidates can be found here!

Polls are published every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, in batches of 8! Please REBLOG any that interest you, it really helps with visibility!

Active Polls:

Round 1M

Round 1N

Round 1O

Round 1P

Feel free to leave civil comments/replies, reblogs, tags, or directly message me about anything! I'll read them all, probably!

Past Tournaments:

I didn't get to do this for the Snournament for various reasons, but if I'm feeling it this time, I will try to post Round 1 stats like I used to do! I've gained like 100 followers over the past couple tournaments, so I guess for many of you it will be the first time seeing it.

So, you may know that evolutionarily speaking, birds are reptiles; they are dinosaurs, and thus archosaurs, and thus closely related to crocodiles; in fact, crocodiles are more closely related to birds than lizards.

In another sense however, since they are very distinct from other reptiles, birds are usually practically grouped on their own even though this means separating them from their crocodile relatives. Thus, in this sense, the "reptile" group is paraphyletic, including some but not all descendants of a common ancestor.

And so, the question I have for you: Would you consider birds to be reptiles or not? Don't try to think about it scientifically, think about it more based on vibes, as that's how much of these tournaments operate.

Like, if I said "oh yeah my favorite reptile Pokemon is Pidgeotto", would you think "oh cool", would you think "uhhhh, I mean I guess technically?", or would you think "...what?"., or anything in between those.

So in the marine reptile tournament, we allowed turtles obviously, but also any turtle/tortoise that wasn't water averse, such as (I think), the Koopa. Conversely, this means that tortoises, land tortoises specifically and water averse ones like Torterra, Torkoal, and so on, were not allowed.

So, the question is: Should we at some point in the future (probably not right after the Lizard tournament), have a small scale Tortoise tournament for land based and ambiguous tortoises only? So the Koopa would qualify again, as would Torkoal, Torterra, Master Oogway, and so on?

We could also broaden it to include tortoises in general; so maybe Drednaw, Blastoise, etc would be included too? Not sure where the line would be drawn.

I'm sure most of you would say it wouldn't hurt, but the concerns are a) would there be enough tortoises to have such a tournament? I would want at least 64, ideally at least 128, and b) it will delay all future tournaments wherever I put it in the schedule. And trust me, we have some cool ones coming up eventually!

Propaganda (if any) under the cut! Please be civil, and please reblog!

Propaganda (if any) under the cut! Please be civil, and please reblog!

Propaganda (if any) under the cut! Please be civil, and please reblog!