Obscure Star Wars species trivia
Chiefly Legends material.
The Duinuogwuin, also called star dragons, are a species of spacefaring dragons that were described in the 1987 roleplaying game and mentioned only very sporadically elsewhere. They're long, many-limbed sapient dragons, capable of flying through space and using the Force. They're described as a very ancient species, but one that the rest of the galaxy knows very little about. They are also prone to random mutations and birth defects when reproducing, and a good portion of their offspring are born with the minds of animals. Some such offspring are put down, while others are left on isolated planets. The Krayt dragons of Tatooine are believed to descend from a colony of unintelligent Duinuogwuin offspring of this sort.
Dac, the shared homeworld of the Mon Calamari and the Quarren, is home to two other, less widely-seen sapient species, the Whalodons and the Moappa. The Whalodons are essentially sapient baleen whales, while the Moappa are telepathic jellyfish-like creatures that are only sapient collectively, when joined in large swarms. The Moappa supported the Quarren's rebellion during the Clone Wars, as both species resented the Mon Calamari's cultural hegemony of their world, and used their telepathy to send orders to Quarren fighters who were unaware of their existence.
When Dac was rendered uninhabitable by a Sith bioweapon about 130-odd years after the Battle of Yavin, the evacuation efforts included the use of huge tanker starships to rescue pods of Whalodons and Moappa swarms.
The Kumumgah were a species that inhabited Tatooine in the distant past, when it was still a lush tropical world, and who were conquered and enslaved by the Infinite Empire of the aggressive and expansionist Rakata. The Kumumgah rebelled against their conquerors, which the Rakata responded to by bombarding Tatooine into a sterile wasteland. The Kumumgah who survived this disaster split into two groups, which became the scavenging Jawas and the cave-dwelling Ghorfas. When offworld settlers arrived about 5,000 years before the movies' time, their drawing of water from the planet's aquifers caused the collapse of the Ghorfa culture and forced them to adopt a nomadic lifestyle on the surface, becoming the modern Tusken Raiders, who still refer to themselves as Ghorfas.
Knights of the Old Republic allows the player to speculate on whether Kumumgah slaves taken offworld were the ancestors of modern humanity, as their world of origin is not known in-universe.
The other contender for the human homeworld is Coruscant, whose original surface is now toxic and buried beneath kilometers of buildings and ruins and thus very difficult to study. Ancient, but post-Rakata, historic records describe a conflict between two groups native to the planet: a human culture called the Battalions of Zhell and an alien species called the Taung, who were defeated and driven offworld.
The Taung settled on Mandalore, becoming its first sapient inhabitants and founding the Mandalorian culture. The Mandalorians began to include other species under Mandalore the Ultimate, who did this in order to prevent his culture from dying out with his species after the Taung suffered heavy losses during their first war against the Republic. Within a few centuries, the Mandalorians had become an entirely multi-species culture, while the Taung gradually died out. The traditional Mandalorian helmet was also originally modeled after Taung facial features.
The Taung/Mandalorians' first major conflict after settling their new homeworld was against an insectoid people called the Nevoota, who were known for their disdain of death and fierceness in combat. Despite greatly outnumbering the Mandalorians and being led by a cunning warlord, the Nevoota were completely exterminated over three years of war. This event most likely caused the Mandalorians' later cultural focus on war and conflict.
This fate was almost shared by another species, the feline Cathar, during the Mandalorian Wars. The Cathar Padawan Juhani describes this as being driven by a desire on the Mandalorians' part to test themselves against another culture known for its prowess in battle. The Battle of Cathar resulted in the majority of the species being wiped out, and most of the survivors being forced to flee offworld, although enough survived to repopulate the planet after the fall of the Mandalorian Empire.
The first people to name themselves the Sith were not a Force tradition, but a species of red-skinned humanoids native to the Outer Rim planet Korriban. Their culture was taken over a group of exiled Dark Jedi that intermingled with the ruling caste, which eventually become composed entirely of Sith-human hybrids. Most of the first Sith Lords to war against the Republic were either Sith Purebloods or hybrids of various degrees. Over time, the ancient Sith either died out or were entirely absorbed into the human gene pool, and the first Sith Empire gave way to the various orders, brotherhoods, and traditions of the later Sith.
While humanity's ancestry is a matter of some debate, its later spread is clearer. After the collapse of the Infinite Empire, there was a long period where spaceflight was done only using slower-than-light ships before hyperdrives were reinvented. This resulted in many human colonies becoming scattered around the galaxy, leading to the formation of the various human cultures in the modern galaxy. Some colonies, however, were so isolated for so long that they became distinct species or subspecies altogether. The most notable of these are the blue-skinned Chiss, whose ancestors settled the frozen planet Csilla in the depths of the Unknown Regions.
The Chiss Ascendancy is one of the larger spacefaring nations in the Unknown Regions, and known for its powerful military. Its most notable citizen in the wider galaxy is the military genius Mitth'raw'nuruodo -- more commonly known as Grand Admiral Thrawn -- who was exiled following a dispute concerning the idea of preemptive strikes. Thrawn felt them to be a legitimate military tactic. The Ascendancy viewed it as murder. The traditional Chiss attitude to warfare can be roughly analogized as "never strike first, but, when struck, strike back so hard that the enemy will never be able to strike again".
The Chiss' militaristic attitudes developed in large part due to sharing their corner of the galactic frontier with several unpleasant neighbors. In addition to assorted raiders and pirates, these include a rather nasty abomination known as Mnggal-Mnggal. This is not a species per se so much as a gigantic mass of ooze connected by a single mind, which can burrow into and possess other sapient beings, turning them into hollowed-out puppets under the gestalt's control.
Its origins are unclear, but it is at least tens of thousands of years old. It has a central hub of sorts in the form of a planet so thoroughly infected that it has been entirely stripped of life and is now covered in immense seas and rivers of the sapient ooze, and orbited by a ring of ships from every known age of galactic history piloted by Mnggal-Mnggal's host bodies.
The Chiss are also not the only species to descend from humanity. The term "near-human" is thrown around a fair amount and not always very consistently -- it has been used for distinct human cultures, human offshoots and subspecies, and distinct alien species that happen to look more or less like humans -- but another group that does descend from an ancient human colony are the red-skinned Zeltrons of Zeltros, known for their ability to secrete pheromones through their skin, their low-level telepathy, and a society focused on the pursuit of pleasure. The Mirialans are also known to be a distant human offshoot.
Another potential member of the nebulously defined "at least Homo if not sapiens" group are the Twi'leks. They were considered to be regular aliens for a decent chunk of the franchise's history and are not referred to as near-humans in canon, which is part of why their males tend to look like... well, like Bib Fortuna or Orn Free Taa, very visibly nonhuman, but there are two suggestions to the contrary in more recent media:
One, both The Clone Wars and Rebels depict human/Twi'lek hybrid children -- the most prominently displayed human-other hybrids in the setting in general, in fact. Two, in The Old Republic MMORPG, the player can encounter Ashaa, an ancient Rakata AI that claims to have created the Twi'leks as part of a genetic engineering program carried out on the Infinite Empire's slave population. Ashaa's claims, however, are a little dodgy due to conflicting with other sources depicting Twi'leks as existing before her time.
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