Alien Creator: need help developing an alien race?

I stumbled upon this slideshow from Bored Panda about animal skulls and what they would look like if an alien were to guess what the animal the skull belonged to would look like.

Lol! These are great! Im going to google random skulls and create me some new aliens

 

My first thought was -I wonder if they did a take on the platypus. And they did (#14).

 

#8 is a good example of how a wrong conclusion can be be come to, even when you come from the same planet.



They show an African hyrax skull, but then an Australian quokka as the whole animal. The ramus on the lower mandible (the really heavy part of the jaw in the top first image) is impossible to miss in a hyrax.

A quokka skull looks like this:

 

*note to self: go to Hobby Lobby for tracing paper and graphite to trace quokka skull

 

BTW, here's another take on a similar idea, this time taking the errors and assumptions commonly applied to dinosaurs, but instead to animals you know from the modern world.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/natashaumer/dinosaur-animals

 

Then you have things like deep sea fishes that don't need any help to look freaky as hell.

 

Here's a suggestion: find an animal that you find interesting, then go look for documentaries about it with the sound off or one that has little or no narration. Watch the way the animal moves, the way it interacts with other animals, beyond just hunting or mating behaviors. Write a list of the attributes you notice & from there, write a description without looking at a picture (no peeking!). If you have an idea about where your alien lives or will be going, try to make what you've come up with fit in that environment. You don't need to be super-descriptive or scientific, but it should be something that at least sounds like it could be real.