A Realistic Take On The Koopa

The sly Larry Koopa (a young Koopa imperator) in the realistic goggles.

Although you’ll often see me enthusiastically talking about prehistoric animals like dinosaurs, I am also quite the veteran of the Super Mario franchise, having played a portion of the games for a long time and knowing quite a lot about its lore.

The villainous Koopa clan take a varying degree of inspiration from turtles, but while Koopa Troopas and Buzzy Beetles are recognisably testudine, more royal members like Bowser (named Koopa in Japan and so the namesake of the clan) and the koopalings are more unique, with a lot of un-chelonian, even un-reptilian features aside their draconic appearance. Instead of a horny beak, they share a fleshy muzzle with a variable set of teeth (canines). They are at least somewhat energetic and stand in an upright, bipedal posture. As for their shells, the carapace and plastron are usually not depicted fused (though the koopas still have the ability to hide in them like a turtle and show that off), and they even bear hair of a variety of styles.

Bowser, his child and his stupid adopted little koopalings as depicted in the games. Image courtesy of Nintendo.

Indeed, revisiting the franchise as someone now into prehistoric life, they are very reminiscent of synapsids (specifically therapsids), a special group of prehistoric reptiles (at least by traditional means), hailing from before the dinosaurs, that were the ancestors of today’s mammals, with a transition of traits between reptiles and mammals, including the sail-backed Dimetrodon, famously mistaken for a dinosaur, as well as other oddities like the herbivorous Moschops and the sabre-toothed Gorgonops. What if, the koopas are not actually turtles, but a surviving lineage of sapient, armoured synapsids from the Mushroom Kingdom that convergently evolved turtle-like characteristics? That’s what I imagine in my headcanon, and I decided to sketch this myself with a realistic interpretation of the scheming Larry Koopa, as if he was a real synapsid. His species I scientifically name Koopa imperator is where the royal koopas like Bowser, Bowser Jr. and the other koopalings belong, and although they’re variable in appearance, that is comparable to us humans as one fashionable species as well.

I also imagine that this species is a basal branch of the Koopa group, just somewhat more turtle-like than the group’s synapsid common ancestor, with other members like Koopa Troopas being more derived for a more turtle-like appearance. Shigeru Miyamoto actually once conceptualised Bowser as an ox, inspired by the Ox-King from the Japanese anime musical film Alakazam the Great, but Takashi Tezuka soon remarked him as looking more like a turtle than an ox, and so more inspiration was taken from Chinese softshell turtles for the look. I also jokingly liked to call him a lion back around 2023, mainly because his painting in Super Mario 64 looked menacingly like one, and today I like to jokingly call the koopalings as well as the Toadies from Yoshi’s Island "reptilian rats" because of their stupidly greedy demeanour as well as with both jokes, their mammalian characteristics.

Inostrancevia, a horrifying carnivorous representative of the synapsid reptiles of long ago. Art by Dmitry Bogdanov.