"More the dragon-lizard thing," Cosima says, considering that reaction. "For one thing, we don't have elves where I'm from and we have some pretty scary cautionary tales about people who take too much of an interest in, say, variations in skin color." To put it extremely mildly, but she doesn't really want to get into slavery, genocide and the history of modern eugenics at the moment.

Instead, she says, "I don't want to influence; I want to understand. A problem I'd work on is, um. You'd think a lizard and a snake are more alike the a lizard and a dragon, right? Size is a more important factor than number of limbs. But using tools I have at home, I can compare how they develop. A lizard may be more like a small dragon than it is like a snake with legs, once you have more information."