How would a human/floral humanoid offspring look?

Question

I’m trying to figure out what the appearance of a human and a floral humanoid offspring would look like. The floral humanoids have humanlike bodies with petal hair and “unnatural” skin color (which usually a couple shades lighter of their petal color).

We know children inherit half of their parents’ DNA. Let’s take a (white/black) biracial child for an example. The child usually has light brown skin, brown hair, and brown eyes but they can have blonde or black hair, blue/green eyes, and paler or darker skin.

If the biracial child had a child with a white person, the child would be 3/4 white and 1/4 black. The child could look more white or biracial (considering genetics isn’t the same for everyone).

I know genetics go deeper than that but I just want to provide a basic example (I’m not much a geneticist so don’t expect a complex scientific post from me lol).

The floral humanoids have flower pigments for their petals and skin color. I don’t think it can mix with human pigment and it’s not possible for genetics to come up with new pigments. It could be possible that flower pigment can transfer over to the hair or skin or maybe it could even combine with human pigment.

I’m not sure about the hair. It has to be either human, petal, or both. Of course there can’t be a mixture because it wouldn’t make any sense.

(Fun Fact: There was a human-pig hybrid. No joke. I wonder how it would’ve turned out?)

I thought about humans and floral humanoids unable to produce offspring due to genetic incompatibility.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Anything you want.

Human and plants are massively genetically different and are utterly incompatible for breeding. As such, radical genetic engineering or magic or a wildly different evolutionary chain is needed.

As such, you can have whatever combination you want. You're not bound by normal biology. You can swap pigments, have them look like whatever, and adjust the form according to your whims.

Answer 2

It depends.

What's the full appearance of the floral race? How human looking are they? If the petals are the only nonhuman trait we could assume their offspring wouldn't be that different. If they are more plant-like with more alien bodies then it's a different story. In genetics it's a law that two species that aren't closely related can't reproduce. For that you have two choices: first they are basically human with a few different genes and second they are xenophiles that can reproduce with anything.

When thinking about hybrids try to look at tigons and ligers for reference.

A tigon is the offspring of a male tiger and female lion. However a liger is an interesting case of genetics. They are the offspring of a male lion and female tiger. You'll notice that they are huge compared to either species. This is the result of a gene present in lion males that usually is inhibited by a gene in females. However tigers lack this system and ligers grow to huge as a result.

Floral and human hybrids might have variations.

• Human mother and Floral father could lead to a mostly human child with petal hair and a slightly more human colour. We are sort of pink, yellow or brown.
• Floral mother and human father could lead to a mostly floral child with an alien looking body but human hair for example.

Think about what florals have that we lack and vice versa.

Florals may have genes that decide how large their petals grow. A hybrid may have oversized petals as a sign of their mixed heritage.

Answer 3

Colour

Their skin tone should feature both parent's pigments at half intensity. However, this will not mean a mixture of both parent's skin tones; the actual mixture will appear more human-like with darker skin tones. They will vary between half-and-half with a dark-skinned human parent to a lighter version of the floral parent with a pale-skinned human parent

Hair/Petals

There's no given reason can't have both hair and petals. They could easily both coexist together on the head. In this state, both structures will probably be thinner or less extensive than in their parents. The colouration of the hair and petals will be independent, and inherited directly from the relevant parent

Answer 4

They are normal humans.

This is because the floral colored humans are genetically engineered post conception, starting from normal human stock. Here is the scheme, from a different question.

Practical reason for genetically engineering exotic skin colors in humans?

Your floral humans start as fertilized human zygotes. Genetically engineered neural crest cells are added at the correct embryonic stage, and these migrate to take up their roles as melanocytes. Cells destined to become hair bearing epithelia are also added to produce the petal effect. These engineered cells have various pigments added to produce the floral colors desired.

The engineered human has the spectacular floral look you request but the base genome is that of a normal human as are the gametes. Engineering is confined to particular somatic cells. When a floral human reproduces with a human, the offspring is human.

This protects the delicate deep workings of the organism from being disrupted by introduced genes, which are confined to somatic stem cells. Occasionally there are disruptions, and occasionally old floral humanoids start reverting to their "rootstock" and lose their petals and pigments with age.

The fact that the floral people do not breed true also protects the commercial enterprise producing and selling them, because otherwise anyone with access to some flower people (like the flower people themselves) could breed their own flower people and flood the market or at least make them so common that prices drop. It is the same principle as improved seeds that do not breed true. That preserves the market for improved seeds.