Non-Mammalian Hair

A witch did it.

"Oh, Larry got himself an entourage! I guess he's thinking he's a superstar now that he is a turtle, with a white mohawk somehow. Turtles are not meant to be able to grow hair, I'll have you know. I know! It is something I had to learn myself the hard way back in kindergarten, when I mistook a turtle for a 100 gigawatt bolt of cloth! Then I was wondering why it wouldn't swim and I was rather the sad little critter."

— raocow in Hello world 5, being only semi-relevant to this trope.

Some non-mammalian cartoon characters are drawn with what looks to be real hair on their heads, despite the fact that real hair is exclusive to mammals and one of our defining traits. Bird characters tend to get away with this the most, since their "hair" can be handwaved as feathers that happen to look like Tertiary Sexual Characteristics, namely long "hair" on female characters.

Lesser versions of this trope include non-mammals with eyelashes (another signifier that the wearer is female) or eyebrows to make human-like facial expressions. This trope is tricky to extend to aliens whose species probably can't be defined on our terms. Occasionally it might apply to characters who are mammals, if they're depicted with profuse human-like hair, yet expressly identified as species (whales, hippos, walruses, etc) which are bald or nearly so.

Compare Non-Mammal Mammaries, when breasts are used to humanize female non-mammal characters.

See also Furry Female Mane, Weird Beard (a "beard" that's not made out of true hair) and Robot Hair.

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Examples

Advertising

• Birdie the Early Bird of McDonaldland is an anthropomorphic bird with brown hair worn in pigtails.
• In the Silentnight mattress ads featuring the hippo and duck couple, a couple of commercials featuring their children show that they have a duck daughter with a ponytail.

Anime and Manga

• Delicious in Dungeon: The piscine-type merfolk have hair despite being more closely related to fish than mammals. Later subverted when it turns out to be water plants rooted to their scalps.
• Digimon Adventure: Wargreymon has short hair under his helmet, despite being a humanoid Cyborg dinosaur. Furthermore, Garudamon, a bird-woman, has flowing blonde locks for hair.
• Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: Both Tohru's father and Lucoa have manes in their dragon forms (although the latter's is probably made of feathers given she's supposed to be a Gender Flipped Quetzalcoatl). Dragonewt's semi-humanoid form also has hair closer to what you'd expect for a human.
• One Piece:
  • Most Fish-men have hair.
  • Drake keeps his hair when he turns into a dinosaur, though prior to the Time Skip it's covered by his bicorn hat. It's more obvious in his design after the Time Skip.
• Sonic the Hedgehog: Sango Morimoto's design for Charmy the bee gives him bright pink hair. Other artists scrap the hair, as did Sega when they made him a Canon Immigrant.

Asian Animation

• The main character of Bread Barbershop, Bread Pitt, has a mustache despite being... well, bread.
• Happy Heroes: In the Season 5 arc where the Supermen are shrunken to the size of ants, two of the ants they meet, the queen and the pink girl ant, both have heads of hair.
• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: The bees in Mighty Little Defenders episode 7 have full heads of hair.
• Yamucha's-Kung Fu Academy features a gang of squid thieves, the leader of which somehow has a Beard of Evil resembling a five-o'-clock shadow.

Comic Books

• Disney Ducks Comic Universe:
  • Some of the female ducks have "hair" on their heads in addition to feathers (such as the one in our page image, Magica de Spell, who for being a witch, has a fitting Morticia Addams-esque bob cut), while most of the male ducks just have white "feathers" that behave like hair, as in the case of Scrooge's whiskers. Gyro Gearloose does have "hair", though, and Gladstone Gander's curls seem to vary between being feathers and actually being colored blond, Depending On The Colorist.
  • Some male examples exist too. Ludwig von Drake has a fringe of hair, giving the impression that he's bald (but he has feathers on the top of his head!). Flintheart Glomgold◊ has a very full beard.^note  Oddly, Glomgold only has a hairy beard in the animated series DuckTales (1987); in the comics. It's the same color as his feathers. In DuckTales (1987), Launchpad McQuack has a red forelock peeking out from his aviator's cap; whether the rest of his head is drawn with hair or white feathers varies from episode to episode.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW): Bad Apple in "Night of the Living Apples" is a particularly extreme example, as he manages to sport a magnificent handlebar mustache despite being a fruit.
• Sonic the Comic: Tekno is a canary with green hair on her head.
• In a comic based on the 1980 Flash Gordon movie, when Flash and Aura pass Frigia, an animal that looks like a triceratops covered in shaggy hair can be seen.

Fan Works

• The Hater Good: Sanjay is changed to a dragon since humans are said to be almost non-existent, but he still has his black hair.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows: Unlike the other four Turtles, Venus has hair. Word of God confirms that it's to mark her as the only female Turtle.
• This Time Round: In the Funny Animal subuniverse "This Toon Round", Author Avatar Daibhid Chelonidae is a tortoise with what his creator calls "an inexplicable dark-brown ponytail".
• Spyro the Dragon: Shadows of the Past: Spyro's mother Archema is a dragon with purple hair.
• In Taylor Varga, Taylor initially tries to give her Saurial lizard-girl form human hair (her hair being the one thing about her appearance she really likes) but quickly finds that it both looks weird and tends to get caught in her scales. She settles for giving herself a crest of feathers shaped to suggest hair.
• In The Myth of Link & Zelda: Breath of the Wild, there is a Zora character named Lochlia who has Hylian hair instead of a head tail like the other Zora. This is because she is half Hylian by her father, Link, who had a relationship with Princess Mipha in his younger years.

Films — Animated

• Disney:
  • Aladdin: Iago, a parrot, has what appear to be eyebrows.
  • The Emperor's New Groove: Toward the end, Kuzco is temporarily turned into both a tortoise and a parrot with his hairstyle before being changed back into a llama.
  • The Jungle Book (1967): The vultures, who sport Beatles-style mops of hair on their heads because they are supposed to be The Beatles if they were a vulture barbershop quartet. (Values Dissonance in the animation department...)
  • Robin Hood (1973): Sir Hiss appears to have three strands of hair sticking out from underneath his hat as well as a few ruffles of fur on his cheeks.
  • The Sword in the Stone: Some of the animals in which both Merlin and Mim turn into during their Wizard Duel are for some reason either birds, reptiles, or even arthropods that retain their respective hairstyles.
• DreamWorks Animation:
  • Chicken Run: Downplayed. Many of the chickens have combs resembling different hairstyles.
  • Kung Fu Panda 2: Lord Shen is an evil peacock with large eyebrows, a Fu Manchu mustache, and a goatee.
• Monsters, Inc.: Roz is a large garden snail-like monster with a tuft of white hair on her head. Also, some of the monsters, whether resembling either toads, slugs, or octopi, will inevitably have some form of hair on their heads. The prequel Monsters University reveals the crab-like Henry Waternoose used to have an afro.
• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf Film Series:
  • Counselor Gecko from Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: The Tiger Prowess has a head of red, spiky hair.
  • In Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf - Moon Castle: The Space Adventure, the Bitter Gourd King has four Super Gourd Shock Troopers assisting him. One of them, the watermelon Shock Trooper, has a head of black hair.
• Rango: Beans the desert lizard has curly locks of auburn hair. The gunslinger Rattlesnake Jake has a black mark under his lips that resembles a mustache.
• Rock-A-Doodle: Chanticleer and Goldie. In the case of Chanticleer, his "hair" is actually his comb (a fleshy structure found on the heads of chickens, usually much larger on roosters) which in his case is shaped like a pompadour haircut colored black to resemble Elvis Presley.
• Barbie:
  • Barbie: The Pearl Princess has Kuda, a seahorse, and Madam Ruckus, an octopus, with hair

Films — Live-Action

• Firehouse Dog:
  • Lola, a dalmation, has a head of braided hair.
  • Rexxx, has a pompadour, however his hair is confirmed to be a toupee when it falls off during a stunt gone wrong.
• Muppet Treasure Island: Captain Smollett, played by Kermit the Frog, has a white Sailor's Ponytail. It may be a powdered wig of the sort commonly worn at the time but, if so, it stays in place when he's hanging upside down. In the music video for Ziggy Marley's closing theme, "Love Power", he has dreadlocks instead.
• Pete's Dragon (1977): Eliot the dragon has hair; possibly not a straight example because Pete's song where he describes him claims that he's "both a fish and a mammal" (although Eliot certainly doesn't have any fish-like qualities).
• Bill, Gil and Jill, the frog advertising executives in The Muppets Take Manhattan, all have hair.
• The Super Inframan: Dragon-man, one of the film's many ridiculous-looking monsters, is a Draconic Humanoid with a Fu Manchu-stache.
• Once Upon a Warrior: The villainess, Sorceress Irendri, starts off as a human before gaining a powerful Scaled Up form as a serpentine monster. Somehow, in her monstrous form Irendri retains her human hair.

Literature

• Franny K. Stein: The Fran With Four Brains reveals that Franny has bearded slugs that she shaves daily.
• The Spiderwick Chronicles: Merfolk and Nixies are fishlike and amphibian-like species, respectively, with "external gill filaments" of various kinds that resemble hair but aren’t. In the published version of the field guide, the Caribbean Mermaid has what looks like anemone tendrils on her head, while the lionfish-like Atlantic Sea King has lionfish fins there. The Nixie also has skin markings over her eyes that look like eyebrows.
• Ssalia and the Dragons of Avienot: Both ssyrean and dragons can grow hair (including beards) in a fairly wide range of colours, despite apparently being reptilian (scaly and egg-laying). Then again, as the book doesn't take place on Earth, they are technically aliens and such labels don't necessarily need to apply.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The Falleen are a reptilian humanoid species who have full heads of hair. The Essential Guide to Alien Species notes that this is unusual, however.
  • Whether Hutts are better classified as reptiles or gastropods is unclear (they share biological traits of those and other types of animals) but they clearly aren't mammals. Nonetheless, Jabba's father in Legends, Zorba the Hutt was unusual among his kind, as he had long, white, dreadlocked hair on his head and a great, braided beard. Because this was such a rarity in Hutts, Zorba's hair marked him as a kind of mutation among his people, and they rarely hid their distaste of it. In canon works such as The Clone Wars, Hutts are seen using creatures known as Sha'rellian Toops as living makeshift hairpieces.

Live-Action TV

• Siren (2018): All merpeople have hair even while in their natural forms, despite being acquatic creatures which have no discernible need for it.
• Star Trek: The Cardassians all have a full head of shiny black hair, despite the rest of them being scaly (though armadillos are also mammals with scales). It's thick, clumpy, and feather-like, but it's still hair. They can also hybridize with at least two conventionally mammalian humanoid species, and the females have breasts. The humanoid chameleons known as the Jem'Hadar also have something that appears to be a black ponytail hidden behind their ceratopsid-like bony crests, though some sources claim it's actually some sort of fiberoptic cable, since their entire race are cyborg Super Soldiers. The Klingons are also sometimes described as being some sort of reptile, but this is far from consistent.

Myths & Religion

• Altaic Mythology: In Armenian folklore dragons (called vishaps) tended to have lion-like manes. One story involves a vishap tricking a boy into picking out the lice from its hair so that he can eat the boy.
• Chinese Mythology: It's common for Asian dragons, who are more or less universally described as great reptilian serpents, to be depicted with furry manes and whiskers.
• The fur-bearing trout is a fearsome critter from U.S. and Icelandic folklore. The American tale would have it as a breed of trout that supposedly grew a thick coat of fur to ward off the cold, while the Icelandic version is a poisonous fish sent to swarm rivers as a punishment for human wickedness. The legend is thought to have originated as a result of certain parasitic molds that infect fish and make them seem to have grown hair or fur.
• Classical Mythology:
  • Medusa is an inversion of this, being a mammal(ish creature) with reptiles for hair.
  • Any mammalian/bird hybrid such as hippogriffs or griffins.

Puppet Shows

• Bear in the Big Blue House: Jeremiah Tortoise has a fringe of white hair and a long white beard.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons: Many monsters are portrayed as (usually female and beautiful) non-mammals with hair. Naga, mariliths, lillendi, harpies... some of them are magical or demonic beings, but it's disturbingly consistent.
• Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40,000: The greenskins are naturally hairless, because they're essentially sentient and extremely violent humanoid fungi. Most orc/k hair is limited to topknots which are explained as being a specialized breed of squig (small, mindless and very hungry/aggressive beasties) that clamps onto the skin with its teeth and is used as a "clip on" hairpiece.

Toys

• My Little Pony: One of the Pony Friends in G1 is a dinosaur with long hair.

Video Games

• Animal Crossing: Several non-mammalian Villagers (such as Pate the duck) have hair.
• Carrie's Order Up!: Downplayed. Some of the anthropomorphic sea life sport fins or tendrils that look like hair, like Skyler the swordfish and Calcia the lobster.
• Darkstalkers: Q-Bee has what appears to be hair, although it (along with her cute mammalian face and other attributes) is a lure designed to trap foolish mammalian males.
• Donkey Kong Country series: The Kremlings (a group of anthropomorphic crocodiles) are generally hairless, barring a few exceptions. The only confirmed female members, Kass and Kalypso, are both depicted with hair. There are also the Kasplat enemies, whose hair actually plays an important role in Donkey Kong 64, as its colour indicates which Kong member can collect the blueprint the Kasplat leaves behind after being defeated.
• Eastern Exorcist has a minor character, an anthropomorphic scorpion-man who has a long, bushy white beard. And huge eyebrows, too.
• Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach: Despite being an animatronic reptile, Montgomery Gator has enough hair for a mohawk.
• Golden Force have one of the main characters, the Draconic Humanoid Drago, who has a head of human hair ending in braids. It's not too evident during gameplay however (because of the game's animation being pixelated sprites) but it's quite obvious on the game's cover art.
• The Bangaa in the Ivalice Alliance games are stated to be lizards, but certain ones that appear in Final Fantasy XII have facial hair. One Bangaa in Final Fantasy XIV explains that he and his kind are not reptiles, but are actually mammals that lose their fur during puberty and whatever parts of their body that doesn't regrow fur becomes hard scaly patches with various patterns. It is presumed that the Bangaa in the XIV universe are the only ones with such a trait while Bangaas in the other games are true lizard people.
• Jazz Amun from Jitsu Squad is an andromorphic frog-man sporting an afro, for some reason. One that's clearly growing on him and not part of a wig.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Great Deku Tree in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has big eyebrows and a very remarkable mustache.
  • The Rito in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild have tufts of hair and the occasional beard, frequently braided. Some of the female Rito even have "earrings" that are actually held up in circled-up strands of hair.
• Little Flower Fairy: Bun Frog has red hair on his head, even though he is a frog and frogs don't have hair in real life.
• Mortal Kombat's Khameleon has long (semi-invisible, like the rest of her) hair. Interestingly, her male race-mates Reptile and Chameleon are either hairless or have a serious kase of Kompressed Hair.
• Neopets: Most characters from site events have some form of hair, regardless of what their species actually appears to be. To drive the point home, there is a fish with a beard and a penguin with black hair.
• Pokémon: Some non-mammalian Pokémon have hair on their bodies, such as Kriketune, a cricket with a mustache; and male Jellicent, a jellyfish also with a mustache. Though with the former the mustache may actually be a pair of feelers/pincers/antennae while the latter's mustache might be made of, well, jelly.
• Splatoon plays with this. Inklings are evolved versions of squids, and their hair are really stylized tentacles. Similar principles apply to the Octolings and various other evolved sea life like anemones; in the case of the Salmonids, their mohawks seem to be stylized dorsal fins.
• Spyro the Dragon does something similar to Mario, although non-mammal hair is rare among females. Beards on male dragons are fairly common.
• Super Mario Bros.: The series does this if a female member of an otherwise assumed to be all-male species is introduced (Kammy and Koopie in the Paper Mario series, for example). Bowser and his son have hair, as do many of the Koopalings, who may or may not be related (ironically enough, Wendy doesn't, although she does have eyelashes). A few characters have mustaches.
• Undertale: A number of monsters that are recognizably based on real animals, such as Undyne (fish) and Bratty (aligator), sport human hair.
• Yo-kai Watch: Roughraff is an anthropomorphic gecko with a large orange pompadour. It's justified in that he's a youkai.

Webcomics

• Dreamwalk Journal (NSFW): Most of the anthropomorphic insects and arachnids, both male and female, have hairlike stuff on their heads. As well as the other humanoid characteristics you'd expect from an erotic comic.
• El Goonish Shive:
  • In one strip, Tedd imagines himself as a humanoid praying mantis with his normal hair.
  • Amanda and Lisa turn into a humanoid reptile and a humanoid bird respectively specifically to demonstrate what non-mammalian humanoid forms would look like.^note Here's that last panel larger and in color if anyone's interested. Both end up with hair-like stuff on their heads; Amanda's is Medusa-like while Lisa's is feather-like.
  • Nanase gets turned into a humanoid gecko and retains her hair. Notably, unlike Amanda's reptilian form, Nanase's form averts Non-Mammal Mammaries.
• Homestuck: The trolls. They look like humans with horns and grey skin, but it's implied by their bizarre life cycle and a few references to their physiology that they're closer to insects. This doesn't prevent them from having hair — long, flowing locks of it, even, in some cases.
• Kevin & Kell: Tammy Flambeau (a moth) has nice long white hair.
• Nip and Tuck: Subverted; lizard Hortense wears wigs.
• Prophecy of the Circle: The tekk have, depending on subspecies, something similar to manes, hair crests or even beards, despite being reptiles.
• Suicide for Hire: The reptilian pizza delivery boy/black market merchant Altair Annunaki has an impressive head of hair (though not as impressive as Arcturus' — Arcturus has the excuse of being a mammal).
• In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, the alien Nemesites have hair, despite being insects (giant butterflies, specifically).

Web Original

• Hector's World:
  • The evil squid has a mustache.
  • Some creatures cyberbully Ming the clam by drawing a mustache on a photo of her.

Western Animation

• Almost Naked Animals takes it to its extreme. Species that wouldn't normally have hair, or at least not a full coat of it, still have the "shaved" appearance.
• Many, though not all, of the citiziens of Amphibia have hair despite being anthropomorphic amphibians. This includes Sprig, though his hat hides his hair most of the time. Hop Pop even laments having gone bald.
• The Angry Beavers features Wanda, Bing's on-again-off-again girlfriend. Like Bing, she's a fast-talking lizard, but unlike Bing, she has blonde '80s Hair, and purple leggings worn under a dress.
• Back at the Barnyard: In "Plucky and Me", when Plucky the T. rex imagines Mrs. Beady as a female T. rex, she is pictured as one with her signature hair, glasses, and apron still intact. As of 2014, the hair could be interpreted as some form of plumage.
• Birdz: Played straight with most of the cast. Those that don't have it just have a patch of feathers on their heads.
• Camp Lazlo:
  • Gretchen has blonde hair despite being an alligator.
  • Slinkman (a slug) is drawn with a poofy orange afro in flashbacks.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog: Le Quack is a duck with a head of blue hair.
• CatDog: Lola (a bird) has black hair.
• Disney:
  • Classic Disney Shorts: Daisy Duck presents something of an odd example, in that she originally didn't have "hair" but, in some recent variations, she's been given something much like this. Notably in House of Mouse, she sports a long ponytail.
  • In the short "The Ballad of Nessie", Nessie is presented as having hair. Like everyone else in the show it is red, as per Scottish stereotypes.
  • All the duck related examples in the comic book section show up in DuckTales (1987) and Darkwing Duck as well. J Gander Hooter also has the white fringes, with nice bushy eyebrows too. Most of these use hair not as a gender marker, but as an age marker. And yes, the girls (Morgana, Gosalyn, Sarah Bellum, Ammonia Pine) have hair.
• Family Guy:
  • Quagmire as a frog keeps the head hair he has in his human form.
  • The Iraq lobster has a beard and turban.
• Fish Hooks: Of the three characters, Milo the betta fish is the only one who has a dorsal fin on his head. Bea goldfish has long red hair while Oscar the catfish has a full afro. In fact a lot of the sea characters have hair, including an octopus and a ponytailed clam.
• Futurama: When he's completely terrified, Zoidberg (an alien crustacean) will grow a full head of hair just so it can turn white.
• It's a Big Big World: Madge the map turtle has white "hair".
• Jabberjaw: The titular shark had a brown goatee.
• Let's Go Luna!: Senor Fabuloso, a flamingo, and Andy's mom, a frog, both have full heads of hair.
• In Kaeloo, Olaf the penguin has big, bushy eyebrows. In season 5 he also grows a beard and a man bun.
• In Littlest Pet Shop (2012), Vinnie Terrio the gecko has a full head of hair.
• Lizzie: The title character is a teenage girl named Lizzie Green who has transformed into a humanoid lizard. She has red hair.
• Looney Tunes: In "Tortoise Wins by a Hare", the female tortoise has hair.
• My Little Pony:
  • My Little Pony 'n Friends: Despite being a crustacean, Crank the lobster sports an impressive mustache and set of thick white eyebrows.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • The Sea Serpent Stephen Magnet sports lovingly coiffed cranial and facial hair, to the point that half of his moustache being cut off is a minor plot point.
    • In "Boast Busters", Twilight Sparkle uses her magic to give Spike the dragon a mustache.
• Nature Cat has eyelashes on fish, apparently to help distinguish males (straight lashes) from females (curly).
• The Octonauts: In an episode where the team meets a spider crab, the one the team meets has an impressive grey mustache, in part to show that he's old (he mentions being on his way to his birthday party thrown by his children and grandchildren).
• Rocko's Modern Life:
  • All three of the Bigheads (who are toads) are drawn with hair. Ed's hair is pretty wispy, though.
  • One of Spunky's parasites is a ringworm with a full head of hair under his cap.
• Regular Show: Mordecai and Rigby, a blue jay and raccoon respectively, have feathers and fur that act like hair for them, with Mordecai having crested feathers on top and Rigby having short hair matching the color and texture of his fur, and it’s been shown in flashbacks to their young childhood that this is natural. However, as teenagers Mordecai had brown hair (presumably cutting and dying it) and Rigby had bleached blonde hair, both resembling human hair. Their parents also have human hair as opposed to feathers/fur.

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• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In "The Two Faces of Squidward," Squidward has chest hair at his "handsomest", despite being an octopus. Or something resembling one. He's also depicted with luxuriant blonde locks in a flashback in "The Original Fry Cook." They disappear in short order to restore him to his familiar state of Furry Baldness.
  • A lot of the other undersea characters have hair at some point. It's implied that Spongebob has always had hair but he keeps it very short because he likes it that way.
  • Pearl Krabs has a small blonde ponytail that technically shouldn't even qualify as "non-mammalian" hair; she's a whale.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012): In the "Mutant Apocalypse" arc, Raphael and Michelangelo have somehow grown a beard and long hair respectively in their old age in spite of them being mutant turtles.
• Tiny Toon Adventures: Shirley McLoon is another example of a bird with hair.
• Mostly averted by Tuca & Bertie, as none of the characters have hair (regardless of whether they are Bird People like the title characters, or any of the other various forms of anthropomorphism present). However, "The Sex Bugs" implies that Tuca has pubic hair.
• VeggieTales presents some rare plant examples, such as Pa Grape (eyebrows and mustache), Mr. Nezzer (bald head), Mr. Lunt (Van Dyke), Esther (an onion with long hair), Petunia (a rhubarb with a ponytail), Madame Blueberry (brown at night, blonde during the day), Laura Carrot (pigtails), Scooter (bald head and mustache), and the Peach ('cause he has hair). There is actually one song about Larry the Cucumber accidentally misplacing his hairbrush despite not having any hair on his head at all!
• Work It Out Wombats!: Despite being a crustacean, Kit has a mustache. Most of the Fishman family also have hair.

Real Life

• There are indeed real life examples of this in nature, depending on what is considered "true" hair.
  • The synapsids of the Permian and Triassic likely had mammal-like hair, despite still technically being reptiles.
  • Pterosaurs possessed hair-like plumage that was neither fur or feathers, but a completely different covering called pycnofibers.
  • Many arthropods, most famously tarantulas, have a coat of hair. Same with bumblebees.

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