Original Dragon Sprites

Before Dragon Cave had the user made sprites it has now, all the sprites came from various video games across the web. This led to some copyright issues, and TJ09 was forced to replace them with the help of various DragonCave fans, resulting in the Replacement Project. Many of the replacement sprites added were heavily influenced by the previous ones, and some artists have critiqued the replacements as having anatomy problems, most notably the Gold dragons and Split hatchlings.

Before the Great Fog, when the replacement sprites were put into effect, the sprites for Yoshi were used as Dinos, which presented major copyright infringement. The replacements continue to pay tribute to Yoshi, having cartoon-ish shading and shoes.

You can also see there are two sprites that are unchanged - the Papers and Hollies, which were originally created in Dragon Cave.

The sprites below are of a lower resolution than the actual sprites were. Some dragon pages have the original, full resolution sprite.

Previously, all the hatchling sprites (except, of course, the dinos, splits, and chickens) were recolors of the same sprite.

The Species
In the image below, you can see many of the original sprites for species that are still in the cave today. Here are the species' names, in that order.

First Row: Black, Water, Green/Pebble, Dark Green/Vine Second Row: Grey/Storm, Magi, Bright Pink, Purple Third Row: Red, Stone, Split/Two-Headed, White Fourth Row: Paper, Chicken, Holly, Gold Fifth Row: Mint, Neglected, Silver, Zombie Sixth Row : Yoshi/Dino (Yellow, Blue, Green, Red)