What if you had a creature that coated victims with a huge amount of contact poison? Could that not then spread from dwarf to dwarf?
Haha, interesting approach. Yeah, you could make a creature that spits globs of poisonous vomit, but the dwarves would still have to touch each other, which probably only happens via sparring.
Although... there are three special materials whose release can be
triggered by poison: blood, vomit and pus. So you could make one of those poisonous to serve as a disease vector. Pus seems like the natural choice, and you can even make it a gas instead of the default liquid. So, give your dwarves a gaseous pus that causes necrosis/oozing in anyone nearby, and you'll have a contagious disease. It still won't be quite right for zombies, though, since
any infected wound (whether caused by a zombie or not) could cause an outbreak of zombie plague.
Footkerchief, when a legendary cat corpse rots/burns, are the bones still legendary?
My guess is no -- the legendariness is tied to the corpse item specifically, not to the deceased cat's material ID.
Interestingly, a legendary cat corpse can't be truly destroyed, due to some weirdness that named items share with artifacts. I think that means either that a) it'd rot/burn forever and never disappear, or b) it'd do some kind of sick phoenix thing where a fresh corpse rises out of the ashes. Does anyone know what currently happens to burning artifacts?