1E
As originally seen, the couatl has a head and body that closely resemble those of a regular snake. While the presence of an extra set of teeth between the fangs is unusual, in other respects, the arrangement of the teeth resembles those of snakes such as cobras, kraits, and mambas, rather than say, rattlesnakes or boomslangs. While the head is at least partially covered with scales like that of a normal snake, the couatl's body is feathered, with longer feathers along the back and what appear to be softer, downy, ones on the underside.
A couple of significant differences distinguish them from the feathered serpents of Mesoamerican myth. Firstly, the tail ends in a plume of long feathers, whereas artistic representations from the real world more commonly show a bare rattle. Secondly, and most obvious of all, couatls have wings, which the mythic versions did not. The wings are, however, remarkably small for the animal's size and certainly wouldn't hold it aloft without magical aid.Of course, magic is something that couatls have in spades. In 1E they have genius-level intelligence, equivalent to the top 1-2% of humans, and know an unusually wide range of spells. They speak multiple languages, although it's not clear what their native one is supposed to be (although it's probably unique, knowing 1E). They are also reasonably physically powerful, with a constriction attack that's just as effective as that of regular giant snakes that are supposedly larger. They are difficult to injure, probably due to agility in the air rather than thick armour-like skin.
They are described as "lawful good" although one suspects this is more of an abstract philosophical inclination than anything with practical meaning for their society, given that they live in very small groups and don't interfere much with human affairs.
In 2E, the head is less snake-like, including heavy brow ridges above the eyes, and looks to be more heavily feathered. The wings are larger, and the feather on the body more uniform, but the appearance is otherwise similar. We're told that they give birth to live young and it's obvious from other features that they are physical creatures, not purely magical. They're said to be related to dragons, although any resemblance is actually pretty remote.
3E
In 3E, the wings are much larger, with a wingspan exceeding the overall length of the body - although this is not very clear from the picture, which makes the body look very long indeed. The head and underside of the body look to be scaled; the latter makes some sense if the creature crawls along the ground when it isn't flying. Its proportionately much more narrow-bodied than before and has additional plumes of feathers projecting out sideways before the tip of the tail.
It's marginally stronger than a regular constrictor snake, which may not be unreasonable considering it's about the size of a large anaconda. Much of its protection against injury does turn out to be natural armour in this edition, which, given that it's feathered and not covered in metallic scales or whatever, is probably another indicator of its magical nature. Couatls also gain even more magical powers although, physically, they're not that much more powerful than before... a shift towards emphasising their otherworldly nature.
5E
Continuing the trend from 3E, the 5E version of the couatl seems to be even less feathered than before, aside from the wings, which are somewhere between the sizes of 1E and 3E. The head looks entirely feather-free, with flaring frills on either side and a comparatively snub nose that looks vaguely mammalian. The body has what looks like a single row of feathers down the back, and retains the sparse tail-feather and odd projecting side-quills of 3E, but otherwise, it too looks to be entirely covered in scales. In contradiction of 2E, couatls now lay eggs.
While the semi-divine nature of the creatures is emphasised in the text, it's somewhat less magically potent than in 3E. On the other hand, it's unusually well-armoured and is, in fact, completely invulnerable to injury by physical objects unless they are magically boosted somehow. They're said to be able to speak "all" languages, which is presumably a side-effect of the telepathic powers that render speech redundant anyway.
The anatomy of the couatl seems fairly straightforward; there is little reason to assume that it isn't, in most respects, similar to a snake. In the earlier editions, the creature has a feathered body, which implies that it is warm-blooded, but even that isn't necessarily the case in 5E. Otherwise, feathers have little direct impact on the internal anatomy, although it's possible that it has a bird-like lung, aiding an efficient metabolism and perhaps even reducing the weight.
The major difference, of course, is that the couatl has wings. In the real-world evolutionary history of snakes, they lost their forelimbs first, with even the oldest known fossils entirely lacking any. But there's no particular reason to suppose that the couatl evolved at all, in any meaningful sense, and even if it did, it would not have necessarily had to follow the same path. While there's no difficulty attaching the wings to the skeleton, which simply requires a shoulder joint of some kind, it is perhaps notable that the couatl does not seem to have large flight muscles. In reality, we'd expect some kind of avian keel-like breastbone, which would be visible as a muscular swelling beneath the wing area, rather than the body continuing its narrow, snake-like form.
But, of course, because of the size of the couatl - it's said to be twelve feet (four metres) long - the wings would have to be exceptionally large to hold it aloft, and they typically aren't. For that matter, even if they could, the tail would dangle downwards while the creature was in flight, since there's nothing to hold it up. True, the body is shown as being vertically oriented in 3E and 5E, which would fit with that, but the wings don't seem to be angled for that sort of motion, and the body is clearly horizontal in the earlier editions.
All in all, at least of what it's doing has to be magical levitation.
Which is fair enough for something so inherently magical. Indeed, it becomes less of a regular creature as the editions move on. In the first two, there's every indication that it's a regular biological animal, albeit with super-human intelligence and considerable skill at magic. But, in 3E, where creatures are listed by type for the first time, it's described as a "native outsider". This is a rather vague term, since pretty much all the features that normally distinguish outsiders from other sorts of being don't apply to the native ones. It's said to mean that the couatl has some extraplanar "essence" but with an ancestry tied to the physical plane but what this would mean in practice is unclear. Still, there's something more otherworldly about it than there is about, say, a dragon, or possibly even a beholder.
In 5E, however, the couatl goes a step further, and becomes a "celestial". This is the category to which angels belong and is essentially the benign counterpart to demons and devils. In 3E, while this category does not exist as such, the equivalent beings are native to the upper planes and, like demons, do not need to eat or sleep. This implies that their metabolism is magically fuelled, and that their soul is less reliant on the physiology of their brains. It's not entirely magical, since they do still need to breathe, but certainly we can assume that regular biological laws do not apply in their entirety to such beings.
We don't really know how much of this applies to couatls in 5E, because the categories don't have such defined rule mechanics. Couatls do seem to eat, and it's at least plausible that, unlike angels, they may actually need to do so. Some of their mental powers, such as their telepathy, are shared with angels and probably have a common origin, but the couatl is established as being impressive in this regard in its own right anyway.
One feature it does share with 5E angels is the resistance to radiant damage. Of course, it's difficult to define what radiant energy is using real-world physics because... well, it probably doesn't apply. We can say that it's divinely powered energy that causes damage to physical objects, possibly by tearing molecules apart from one another, and that gives off visible light but not a significant amount of heat (or it would also do fire damage). Presumably, there's rather a lot of it in the upper planes and angels would likely need some protection from it to survive - although it's notable that they aren't actually immune. That couatls are resistant to it as well indicates that they're at least partially composed of whatever angels are and may even be at least partly fuelled by similar divine energy.
Nonetheless, even in 5E, couatls seem to be more physical than angels and may be more tied to the physical laws of our universe. The main evidence for that is that they do still reproduce in a biological fashion, which angels presumably don't. The mating habits described imply that any given pair of couatls has, at most, two offspring (that is, one before each of them dies) and not all of them bother doing that. Clearly, we can't take this literally, since, even assuming a zero infant mortality rate, their already small population would inevitably shrink over time. After all, whatever deity originally created them has long since stopped doing so.
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