Something a little controversial...

I've said it before, and I know that I'll say it again. It may sound shocking to some other Oldhammer players, but, in my opinion, getting eaten by the tyranids was the best thing to happen to the Squats of 40k. Obviously, it wasn't pleasant for them, but, from a lore perspective, it was what they needed.

Back in 1987, GW launched the Rogue Trader game that they'd been teasing for over 4 years. Originally it was to be a sci-fi RPG, then a trading game, like Elite, but neither of those saw the light. What we got instead was Warhammer 40,000. In part this was to strengthen their brand, since they had the Fantasy game well established. In part it was to avoid confusion with Rogue Trooper, a boardgame they'd released a few months earlier based on the 2000AD strip. And in part it was laziness, of a sort: by tying it in with Warhammer Fantasy, they could just morph across the Fantasy races, rather than putting too much effort into designing alien races for a game that might not sell.

Of the races morphed across, humans, and their Imperium, are still very strongly there, the space elves, or eldar, too, and the space orcs, renamed orks. There were, however a number of races that never made it out of the rulebook. Who's ever faced an army of zoats, or space slaan, or an army led by an alien of the vampire race? So many races were poorly planned, much as I love them all, and have used each and every creature from that book at least once over the years.

The dwarfs were morphed over as descendants of human miners, who evolved to be short and strong because of the cramped conditions, but, otherwise,  they were humans, and sent troops to the Imperial Guard and Rogue Trader retinues, and could be priests, etc.

Then they got a massively expanded range, including bikers, exo-armour, hybrid metal-plastic models and a starter boxed set of plastic infantry. To justify this, or, perhaps because it had been the plan from the outset, they got their own mini army list, based around a platoon model, and their own background. The problem was, dwarfs in almost every fantasy setting, including Warhammer, are a proud, noble, ancient race of miners and craftsmen, but a race whose numbers are dwindling. With them being humans, they couldn't have that ancient history from before upstart humans came along.

What we got basically turned them into conservative, paranoid, alcoholic bikers and traders, who were determined not to die out and so exempted from military service anyone without 2 adult sons. They were dwarfs - small, strong and obsessed with a perceived honour and grudges - and they had a pre-Imperial history that explained their having the traditional dwarven distrust and enmity of orcs, goblins and elves, and they had the dwarven love of beer, gold, weapons, jewels and sagas, but were rather written into a corner.

When second edition came out it introduced the Codex as a standard format for army lists: a whole book for an army, with special rules, background, maps, unique items, lavish full-colour spreads of pro-painted new models, etc. There were plans for a Codex Squats, mentioned by name in Codex Imperial Guard, and a handful of new miniatures were designed and cast, some of them appearing in the second edition boxed sets' books. It was an exciting time, since even the Adeptus Ministorum got their own Codex, but 5 years passed, and there was no sign of Codex Squats. None of the games designers could face trying to expand the half list and sparse background enough to make a Codex.

In 1998, third edition dropped, with stand-in army lists in the rulebook. 2 forces from second edition were noticeably absent, though: Genestealer Cult, who went from being 2 separate armies in 1989 and the core of tyranid forces in 1991/2's army list to being an appendix army list in Codex Tyranids second edition, and the squats, whose last published appearance in canon was in the starter set from 1993.

Of the two, Genestealer Cult got a special character army list in the Citadel Journal, issues 40 and 41 (basically, you needed your opponent's permission to use the entire list, and if you got it, you couldn't object to them fielding special characters). For the squats, though, it was very different. A year before the GSC list came out, in Citadel Journal 33, Jervis Johnson addressed the issue of the squats in an article called Standing in for the Little Guys. The article basically said to use them as Guard, representing squats from worlds that had been pacified, or orks, representing freedom fighting guerrilla rebels. To quote, briefly, from the first paragraph:

"Now it has to be said that over the years the games development team have come up with some good ideas, and some, erm, not quite so good ideas. Although there are some that I know will disagree, we feel that the Squats fall into the latter category, and after literally years of trying to make them a bit more interesting, none of which have worked, we've decided to retire them from the game. In the future we want to return to the Squats, but whatever we do will be radically different to what has gone before (and they'll be called something other than Squats to boot!)."

...and so GW began the task of ret-conning them out of the setting. Development began on the Demi'urg, a name from myth that means "World builders", a race of purpley-grey skinned short humanoids, who basically looked like Thanos had screwed a dwarf, and the offspring had interbred for millennia. The Demi'urg, as yet, haven't appeared in 40k, but were available in Battlefleet Gothic, as part of the Tau fleet.

While efforts were being made to obliterate the squats, retroactively, a frustrated developer, if apocrypha are to be believed, told a disgruntled squat fan that the tyranids ate them. It was an off-hand comment, somewhat spur of the moment, etc., if it was even said, but it spread and became interwoven with the mythos. In the modern, 8th edition Codex Tyranids, there's even a map showing Hive Fleet Leviathan coming up from below the galactic plane, with at least one tendril intersecting with where the Squat Homeworlds were on the maps in first and second.

It may have been a frustrated, off-hand deflection, but it gave the squats something to make them interesting. The Space Wolves were better at being space vikings, the Ravenwing and Saim Hann's Wild Riders were better at being space bikers, but squats who had survived the dragons destroying their homes finally made squats properly into Space Dwarfs. It's interesting that, after that alleged outburst, squats started to be mentioned in-canon again.

The squats were so dull and fenced-in that they got dropped; the cover-up made them interesting again.

During first and second edition, i had no interest in the Squats. When I returned to the Guard in 2016, noting the mention of squats in the core books, i thought i might add a few squats to my Guard, because it'd be different. Three years on, and I'm building a squat army, there are even 2 new squat models in the form of a bounty hunter and an ammo jack for Necromunda...