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  1. #25
    Player
    Iscah's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2017
    Posts
    14,102
    Character
    Aurelie Moonsong
    World
    Bismarck
    Main Class
    Summoner Lv 90
    Quote Originally Posted by Joven View Post
    I meant all on the same animal
    Maybe there isn't a real-world animal with all three, but that still means it's plausible that a mammal could have evolved all three in the right conditions.

    In any case, the game has so many hybrid creatures that it's not necessary to make that argument in the first place. Chimeras, gryphons, lamiae, "owlbears", winged horses.... many of them are a mix of mammal and reptile parts (birds technically being specialised reptiles as well).

    Interestingly most of those get traced back to Allagan experiments, according to the lorebook. Gryphons seem to be considered natural. As discussed earlier, you could theorise that Au Ra have "unnatural" origins as well, although there may have been lore contradictions to it. We know the Ixals are of Allagan origin, and juding from the lamiae on Azys Lla, the Ananta are as well. (I saw a theory once that the original inspiration of Garuda might have been an Au Ra woman, which could add up with the possibility of an Allagan origin for them.)

    Of course, in-game understanding of taxonomy is still developing, with creatures grouped in ways that don't correlate with our modern understanding. eg. 'cloudkin', flying creatures, mostly birds but including mammalian bats and a fishlike monster, also the arbitrary split with 'scalekin' that includes things like ziz and archaeornis - eventually they'll probably work out, like in our world, that there isn't actually a dividing line between the two (and that bats are flying beastkin).

    Then again, maybe anyone who tries to develop a better system gets as far as classifying the hybrids, and gives up.

    ---

    Bonus Wiki-trivia round! You know that bright-coloured lizardy thing that's an elite mark on the Azim Steppe? I spotted it on the reptile 'family tree'.
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    Last edited by Iscah; 07-28-2018 at 12:32 PM.