Races born after Zodiark

[Lurina]

There seems to be at least some indication (assuming Emet's reconstruction of Amaurot is accurate), that at least one current-day monster/'animal' species had origins that actually preceeded the Terminus - griffins of all things. One of the Amaurotine shades mentions how she tried creating a 'white lion' but her thoughts had been momentarily distracted by an eagle suddenly interupting her, causing the resulting creation to end up a weird winged lion/eagle hybrid. She didn't mention the word 'griffin' by name, but it was pretty clear that's actually what she was referring to.

The context of the dialogue was it was meant to show just how easily the Ancients' Creation magic could easily go astray, but I found it interesting for how it seems to suggest that modern griffins came about simply because an Amaurotine 12000 years previously got distracted.

It makes one wonder just what other creatures/monsters currently existing may also have similar pre-Sundering Amaourtine magical origins.

My guess would be that almost all of the surviving animals have some kind of fantastical origins, with only a handful of exceptions. There's nothing really to substantiate this, but my vague guess based on framing is that the animals that evolved alongside humanity rather than being created by either the Ancients, Zodiark, or later civilizations like the Allagans, were all probably much closer to mundane, real world creatures. If you look at the animals we find in the game that share the names of actual animals, they're often different or monstrous - like the sheep, which look like rodents, or the bears, which look have hunched backs and nightmarish appearances. My guess would be that the original "sheep" were much more like our recognizable real-world sheep, but that they were rendered extinct during the Final Days, and the Ancients ended up just applying the name to a new animal with a vaguely similar appearance.