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Description
After all this time spent working on detailing sapient cultures, I've elected to get back to drawing some more animals like I have done in the past. The focus for this piece is on the Duro, a creature I had mentioned in several of my earlier pieces, as well as some of the other species native to the western half of the Southlands. I intend to keep the descriptions here a bit shorter than my more recent work, partially for my own sanity and partially to try and get back to a more succinct type of writing. I have a bad habit of 'over-describing' some things, so hopefully this will help me to be a bit less prone to writing novel-length descriptions. I do hope you enjoy it.

𝗗𝘂𝗿𝗼

The Duro is a large, genetically engineered camelid that had been designed as an alternative to horses and several other species of livestock by the ancestors of this World's humans. The average male Duro weighs around 405 kilos and stands around 13 hands tall at the withers (i.e., approximately 130 cm), though it appears quite a bit larger due to its long neck and leporine ears. In most respects it resembles an abnormally large llama, and this is no surprise since the geneticists who first created these beasts used this species as their primary template, but there are also several more subtle modifications made to the base in order to make them a better mount. The spine and musculature of the back has been reshaped and bolstered in order to accommodate a human rider for long periods of time without injuring or exhausting the animal. Moreover, its temperament has been modified to lessen their innate territoriality while still maintaining a degree of dogged stubbornness that makes them less prone to being spooked in stressful situations. Compared to horses, the Duro is much heartier, requires less water, can bear considerably heavier loads relative to its body size, and is more adept at navigating uneven, mountainous terrain. They also produce a sweet, nutritious milk (engineered with an active concentration of lactase that pre-digests any lactose in the secretion), and have a fine, soft undercoat that can be shorn off and used as a material for making textiles. With all that being said, they are somewhat slower than their equine equivalents, clocking in with a gallop of about 65 kilometers an hour without a rider, and the manner in which they move their feet while running makes them a less steady platform for mounted archery. The men of the west, specifically those encountered by the mariner Swassuyok (not to be confused with Swaskaku) called these beasts the Dhurot, and they formed the backbone of their nomadic society. The man depicted above belongs to one of these nomadic tribes. He can be seen surveying all that lay before him astride his trusty steed.

𝗗𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗼

The Durando is another of the animals domesticated by the men of the west and used as livestock, though unlike the Duro, it has evolved naturally, and their genetics have not been tampered with by humans beyond that wrought by selective breeding. The Durando (a.k.a., Drandod by those who initially domesticated it) is an enormously massive rodent, one might say of unusual size, of the family Caviidae most closely related to our modern-day Patagonian hare. A typical male stand around 160 centimeters tall at the shoulder and may weigh as much as one metric ton. The species is highly social and is known to dwell together in larger herds that travel the vast plains in search of grass and fresh foliage to graze upon. The Durando is also very vocal and uses a wide array of sounds to communicate such as chattering, whistling, shrieking, and even purring. They are normally fairly docile creatures, undisturbed by most predators due to their massive size and strength, though they can and do resort to violence when forced to defend their calves or during instances of intraspecies competition between bulls vying for access to their choice of cows. They warn potential threats by loudly 'barking' at them in hopes that they will take the hint and go away, but if worse comes to worst and they are forced into a fight, they can deliver devastatingly lethal bites with their tusk-like incisors. The peoples who first domesticated these animals primarily used them for their fatty meat, though they are also kept as a source for dung that can be used for fuel and farming, and their wiry hair which is often incorporated into brushes. They can be milked, though the nomads who herd them consider its taste inferior to the milk produced by the Duro. Some argue it tastes best fermented into an alcoholic beverage similar to kumis.

𝗞𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗮𝗻𝗼

The kappano is a kind of bipedal lagomorph which split from the rest of the family Leporidae some 39 million years ago. In many ways it is the polar opposite of the Durando: small, swift-footed, and incredibly prolific. A typical male of this species only weighs about 0.6 kilograms and stands about 13 centimeters tall at the shoulder. Their species and several of its relatives are a common sight throughout the west. They established and secured their niche as quick breeding generalist herbivores soon after their introduction to the planet, and since humans have arrived, they have flourished even more. Kappano may appear somewhat cute, but they are voracious pests. The advent of agriculture in and around the Great Western Lake drew tens of thousands of these critters to humanity's growing agrarian villages, and their numbers have since exploded as they have glutted themselves on the hard effort of the people they victimize. Moreover, their large incisors have fused into a pair of beak-like pincers which constantly need to be worn down because they never stop growing. They will chew on just about anything they can get their fluffy mitts on, and they are all too willing to ruin wooden furniture or eat their way through valuable cloth. That being said, the humans that live in this region aren't completely helpless against these creatures. The people who have to deal with these nuisances on a day-to-day basis have learned of several plants they find repellant, and they have specially bred their dogs to be adept 'mousers'. They can be somewhat hard to track by conventional means because they mostly get around by hopping, meaning they don't always leave regular spaced tracks that can be easily followed. Their name, meaning 'the beast with the leaping foot', is an exonymic attributed to them by the Mai who first encountered them infesting their grain stores as stowaways on their shipping vessels. Despite the Mai's best efforts to get rid of them, they have since invaded the Eastern Peninsula and threatened several endemic pest species such as the Chinchéké, or giant cricket.

𝗜𝗴𝘃é

The Igvé is a small, flighted beast that was brought to this world from the same planet as the Chinya, Kyogwé, and Handa. Of the three, it is most closely related to the Chinya, though even these two species diverged from their common ancestor a very, very long time ago. An average male Igvé only weighs around 16 grams and has a frontal wingspan of about 35 centimeters while its back wings measure roughly 31 centimeters from end to end. They use both their front and back pair of wings for initial take-off, but after reaching a safe altitude they will usually only use their front wings to fly in order to reduce the amount of energy they are expending to stay airborne. The back pair of wings are sometimes unfurled for gliding, but more often they act as rudders to help control their movement through the air similar to the tail feathers observed in terrestrial birds. Unlike birds, their wings are still able to function as legs for moving about on foot or clinging to surfaces like trees or cliff faces. While they might appear rather odd to one of us, the Mai have encountered similar creatures in the Eastern Peninsula. The Igvé and many of the other flighted species from within its clade serve an ecological function similar to bats, leading a largely nocturnal lifestyle hunting for insects when most of the birds they would otherwise compete with are asleep. Igvé don't have particularly good eyesight, so they primarily hunt using the sound made by their prey. Like owls, they have asymmetrically aligned earholes that allow them to better track the source of a noise in 3D space. While some species are better adapted for life in the trees, the Igvé lives in an area where forests can be rather scarce, so they have instead adapted to dwell together in complex burrows they dig out of the loose sandy earth. This change in habitat seems to have occurred rather recently evolutionarily speaking, given that it still retains a long, prehensile tail. The poor creature hanging from the tree in this illustration is very likely lost and evidently frightened out of its wits. As mentioned before, the Igvé is a nocturnal insectivore, so the fact that it is still active in broad daylight illustrates there is something deeply wrong with it. It could very well be suffering from some kind of disease or may have been spooked away from its burrow by a nearby predator. Whatever the case, the creature is clearly on edge. It is staring intently at the observer from its perch with its wings extended to make it appear larger than it actually is. Moreover, each of its four wings bears an bright yellow eyespot adapted to resemble the eyes of a predatory species native to this region. While not especially convincing under the scrutiny of human eyes, it might fool a naive predator enough to scare them off, or buy the Igvé an extra moment to flee for its safety.

Description
After all this time spent working on detailing sapient cultures, I've elected to get back to drawing some more animals like I have done in the past. The focus for this piece is on the Duro, a creature I had mentioned in several of my earlier pieces, as well as some of the other species native to the western half of the Southlands. I intend to keep the descriptions here a bit shorter than my more recent work, partially for my own sanity and partially to try and get back to a more succinct type of writing. I have a bad habit of 'over-describing' some things, so hopefully this will help me to be a bit less prone to writing novel-length descriptions. I do hope you enjoy it.

𝗗𝘂𝗿𝗼

The Duro is a large, genetically engineered camelid that had been designed as an alternative to horses and several other species of livestock by the ancestors of this World's humans. The average male Duro weighs around 405 kilos and stands around 13 hands tall at the withers (i.e., approximately 130 cm), though it appears quite a bit larger due to its long neck and leporine ears. In most respects it resembles an abnormally large llama, and this is no surprise since the geneticists who first created these beasts used this species as their primary template, but there are also several more subtle modifications made to the base in order to make them a better mount. The spine and musculature of the back has been reshaped and bolstered in order to accommodate a human rider for long periods of time without injuring or exhausting the animal. Moreover, its temperament has been modified to lessen their innate territoriality while still maintaining a degree of dogged stubbornness that makes them less prone to being spooked in stressful situations. Compared to horses, the Duro is much heartier, requires less water, can bear considerably heavier loads relative to its body size, and is more adept at navigating uneven, mountainous terrain. They also produce a sweet, nutritious milk (engineered with an active concentration of lactase that pre-digests any lactose in the secretion), and have a fine, soft undercoat that can be shorn off and used as a material for making textiles. With all that being said, they are somewhat slower than their equine equivalents, clocking in with a gallop of about 65 kilometers an hour without a rider, and the manner in which they move their feet while running makes them a less steady platform for mounted archery. The men of the west, specifically those encountered by the mariner Swassuyok (not to be confused with Swaskaku) called these beasts the Dhurot, and they formed the backbone of their nomadic society. The man depicted above belongs to one of these nomadic tribes. He can be seen surveying all that lay before him astride his trusty steed.

𝗗𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗼

The Durando is another of the animals domesticated by the men of the west and used as livestock, though unlike the Duro, it has evolved naturally, and their genetics have not been tampered with by humans beyond that wrought by selective breeding. The Durando (a.k.a., Drandod by those who initially domesticated it) is an enormously massive rodent, one might say of unusual size, of the family Caviidae most closely related to our modern-day Patagonian hare. A typical male stand around 160 centimeters tall at the shoulder and may weigh as much as one metric ton. The species is highly social and is known to dwell together in larger herds that travel the vast plains in search of grass and fresh foliage to graze upon. The Durando is also very vocal and uses a wide array of sounds to communicate such as chattering, whistling, shrieking, and even purring. They are normally fairly docile creatures, undisturbed by most predators due to their massive size and strength, though they can and do resort to violence when forced to defend their calves or during instances of intraspecies competition between bulls vying for access to their choice of cows. They warn potential threats by loudly 'barking' at them in hopes that they will take the hint and go away, but if worse comes to worst and they are forced into a fight, they can deliver devastatingly lethal bites with their tusk-like incisors. The peoples who first domesticated these animals primarily used them for their fatty meat, though they are also kept as a source for dung that can be used for fuel and farming, and their wiry hair which is often incorporated into brushes. They can be milked, though the nomads who herd them consider its taste inferior to the milk produced by the Duro. Some argue it tastes best fermented into an alcoholic beverage similar to kumis.

𝗞𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗮𝗻𝗼

The kappano is a kind of bipedal lagomorph which split from the rest of the family Leporidae some 39 million years ago. In many ways it is the polar opposite of the Durando: small, swift-footed, and incredibly prolific. A typical male of this species only weighs about 0.6 kilograms and stands about 13 centimeters tall at the shoulder. Their species and several of its relatives are a common sight throughout the west. They established and secured their niche as quick breeding generalist herbivores soon after their introduction to the planet, and since humans have arrived, they have flourished even more. Kappano may appear somewhat cute, but they are voracious pests. The advent of agriculture in and around the Great Western Lake drew tens of thousands of these critters to humanity's growing agrarian villages, and their numbers have since exploded as they have glutted themselves on the hard effort of the people they victimize. Moreover, their large incisors have fused into a pair of beak-like pincers which constantly need to be worn down because they never stop growing. They will chew on just about anything they can get their fluffy mitts on, and they are all too willing to ruin wooden furniture or eat their way through valuable cloth. That being said, the humans that live in this region aren't completely helpless against these creatures. The people who have to deal with these nuisances on a day-to-day basis have learned of several plants they find repellant, and they have specially bred their dogs to be adept 'mousers'. They can be somewhat hard to track by conventional means because they mostly get around by hopping, meaning they don't always leave regular spaced tracks that can be easily followed. Their name, meaning 'the beast with the leaping foot', is an exonymic attributed to them by the Mai who first encountered them infesting their grain stores as stowaways on their shipping vessels. Despite the Mai's best efforts to get rid of them, they have since invaded the Eastern Peninsula and threatened several endemic pest species such as the Chinchéké, or giant cricket.

𝗜𝗴𝘃é

The Igvé is a small, flighted beast that was brought to this world from the same planet as the Chinya, Kyogwé, and Handa. Of the three, it is most closely related to the Chinya, though even these two species diverged from their common ancestor a very, very long time ago. An average male Igvé only weighs around 16 grams and has a frontal wingspan of about 35 centimeters while its back wings measure roughly 31 centimeters from end to end. They use both their front and back pair of wings for initial take-off, but after reaching a safe altitude they will usually only use their front wings to fly in order to reduce the amount of energy they are expending to stay airborne. The back pair of wings are sometimes unfurled for gliding, but more often they act as rudders to help control their movement through the air similar to the tail feathers observed in terrestrial birds. Unlike birds, their wings are still able to function as legs for moving about on foot or clinging to surfaces like trees or cliff faces. While they might appear rather odd to one of us, the Mai have encountered similar creatures in the Eastern Peninsula. The Igvé and many of the other flighted species from within its clade serve an ecological function similar to bats, leading a largely nocturnal lifestyle hunting for insects when most of the birds they would otherwise compete with are asleep. Igvé don't have particularly good eyesight, so they primarily hunt using the sound made by their prey. Like owls, they have asymmetrically aligned earholes that allow them to better track the source of a noise in 3D space. While some species are better adapted for life in the trees, the Igvé lives in an area where forests can be rather scarce, so they have instead adapted to dwell together in complex burrows they dig out of the loose sandy earth. This change in habitat seems to have occurred rather recently evolutionarily speaking, given that it still retains a long, prehensile tail. The poor creature hanging from the tree in this illustration is very likely lost and evidently frightened out of its wits. As mentioned before, the Igvé is a nocturnal insectivore, so the fact that it is still active in broad daylight illustrates there is something deeply wrong with it. It could very well be suffering from some kind of disease or may have been spooked away from its burrow by a nearby predator. Whatever the case, the creature is clearly on edge. It is staring intently at the observer from its perch with its wings extended to make it appear larger than it actually is. Moreover, each of its four wings bears an bright yellow eyespot adapted to resemble the eyes of a predatory species native to this region. While not especially convincing under the scrutiny of human eyes, it might fool a naive predator enough to scare them off, or buy the Igvé an extra moment to flee for its safety.