u/EricCartoonBox

I thought I was having an actual stroke at first while I watched this.

Last night, I went binge watching with my friend, per request, the Disney movie "Teacher's Pet", and since then, I've become quite enamored by Gary Baseman's work, and only did I recently find out he designs designer toys like ItemLabel.

Knew about their giant Aussie and European distant cousins, but never knew about this scamp. I'm especially fond of the pink bill and striated feathers on the back.

The cliffclamber shimmian is a creature a quarter of a man in size, and is an almost humanoid shimmian hailing from the Covelands, several deep chasms within Gribbetonia's surface formed from the draining of the Great Bayou Sea and several other large inland seas adjacent to it, though cliffclambers have spread elsewhere, with populations even thriving in near-inhospitable desert and tundra ecosystems; this is all thanks to their climbing adaptations, helping them scale even steep cliffs with relative ease, and their social and mental ingenuity making up for the most part. Cliffclambers are social animals like most other gribgibbons, thriving in anarchic groups, and in which they will collectively perform tasks such as collecting fruit, hunting small game, and even playing pranks upon each other and upon other animals, even animals that would likely harm them.

Cliffclambers find entertainment in almost anything they choose to find entertainment in, whether that could be crafting rudimentary slingshots out of perfectly-shaped sticks and the latex of certain trees, in which they will form into strips of hardened rubber, and using seeds as ammunition, or knotting the hair of furry animals into locks, or riding on gribhorse, ungulette or sonoroo-back, though it is usually an earnest, albeit still playful act in nature, and is usually benign. Cliffclambers rarely show earnest malice; they are amicable animals.

This attribute is not to say for the airborne animals that hunt them, though...

Flying high within the "sky" of the Covelands lies among the biggest fairylings to have ever lived, and one of the most malicious, too. The emperouge, a "strix" - a type of predatory fairyling - is the top predator of the higher levels of the Covelands, a steep - and already dangerous enough - environment, where very little non-airborne creatures thrive. The emperouge is usually seasonal hunter; it typically targets prey animals that enter the covelands, which visit seasonally as to shelter themselves from the oppressive cold of the winters, though such a large predator, and an active one at that, has to supplement its diet within other seasons, too. Cliffclambers stuck among walls too steep for them to climb out from, if their warning cry, a sonorous wail, sounding somewhere between the "death whistle" of a human postmortem, and a high-pitched, siren-esque sound, isn't enough to vulnerably petrify the shimmians into waiting for impending doom, will be picked by the beak of the emperouge.

Seventy million years have amassed since Gribbetonia's initial seeding, and, additionally, a hothouse world had formed. The descendants of those three initial archetypes that had been seeded onto the planet look completely unrecognizable now from what they used to look like, and the bayousailor, a large, shrimpo descendant, is no exception to this perception...

...Deep within the Great Bayou Sea, creatures frolic, play around, and swim across this great, seemingly endless body of water. Pods of hippocamps, a type of carnivorous, nearly-fully aquatic gribhorse, leap and spring out of the water in great numbers. Aquatirexes dabble for floating, water-borne plants and colonial orblets that drift and amass in great colonies across the open sea. Shoalshrimpos and bogpoles shoal while grotesques, a type of gribbet, and gigacheirans, another type of shrimpo, snap them using their long arms. Cropperwhales dive deep to find ghostly-hued shambleweeds hidden through the murk. Petrigulps, a type of "flying primate" gribbet polarise light as to find schools analogously hidden beneath the cloak of water. All seems well, and the creatures prosper in an environment fit for their needs.

The "Great Bayou Sea" is the collapsed, waterlogged remains of the Great Bayou, a marshland spanning nearly the whole of the northern continent's western coast, which also happened to sit upon an expansive cave system deep below. Both biomes also had their fair share of diversity, and within a unified landform, cave and marshland joined into an expansive inland freshwater sea, cave life and swamp life dwelling together, but sometimes, like the bayousailor, there are outsiders mingling among them too.

The bayousailor is fairly large, even by shrimpo standards. Its body length, from its rostrum to its tailfluke, is nine meters long, and its sail half as tall. It may be assumed that the bayousailor, as a shrimpo, having plates consisting of a constantly-regenerating keratin-bone hybrid material, would sink into the depths of the sea, but to compensate for its large size and heavy plates, the bayousailor's body is lined with thousands of air-filled sacs, descending from the swim bladder of the ancestral shrimpo, and is constantly kept aloft by a cluster of torus-shaped sacs snug deep within the body. Bayousailors use their frontal fins to row slowly and peacefully through the water, alternating between each fin like an oar. As a creature of immense size, and with an underbelly so vulnerable, it is a common target of large predators such as the nessiteras, a blind, fully-aquatic plesiosaur-like gribwhisker, the each-uisge, a larger, sharp-toothed relative of the hippocamp, and the galeocrush, an immense, shark-like shrimpo with modified, jaw-like front fins and with similar airsac adaptations.

It is unknown what caused the bayousailor, an outsider whose relatives are all saltwater-dwellers, with no clear adaptations to cope with freshwater, and inhabitors of far more expansive seas, to have come to adapt - and even thrive, in a body of water like the Great Bayou Sea. One clue might suggest a reason - the bayousailor is euryhaline, and can thrive in salt concentrations by as much as 25%, though this has no use considering the bayousailor rarely ventures outside of the Great Bayou Sea, and is most likely an atavistic trait, and still does not explain why both its ancestor and close relatives cannot tolerate freshwater. It is likely, though, the the bayousailor is an early offshoot of its lineage that was less venturous than its relatives, and many of the ethological traits associated with the shrimsailor clade are merely convergent.