TazManiac wrote:Lion Ears-
I'm willing to give Paul some Artistic License re: differing one animal ear from another, but it wouldn't hurt to dial it in either... Just say'n.
Well, you've got to keep a few things in mind.
First, while Timmy is lion-like, we don't know that he's actually part
Panthera leo. It could be an example of convergent evolution, like with dolphins and sharks looking similar to each other.
Even if he is part lion, that leaves open the question of just what type of lion. Lions of one type or another have been around for a long, long time. He and modern lions may be descended from a common ancestor, but have gone along separate evolutionary paths for many thousands of generations. Comparing him to a modern lion might be like comparing a human to a chimpanzee.
And if he
is part lion, then what's the rest of his genetic make-up? Human? Fae? Something else? Lots of something elses? Who knows what sort of physical traits might be encoded in his DNA (assuming that he even has DNA)? Or is he not even a hybrid at all, and is just the result of a branch of the lion family that evolved to be bipedal and high intelligence, rather like a certain branch of the ape family has done?
Or he could just have really big ears, even for his species. That happens sometimes. There are plenty of humans who have unusually large ears, after all, or oversized noses, or whatever else.
And on top of all that, there's the fact that he's still young. The
young of many species tend to have different body proportions than
do the adults.
The genetic and evolutionary background of a good many characters in this story are very ambiguous, really. Maybe someday we'll find out what's behind all of these seeming hybrids and oddly human non-humans. Or maybe we won't!