Exploring the natural habits of the zippersnake introduced last week (at https://www.furaffinity.net/view/23825223/ but I don't know how to make that a graceful link hidden by text). It should be noted these are the creatures' preferences. The facts of a specific encounter with a znek may be more important than whether they'd prefer to get the belly or spine.

Meanwhile I'm delighted that I tried a moderately complicated drawing and it actually worked out, mostly! I mean, in my head everything looks better, but not unrecognizably so like normal. And in behind-the-scenes thoughts: how do you pick species to read cleanly here? I wanted something unmistakably an Old World animal, and something unmistakably New World, and I can't draw cats, dogs, or wolves well enough to make old- versus new-world species clear. Plus I wanted the Madagascar punch line. (I figured either Australia or Madagascar would be biologically sensible to have the weird case, and Madagascar seemed to make the funnier name.)

So a representative Madagascar animal almost demands lemur, which implies ringtailed lemur because anybody can draw that so they know what it's supposed to be. But that means the unmistakable New World animal can't be the obvious pick, the raccoon. Which is why I ended up drawing a capybara. The hippopotamus got picked for the Old World animal mostly because I saw a note on how to draw one, and tried it, and that worked out all right so I committed to it.