#they're my weird little pet peeve. there are so many other examples of stupid morphology and biology but idc abt those. just togs.

[high-voltage-rat]

Tog morphological biology really is weird. Their mouth, which resembles a crocodilian's, has teeth that imply carnivorous diets. However, where their head is so elongated, their bodies are extremely short and tall in comparison to a crocodilian, which to me suggests that they would have to dedicate significantly more power to holding their head up. Their eyes are positioned in a way that's really only suited to being a prey animal, horse style, unless you're an aquatic hunter. However, togs have the stumpy feet I associate with elephantids or other plains-based ungulates- or hippopotamids. They seem to be perissodactyls in this sense, bearing weight on the front 3 toes. But their shorter bodies paired with these feet would make balancing their heads quite difficult, as they have very little tail to offer a counterbalance, and their feet are stumpy enough to offer very little leverage. On top of that, they're known to be reptilian, but they also exist in cold snowy areas, with adapted colouration even, which suggests they're not cold-blooded. They're overall smooth-skinned (or possibly fuzzy? The striations seem to imply a fuzzy texture but the rest of them doesn't. I hesitate to use the fluffy tog or entagled tog as examples given they're meant to be mutants, but all other entagled creatures' mutations were mostly just exaggerations of pre-exisying traits, so short fuzz -> fluffy isn't that hard to imagine.) but they also seem to have the capacity to grow plated spines, which are modified osseoderms, so they do possess the genetics to grow scales like crocodilians- they just only use it for stegosaurus-style plates on the head and tail. Functionally speaking, these add little value and strike me as either residual anatomy or an in-progress developing adaptation. I lean towards the latter since the plates are a more terrestrial-suited feature.

Basically, lots about their morphology suggests they'd be best suited to aquatic or semiacquatic hunter lifestyles, including the fact that their balance issues wouldn't be as present in the water- except that we only ever see them on land, and their feet would be a nightmare for paddling in water (hippos, who have similar feet and webbing between their toes, are still poor swimmers and just walk along the bottom of water bodies- it's believed the webbing is more for stabilization in bottom walking). So the best explanation is that they were shallow-water hunters who wade, but at some point they became totally land-based, lost some reptilian and aquatic features, started developing spines, and began menacing Lore.

They're just such stupid creatures with stupid nonsense biology. I know this is a land of magic and I have an amulet that channels the power of my love to make my dragon grow gigantic à la Clifford the big red dog, but I draw the line at togs.