one of the cool things about doing a massive worldbuilding project with several habitable planets with unique ecologies is that in the process of learning enough about evolutionary biology to come up with alien organisms that are not simply "dogs with four eyes and six legs", ive learnt just how fucking astonishingly diverse life on earth is. like every idea i come up with for an alien organism turns out to have existed on earth already, at least once.

this post brought to you by the Mexican mole lizard, which is essentially a kind of snake that has turned itself into an earthworm, except it's retained its front legs because they help it dig. i had written down an idea for an alien animal that i thought was weird and unique that i had never seen before ("what if a snake kept its front legs?") and it turns out this lil guy has been here the whole damn time.