New Animals

Hey Jammers! I was planning to post about sabertooth tigers on Friday, seeing as I had a day off from school, but my brother took over my computer for the whole day. Then I started this post up yesterday, but due to being busier than expected, I never finished it. :/

But what matters is that I'm here now. Let's get to the update now, shall we? :D

As I thought before, that ambiguous lump of rock was not in its final form. 

Here's a comparison:

Hehe X)

You can definitely see some distinctive features on this lump that signify a sabertooth tiger.

I was initially confused why the Heartstone of a sabertooth tiger would surface in a swamp. Sabertooth tigers originally lived in grasslands and tundra, right?

But then I remembered something...

For fossils to form, conditions have to be perfect. Most plants and animals completely go back into the earth, but a few become preserved. Usually, swamps and bogs are good places to find fossils!

So that little mystery is solved. But there's another one about this update that may be a little trickier to solve.

Right in the middle of Animal Jam's April homepage is, you guessed it, a sabertooth tiger. But it probably took you a second to notice anything different because this feline looks exactly like every other recently released big cat on AJ. 

You can get the same basic design if you put Monster Teeth on a cougar:

Basically.

So if this animal is so similar to others that have been released in the past, why does AJHQ even bother?

The (most likely) reason why the Ostrich will never be released, even though it was promised a year or two ago, is because its basic design was repurposed for the flamingo. 

So if AJHQ has that amount of restraint when it comes to bird avatars, why do they put out so many all-too-similar canine and feline avatars?

I believe it's because AJHQ is trying to recreate the popularity of wolves, which I can kinda understand. But I don't think this is the whole story. 

This may seem like it's going off the rails, but hear me out. Let's look at a handful of recently released animals, in order of date: 

- Cougar (released March 16, 2017)
- Coyote (released May 25th, 2017)
- Flamingo (released August 3rd, 2017)
- Red Panda (released November 3rd, 2017)
- Clydesdale Horse (released January 18, 2018)

On average, there is a two month gap between the release of each new animal.

It seems like AJHQ has given themselves a requirement for implementing new animals into Animal Jam. Maybe these deadlines don't leave a lot of room for creativity. :\

A lot of the fan-made animal ideas are very unique and cool. Maybe AJHQ could take inspiration from them:

Source: sapstar on DeviantArt

This is not to say that animals released in the past are not creative. A lot of work probably went into them. I just personally think that new animals shouldn't be released so close together to give the people working on them some more time.

Thanks for reading. See you all in Jamaa! :)

~DoomyPanda