"Moosows are pig-cows. I'm not actually aware of any moosepigs. Mooselions yes, dragon moose, moosewhales..."

"Ah. No offense, but those sound terrifying."

"Dragon moose are domesticated. They've fallen out of use, but they used to pull heavy loads."

"I'm trying to imagine what a moosewhale would look like and I'm probably doing it wrong because it's coming out implausibly comic and also very Canadian."

"I had the antlers at a different angle and was using a different kind of whale, is I think most of the problem. The Canadianness persists, I'm just going to assume my brain inextricably links moose with Canada. Canada is a country near mine that has a lot of moose in it," she clarifies.

"I see."

"So most of the animals where you're from are weird mix-ups? Weird from my perspective, I mean, sorry."

"Yeah. We have some isolate animals - an Earth King once famously kept a pet bear - but they're uncommon and tend not to do as well even if they establish populations."

"Huh. I wonder why that is."

"I don't know. Do you not have very many kinds of animals? Since there's no combinatorial explosion?"

"We have a lot of animals. We have I think several million kinds of beetle, thousands upon thousands of kinds of birds, mammals, reptiles, uncountable sea creatures...I'm not a taxonomist or I'd have better figures but it's a lot."

"...Okay. Maybe you have more kinds of animals than we do. Since instead of crossing and generalizing they're specializing ever-finer until you have millions of kinds of beetle."

"Probably, yeah. I'm not the best person to ask, evolution isn't my field of study."

"Fair enough. ...That is so many beetles. Counting everything that has as a component any kind of beetle we probably have a few thousand, it's a good design, but that's just ridiculous."

"I think beetles are one of the more numerous kinds of animal on the planet, yeah."

"Rocs are an unusually streamlined animal. I think they're eagle/ospreys but they're one of the animals that gets their own name."

"Well, they're a specific thing in my world's mythology. I think the fictional version eats elephants or something."

"I mean, rocs are big enough that they could probably eat most of an elephant-rat, maybe even an elephant-rhino if they took their time, but they prefer fish."

"...Rats are tiny. Rhinos are not tiny but significantly smaller than an elephant. I suspect that elephant-rats and elephant-rhinos are smaller than just plain elephants."

"I don't actually know how big any of these things are as isolates. An elephant-rat is yea big -" She gestures a size that's a bit bigger than a regular rat. "I say 'most of' because it wouldn't have fish bones and the roc wouldn't be able to swallow it whole, it wouldn't be much of a meal really... An elephant-rhino is huge, though."

"Hey, Bar, can we have pictures of an elephant and an elephant-rhino on approximately the same scale?"

They can get a spread of all the elephant crosses, including the elephant koi, which is the biggest. The elephant-rhino is second-biggest, about the size of an Earth elephant.

"Okay, that's about the size of an Asian elephant. African elephants are bigger, but I don't remember which one rocs were supposed to eat, so."

"I couldn't tell you."