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Description
A practice comic I made earlier this year focusing on evolution on an alien planet with lower gravity and a cooler, drier climate. Around a hundred million years have passed since the last page. Life has successfully colonized the planet's terrestrial surface. One of the earliest and currently most successful lineages of large vertebrate-equivalents includes the herd of tobogganing herbivores featured on this page. This group of organisms incorporates large amounts of antifreeze-based enzymes within their metabolisms. This allows some to attain large sizes as a defense against predators, but at the cost of true endothermy. Thus, while these grazers migrate to new feeding and mating grounds across large sheets of ice, they are easy targets for the apex marine predators. The remains of a successful kill are scavenged by creatures that belong to another group of creatures that diverged from the grazers' lineage millions of years before. They maintain higher metabolisms, producing their own heat, allowing them to forage more actively. This requires them to consume proportionally more food, though, leading to quarrels among the scraps. The males of this particular species sport colorful display membranes which, along with a shared meal, allows them a chance to continue their lineage...

Description
A practice comic I made earlier this year focusing on evolution on an alien planet with lower gravity and a cooler, drier climate. Around a hundred million years have passed since the last page. Life has successfully colonized the planet's terrestrial surface. One of the earliest and currently most successful lineages of large vertebrate-equivalents includes the herd of tobogganing herbivores featured on this page. This group of organisms incorporates large amounts of antifreeze-based enzymes within their metabolisms. This allows some to attain large sizes as a defense against predators, but at the cost of true endothermy. Thus, while these grazers migrate to new feeding and mating grounds across large sheets of ice, they are easy targets for the apex marine predators. The remains of a successful kill are scavenged by creatures that belong to another group of creatures that diverged from the grazers' lineage millions of years before. They maintain higher metabolisms, producing their own heat, allowing them to forage more actively. This requires them to consume proportionally more food, though, leading to quarrels among the scraps. The males of this particular species sport colorful display membranes which, along with a shared meal, allows them a chance to continue their lineage...