This little hopping nightmare is a nobbit, or not-rabbit, the commonest form of herbivorous megafauna in a squinch, or pocket universe, called Koozebane.

Nobbits, or Xenoparalagus monopodus, are mammalian in external character, with warm blood and a thick coat coat of brown and white fur, long ears and a cute furry tail, giving it a distinctly rabbit-like look. There are two large eyes, but unlike earth animals one eyes faces forward and the other behind, giving it a disturbing cyclopean appearance. The nares and jaws are located at the end of a long trunk, allowing the nobbit to seek food while it remains upright, giving it a better view of approaching predators. The trunk contains a trachea but not an esophagus - vegatation is grabbed by the pseudo-mouth and stuffed into a slit on the chest which leads to a powerful crop lined with pebble-like bony nodules which grinds it to a pulp.

The nobbit's torso is shaped like a bowling pin, the bottom-heavy design giving it an inherent stability. It propels itself forward in a series of leaps on its huge, single limb. The nobbit's sping is quite flexible, serving as an excellent shock absorber and allowing it to bend itself around and kick and scratch attackers with its retractable claws.

The unicorn-style horn growing from the nobbit's cranium is actually a fruiting body. Every few months a nobbit will sprout one and, when it reaches full growth, drive the spikes into the ground and snaps it off. Roughly three weeks later a seedling grows from the spike and becomes a large plant with thick, tough leathery leaves and a frail white orchid-shaped flowers on long stems, which are fertilized by a species of butterfly (not pictured). The plant develops fruits which resemble coconuts and which shelter the growing nobbit embryos like vegatable eggs. Although the plant usually is fertilized by pollen carried from other plants, it is capable of self-fertilization. Since nobbits clearly did not evolve in Koozebane, they must have come from another universe. A single nobbit would have been sufficent to spawn the entire current population.

In some respects nobbits are nearly identical to earthly rabbits, in others, they're so striking dissimilar they more closely resemble fungi than animals. Scholars disagree whether they evolved from or in parallel to true rabbits, perhaps mutated by strange radiations or the unusual physics of their non-euclidian habitat, or developed their rabbitlike features convergently.

All those who've studied them agree, however, that if you can get past the way they look, nobbits are delicious.



Nobbits are something I created for a short story, just felt like drawing one today. More about squinches here: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/1940549/ (scroll to the bottom). Koozebane is a name from the Muppet Show, a deliberate joke by one of the characters. I admit, I got the hopping monopod idea from Wayne Barlowe, but one should always steal from the best.