Gronk

"Look, if you put your teddy bear at the bottom of the bag you're just going to have to wait until we stop to get it out."

Number Appearing:  1 to lots

Size: Giraffe

Armor: Pack saddle

Resilience: As large herd beast

Intelligence: Questionable

Communication: "Gronk!"

Disposition: Domesticated

Violence: Variations of "trample"

Enemies:  Large predators, bandits, gopher holes

Aims:  Keep moving forward

Peculiarities: Dwarf sauropods are peculiar in the same way as jumbo shrimp

Treasure: As caravan

"Picked 'em up in Damascene.  Salt was cheap and almonds were dear and we needed extra beasts to haul it all home.  The man that sold them to us said that the merchant he acquired them from claimed they were from somewhere around Akka Arrh, but that doesn't make any sense.  That place has been lost for centuries, if it ever existed."

Gronks are "dwarf" sauropods used as beasts of burden.  They're fairly unusual outside their home range of "not here".

Format cheerfully swiped from They Stalk the Underworld

A Bit of Culture (it grows on you)

"William", courtesy of The Met

This is a 3,800-year-old knick-knack from an Egyptian tomb. Over the last hundred years, it's become a mascot of sorts for The Met.  If you take a close look at the lotus markings, they're really just made out of triangles and dots.

Painting by Charles R. Knight

These things said "Hong Kong" when I was a kid.

Uintatheriums are a somewhat odd extinct mammal.  The tusks give them a certain resemblance to hippos (they're not meaningfully related to any modern mammal).  Uintatheriums started popping up in bags of chinasaurs around the time that Gary Gygax was playing with other cheap plastic critters in his basement, but never got turned into anything iconic, D&D-wise.

Reaper 77144: Mummy for scale.

This sort of thing is what happens when I play with cheap plastic critters in my man-cave.  Acrylic paint, an alcohol pen, and a paperclip used to wire him to the Magic-Sculpt base.  The biggest time consumption came from the cleanup stage - the molds have not aged well.  One big advantage over doing this in the '70s is that I can pull up a 3-d view of the original hippo's markings while I've got the pen in hand.  He's deliberately glossy because "William" was originally glazed with blue glass.  He seems to be perfectly serviceable as a statue, living construct, or magical critter.  I kind of picture him as an immobile oracle that speaks with a lisp due to the tusks.