Are there any
moles in the game?
Letsee,
squirrels, armadillos, porcupines, mongoose... flamingos, newts... are there any
scorpions in?
Ooh, I forgot about adding giant praying mantises I wanted to do. Uh, normal sized those would just be vermin...
its moot as far as this project goes.
Fun fact: Moot is defined as "open to argument or debate"
Mammoth sounds reasonable to me. They're significantly different from elephants, and would make a useful hunting target for those settling in icy areas, as well as good challenge to those daft dwarves who insist on settling in haunted glaciers.
I don't think that really carries the meaning very well. It's something that you would only debate for the purpose of debate. It's otherwise pointless.
Next up: lagomorphs. I should note here that the pika, which is listed in the OP as a rodent, is in fact a lagomorph.
Lagomorphs are practically rodents and they were classified together less than a century ago.
If rats can chew through steel... i wouldn't approach a capybara...
I've heard stories of Beavers
The oddest story I've heard of Beavers is that they had the ability to chew through arms... but that claim just seems rediculous.
They can definitely pierce skin and given time I don't doubt they could gnaw through a bone but chomping through in one go is hard to believe.
Ohh...
well Ill list two then
-Sea Scorpian (Extinct): Some got as large as 2.5 meters large
-Horseshoe Crab (It is more related to a Spider and has an amazing immune system that we take advantage of even today)
Which reminds me of an important detail: we should be sure to give all the mollusks blue blood. Instead of hemoglobin (iron) they have hemocyanin (copper.)
This thread gave me an idea that renders this project somewhat useless trivial redundant something you don't really need to do.
http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=46852.0
Divergent evolution comes from a pretty frequent selective pressure: do something different so you don't have to compete with as many species. The reason I bring this up has to do with the bell curve for things like size and those other measurements. Shift the two away from each other to either extreme (you'll usually push a bit past it actually,) and you'll have a decent approximation.
In the case that they're not enclosed in the area and have some gene flow between larger populations only the species that stopped breeding with that would change much. Realistically when animals have mates around they won't just cut themselves off from the larger population without something like a mating ritual that gets off kilter. If this ever ends up giving creatures particular diets you could easily have different species trying to stop overlapping each other, whether that means two types of condor or a hyena and a lion.
Having a world gen setting for how often to do this would probably be a good idea as some people may want their deer almost always being pygmy or dire versions of the raw defined creature while others while others would want their deer to basically be deer. A default of having it happen to a particular animal in about 1 in 3 of the biomes it shows up in might be about right but you don't need to change the size every time as with some animals just changing the color could be suitable and as a lot of people have noticed the differences aren't actually that big for things like mice of the same genus.
Or particularly mentioning in the raws how frequently to split an animal type could do it too.
(should we stay away from "created breeds"?).
I'd say no as basically all food crops are "created breeds" but I doubt many of the players really know anything about historic agriculture beyond how growing your food gives you more time to figure out how to crack someone else's skull. The thousand or so years we run world gen for is probably not enough to go from some grass to modern wheat but it's plenty of time for taking an already domesticated species and make a lot of different varieties of it or lightly domesticate wild species.
I think the medieval diversity of dogs wasn't much compared to what we think of today- with the modern techniques of selective breeding you can get a lot done in just a few decades but without it that kind of thing takes much longer and is almost as much about chance.
I wish I knew the name of the beatle (or however you spell it) that lives near my house. It has a beautiful (in fact stunning) shimmering green shell so much so that I nicknamed it the Emerald Beatle.
You should have a decent chance of being able to tell us what family it fits into:
http://bugguide.net/node/view/60