An idea I've had for a while is "spicing up" the world of LBT by escaping the boundaries of the Mesozoic and adding creatures from the preceding geological era - the Paleozoic, specifically the Permian period that immediately preceded the Triassic. It was a strange and fascinating period of Earth's history that has been overlooked by pop culture. What is most unique is that it was dominated by synapsids, which split off from a shared ancestor with reptiles around 318 million years ago and are the ancestors of mammals. Early synapsids such as, most famously,
Dimetrodon were quite reptilian in appearance (though they still possessed the enlarged canine teeth that reptiles lack), but by the end of the Permian, advanced synapsids had evolved a more warm-blooded metabolism and fur.
The world of the late Permian was one where wolf-like furry predators called Gorgonopsids preyed on their scalier synapsid cousins while the trees were occupied by creatures like
Suminia that greatly resembled primates - including prehensile tails and opposable thumbs!
Now, what if these creatures managed to persist past the end-Permian extinction in some corner of LBT's world, even if they preferred to hide from its Saurian inhabitants?
Suminia in particular is interesting because in a world where non-human animals are anthropomorphized, these creatures could easily become adept tool-users and even become somewhat "civilized," though at a tribal level of development. Just some food for thought.
