This is one of my favorite interior art pieces from Brenda Lyons, who always knocks them out of the park. From Opinicus, Book 7.
The Silkmouth Pride (jaguarundi + cave swiftlet gryphons) facing off against a titanoboa.
While I'm as much a fan of giant snake movies as the next girl, I really liked getting to write cave swiftlet gryphons. Cave swiftlets produce silk from their mouths, which is actually where the nests for bird's nest soup comes from. To help them hold onto cave walls, their tail feathers are very long, and the feathery part stops about halfway down, leaving a vicious spike to dig into the stone.
Combine those into something gryphon-sized, and you've got quite the critter! There weren't any good photos of cave swiftlet tail spikes online, so I reached out to Oriana Pokorny, an ornithologist friend, who was able to provide some for reference. (Though if you look up chimney swifts, you can see a less vicious version. Bristlespine from later books is a chimney swift gryphon.)
You can read or listen to Opinicus on most stores, libraries, through my Patron, or on Itch. Here's the Books2Read link that has most of the stores on it: https://books2read.com/opinicus
