basics
pronounced like ho-shi-nal, plural being rouxinóis (ho-shi-noise). rouxinóis are frugivore marsupials found in tropical rainforests. they spend most of their lives in small "gangs", usually looking for the next fruit tree. but they're also known for travelling for the sake of it, never being satisfied with one tree, always itching to see more of everything. rouxinóis travel both on the ground and on trees. they are diurnal and prefer sleeping in a "pile" in small crannies between branches or roots.
they have two sexes: siren and muse. sirens are smaller than muses, and usually there's only one or two per group. the size difference is a trait from way before, when the specie before modern rouxinóis used to eat meat: sirens needed to be small and quick to act as bait and lure predators into the trap. muses were bigger and heavier because they were that trap, they would sit on branches and wait for the sirens to bring the predator close enough for them to dogpile and kill it. this doesn't happen anymore, but this size different is still useful for their meat-eating cousins.
babies
eating upside down / sharing seeds with saúvas
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colors
they have three base colors; brown, blue and red. brown is the most common. for now they have only two genes that can affect those base colors: dilute and spread. diluted brown is lilac. diluted blue is silver and diluted red is cream. spread, well, "spreads" the color of a rouxinol's ribbons to its entire body. brown turns to black, red turns to maroon and blue turns to ultramarine.
highlights can be blue, yellow, cyan and red, with yellow outer rings and red inner rings being the most common. highlights are not affected by either the spread or dilute gene, but certain conditions can mess up with the way they're expressed; hyperpigmentation in yellow and blue highlights can make them look orange/purple respectively, and hypopigmentation makes red looks pink. both rings have their own sets of possible colors, so they can both be the same color of different ones.
rouxinóis can develop a purple "tint" from metabolizing the pigment from the pituguinha fruit. if they consume enough of them it can pass down to their offspring.
rouxinol art
inspiration
rouxinol is the portuguese word for nightingale. inspired by the art of Eqüietum. i wanted them to look like a real animal, but also like a statue. something painted, maybe? kinda fake. like someone took a ceramic dog or cat and painted on top without really knowing it was a dog or a cat. i struggled with the face the most because i wanted them to be like the faces from Eqüietum's works, a thing of shapes and lines with a pattern you can't quite make sense of. but then i got tired and just fucked around with it and in the end i went with those simple markings instead. as of writing this (25/09/02) i just found out the first rouxinol design is from 3 years ago so i think i kinda got . a little tired of remaking their faces again and again and againnnn.
i forgot paragraphs are a thing. i struggled with their whole design actually, before i got blessed in the middle of the night with a vision of a perfect alien shape and scribbled it on a random postit. obviously birds where a big inspiration. also fossas, weasels and stoats, and jaguarundis. their face shape specifically was based on a barnacle i saw on a tiktok (beaked barnacle?). oh and graffiti. in general, just graffiti i see around são paulo.