I'd have to pick gryphons, for a variety of reasons:
- Lions are badass, eagles are badass, making gryphons badass squared
- Historically associated with strength and protection
- They're often portrayed as having human-level intelligence and how fucking cool would it be to talk to one
- They would give the absolute best cuddles and you cannot convince me otherwise
The number of times humans made furries completely independent of other cultures is really interesting to me.
It's the oldest fandom in existence, yeah.
"What if a dude was also a wolf" is not that far-out of a concept
Sure, but there aren't a lot of ideas that appear spontaneously on multiple continents. "What if a person had a snake body for legs" happened both in Greece and India, probably totally independently. That's really neat!