Animals

[XBrickmonster]

Hello!
Recently I have decided to enter a contest over on Flickr, the Colossal Battle Contest in the group LEGO War. One of the categories is Beasts of battle, and I was wondering if anyone had ideas/techniques of how to build cool animals that might fit that theme. I already have one entry done, but I still want to hear some ideas and learn some new techniques to apply in other builds as well. I hope this topic will help others too, because I know that animals and beasts are often rather difficult to realistically represent in LEGO brick form.

Thanks everyone!