Howdy, Carly_kins! Nice to meet you! Hope after you're done here, you go over to
Introductions and meet everyone else! :grouphug
As to the variants, yes, they are 'random' skins that appear for some animals. They come WITH the animal (except a few separate downloads like the scarred lion). But, the 'trick' is that your graphics settings have to be on High for them to show up. If that slows your computer down, you can compensate by 'tweaking' the other settings (especially the font/font aliasing/font shadow ones). Let us know if that doesn't help. Oh, and the appearance of the skins is about 33%. So, only one in every 3-5 animals will have one. :happy