I'm not convinced about that. It ignores the other 60% of animal creation. It isn't just manipulating a digital skeleton and slapping on a skin, they have to add new animations (even with rigs built from existing rigs, like with the jaguar and polar bear, and even the dingo), find recordings of the animals' sounds, create the Zoopedia entry, programme in the animal's specific needs and requirements, and so on and so forth. Some of this might be easier to do than other parts, but 1-2 weeks is an absurdly optimistic time frame, IMO.
I believe you're overestimating the amount of time most of this work entails though. The visual part of the animal (rig, textures, models, etc.) are one thing and require quite a lot of time. It's perfectly possible Frontier uses a similar system we used back in the day in our modding team, where you have a basic mesh of some animals (for instance a big cat mesh), which you can from there on out resculpt said basic mesh to the animal you need; or they can have a bunch of mesh assets like claws, teeth, hooves, horns etc. to lighten the work load. But overall, together with the sound design, this takes up the majority of the time. So that's your 60% of the animal creation, not the other way around
But animal needs and requirements are parameters you need to adjust, most likely with their own piece of software where you input the animals parameters and that produces a base programmed animal. People seem to think that we as developers write every piece of code of our project by hand, but that's not the case. Next to actual product development (aka development that directly influences the project), we also do a lot of dev-development (development to make the lives of your dev team easier and indirectly influences the project.) A lot of processes are automated, so that we don't have to do everything by hand, because that wouldn't be efficient at all. It would be more unlikely that Frontier does not have such systems in place and that all of their animals are coded by hand, especially given that the game has over 80 animals already. Most likely they have their own "TMTK" software to add in animals. Because keep in mind as well, a majority of work that was put in early on was put in to make it easier to add animals later. That's how development usually goes, we try to code stuff in a way that future selves don't hate us and we have less work.
Besides, there are multiple people working on an animal at once, so whilst some people do research for multiple animals, others do sound-design for multiple animals, etc. All of this happens at several stages, so it's hard to pinpoint it to a specific stretch of time, but a full month of 7-8 hour work days for a single animal is far from absurd. It's perfectly do-able, and I wouldn't be surprised if the time frame is even shorter. We're talking about a professional team here, with full work days and a company that's known for being able to tackle big projects.
We surely shouldn't over-estimate the amount of work, but we shouldn't underestimate it either. Frontier most likely had put in hours and hours and hours into the process of making animals, which means it's for sure quite streamlined by now. But that's only because so much effort was put into it at the start.
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