LAST EDITED 30 40 MINUTES AFTER THE TIMESTAMP!! Edits are not embedded, though, so don't worry! Go to bottom of the post for edits
I found some links that I sent to Sol (they're links to old threads, and for some reason that I can't figure out, I am currently paranoid about publicly posting links to old threads), but apparently, the Vixen second gens went up August 16 (there's a post that leads me to that conclusion). And for eyeball comparison purposes:
pet ID 24107 with adoption date 2008-08-10pet ID 34106 with adoption date 2008-08-16pet ID 44107 with adoption date 2008-08-17pet ID 54107 with adoption date 2008-08-20Without finding the first/last pets adopted on each day, I can't figure out approximately when in each day these pets were adopted (e.g. is that 34k pet among the first or the last of the August 16 pets?), but I don't think the exact times matter, because... I think it's safe to say from eyeballing the above ^ that we got a flood of people adopting the Vixen 2nd gen babies when they came out. That would explain the aforementioned deluge of "Other" pets in the 40k area.
Also, 2nd gen babies are always differentiable at birth (with very, VERY few exceptions, and none of them happened in 2008!), so people were probably more inclined to adopt more IMMEDIATELY (remember, no adoption limits yet!) to get all the blankets they saw other people with.
On a similar note but unrelated to second gens: I'm pretty sure the balloon dogs newborn had a tri-colored blanket OR it was just the purple-colored blanket (speaking from memory, which I admit could be failing me... I remember not thinking that there could be more outcomes and so I didn't think to adopt more balloon dogs; also, purple-only wouldn't be too strange because pink + blue = purple more or less LOL I also remember being surprised when I first saw the pink and blue balloon dogs, although I have no idea when I first saw them...). Similarly for the October 2008 red/teal/orange litter, and similarly for a few other newborns throughout CS's history. BUT upon adoption, you received a newborn with a single-colored blanket.
This may have influenced whether people adopted more pups right off the bat. Is this relevant?
EDIT: I always, always forget about WayBack Machine despite how much I love it OTL
(Vixen) second gens available on August 16, 2008! (Vixen only deduced from pets/forum posts, as the parents of the other August 2008 second gen litter are also from May 2008)
She even posted exactly how many babies they had lol
Edit2:
Even better! Check out that latest news post.
And
looks like the August 2008 -> September 2008 transition was as on-time as you can get with manually doing everything =P last adoption date for any August 2008 pets should be 2008-08-31, as there are September 2008 pets with adoption date 2008-08-31.
Also, you can look through all news posts ever like this:
6 July 2008 - 16 August 2008,
13 August 2008 - 17 October 2008, and then you can go to the on-site news (current last page is
here; this will change as more news is posted) to view news from 10 October 2008 - present
(there's overlap in the ranges, yeah, but that's no problem)