This was supposed to be posted ages ago but I procrastinated on it because I couldn't write the nuances in English right, so have this (possibly) terribly written post about snowshoe evolutionary history.
The image above is a bit outdated, and none of these names are permanent for now.
A species of genetically-modified, rodent-like mammal, called a tiomouse, is abandoned on Tiomia. They are the only vertebrates left there, so they find themselves in a world with endless food and no competition. They were herbivores that mainly ate 'grass'.
After 'trees' and predators appear, some browsing tiomice become arboreal and turn into screechers. They were frugivorous animals that usually lived in groups of 20-100 individuals and communicated with each other using high pitched calls.
After ~50 mya, a species of screecher (specifically from the croakape genus) learn that they can use auditory mimicry and their large numbers to scare away small carnivores from their kills. The protein gained from the meat and the teamwork required to execute this theft properly is a massive boost to the species' intelligence. After they become more omnivorous and began to actively hunt, the swarmers appeared.
A population of unusually smart swarmers discover that they can use sticks and stones to hunt more efficiently and process their prey, and in only a few mya turn from mesopredators (trappers) to apex predators (dropwolves). They were named for their hunting strategy of using bait to lure prey into special areas, where a group waited until the right moment to drop down and swarm them.
As the climate cooled and the taiga's range dwindled, some dropwolves were forced to evolve to become good walkers again in order to travel between strands of forest, and some populations of these 'terrestrial dropwolves' evolved to almost entirely lose their arboreality. Although many different clades adopted different hunting strategies, the ancestors of the snowshoes used stones to dig out ditches, shoved sharp sticks into the bottom, and placed layers of moss and grass at the top (punjiwolves).
One of these punjiwolves over-specialized for intelligence, trading off nearly all of their muscular strength and speed for complex groups, extremely efficient traps, and faster ways to transmit information, as well as forming a symbiosis with the ancestors of pobuivai in order to traverse greater distances. These punjiwolves evolved into snowshoes, and they are the most successful and wide-spread species of the punjiwolf genus.
