well i'm sure everyone is shocked that the game follows the movie
https://twitter.com/i/status/1641833148026593282

Noice!

Larian calls the owlbear "Nature's cutest mistake", but if I recall correctly, owlbears aren't natural creatures. (That was why they were a "Beast" rather than an "Animal" in more recent editions.) They were the result of a wizard's magical crossbreeding experiments that escaped and managed to thrive just fine all on their own. (Unless, of course, later editions retconned this.) The Carrion Crawler is another iconic D&D monster that has the same origin.