Quinkana

Weight: Generally 1 ton or less

Length: 10-20 ft

Height: Up to 6'3"

Social Unit: Individual

Native to: Atlantea

Habitat: Mostly Valleylands, Savanna, Desert, and Light Jungle

Quinkana is a large terrestrial crocodile native to Atlantea, occuring in the Yiri archipelago. Together with the megalania and thylacoleo, quinkana is one of the three terrestrial apex predators of Yiri's ecosystem. The cooler temperatures and the utter dominance of the thylacoleo in the Coorabar Alps keeps quinkana out of the higher altitudes, while the megalania's slower but stockier build and climbing ability outcompetes it in thick jungle. As a result, quinkana mostly inhabits savannas and the fertile valleylands in the archipelago's center.

Unlike most crocodiles, quinkana has long legs that have allowed it to adopt a wholly terrestrial lifestyle, living in drier areas where saltwater crocodiles are unable to hunt and would starve. Its legs, which come directly down from the body instead of jutting outwards like they do in most crocodilians, allow quinkana to reach a sustainable running speed of 30 mph and short sprints of up to 50 mph. This makes quinkana by far the fastest of Yiri's apex predators, running circles around the bulky and relatively slow megalania and outsprinting the thylacoleo. This allows the quinkana to run down its speedy prey in long chases and cut them down with its serrated teeth, unlike the megalania and thylacoleo, which are both ambush predators to an extent.

Quinkana's prey generally consists of medium-to-large-sized creatures in its territory, especially kangaroos, wallabies, palochestes, sambar deer and mihirungs. Although they sometimes kill and eat bunyip joeys if they can get away with isolating one from their herd, quinkana know never to hunt adult bunyips, as they are far larger and stronger than the much more lightly-built quinkana.

Despite being abnormally fast for a reptile, quinkana is still cold-blooded, and as a result, is completely unable to hunt or effectively defend itself at night. This poses a particular problem in the parts of its range that overlap with saltwater crocodiles and thylacoleos, as both of these predators are very active at night and have sometimes even been known to kill young quinkana in their sleep. Both territorial and predatory attacks on sleeping quinkana are known from these two species, and as a result, quinkana have learned to cope by sleeping in dense plant cover away from water to avoid being seen.

Quinkana have the potential to live for a very long time, with one recorded individual dying at the ripe old age of 110, but this is highly unusual, with most quinkana dying at around age 75 or so. They reach sexual maturity at around 15 years of age, and mating takes place at the beginning of the wet season, with eggs typically being laid 2 months later. Nests are usually dug in secluded and easily defensible spots with good plant or rock cover, and both parents will fiercely guard the eggs until they hatch. While 40-60 eggs in a nest is typical, a nest was once found near Neenynah with 91 eggs.

Despite the watchful eye of the parent quinkana, many eggs are stolen and eaten by smaller predators such as goannas (smaller cousins of the megalania), dingoes, mihirungs, and snakes such as the wonambi. Like their distant saltwater crocodile cousins, quinkana display an unusual level of parental care for reptiles, with the mothers typically staying with the young for over a month after they hatch. Like most other reptiles and birds, quinkana young will imprint on the first animal they see when they hatch, almost always their mother. However, there has been one known case of a quinkana hatchling imprinting on a sentient: Sarah, a Yiri Islander from a remote village on the Mullaring Plateau, found a nest that had been almost completely emptied by a goanna with no mother croc in sight and decided to take the last egg for herself, raising Yangarra, the quinkana who hatched from it, as her own.

While adult quinkana have essentially no natural predators, young quinkana have to deal with all sorts of threats, including penguins, pelicans, quolls, snakes, coconut crabs, goannas, eagles, dingoes, other crocodiles, and thylacines.

Since the quinkana occurs in Yiri's most agriculturally productive regions, encounters with sentients are frequent and usually do not end well. Since it has lived with sentients for so long, the quinkana has learned to avoid preying on them and to try to avoid contact with them whenever possible. However, isolated attacks do occur when non-imprinted quinkana become habituated to sentients (especially if fed by them). Quinkana also kill and eat livestock on occasion when wild prey is scarce, resulting in farmers viewing it as a pest and many retaliatory killings of the crocodiles.

As of late, this problem has gotten worse due to the galaxy's rapid industrialization beginning during the Tatian War, resulting in new crops and livestock being introduced to Yiri, as well as a population boom and increased demand for farmland. In 29 AR, the Atlantean Government took action and declared the quinkana a protected species, outlawing killings of the creatures. However, an unforseen effect of the Tatian War on quinkana has been noticed: during the war, Aurean camels (Camelops) were introduced to the Mullaring Desert on Yiri to help move supplies across the unforgiving terrain. However, the environment was so perfectly suited to these camels that escapees soon began breeding in the wild, and before long the Mullaring Desert had a camel population numbering in the millions. As a result, increased numbers of quinkana have been seen living in the Mullaring Desert in recent decades, as the camels offer them an easy source of prey.