Gutguzzler

By 290 MPE, many thorngrazers - once big, homely, hostile animals - have evolved into smaller creatures that can be beautiful, elegant, and even highly intelligent. It has been a transformation few could ever have expected of them before the hothouse. 

But there is another genus of thorngrazers found in northern Serinarcta that, though quite small, are among the meanest and crudest of the entire lot. Very near relatives of the savannah thornsaber, and a little more distantly to the eartheater, they are the anklebiters. Their clade nickname embodies their fierce natures that make up for their diminutive sizes: anklebiters are carnivores, like their larger kin. The largest of this genus grows to just over knee high, some 20 inches at the shoulder. Yet they are deadly predators, able to hunt prey larger than themselves with vicious hooked underbites. Lurking in hiding - in deep, shadowed forest undergrowth, or the tall reeds of the endless wetlands - these creatures plod along on short, stubby legs that let them vanish into low cover. Though poor swimmers, bony osteoderms and dense skeletons let them sink in water and run along the bottom, giving them some ability to cross rivers and so dwell in wetter places than many thorngrazers. With barrel-shaped bodies, they appear chubby and almost cute. Don't be fooled - that isn't fat, but muscle. Extremely strong for their size, anklebiters erupt from the vegetation when they've crept close to some hapless passing animal - a unicorn, a trunko, anything it can catch unaware - and they strike at their vulnerable lower regions. Many anklebiters charge and strike the legs of their far bigger prey with a crippling bite; then, when their target has tripped, they make a killing bite, and drag their victim into cover to feed.

But not all are such quick, merciful killers. 

The gutguzzler is an anklebiter native to the flood forest region of Serinarcta. It is renowned for its gory feeding habits. Gutguzzlers don't bother striking a target's legs, but simply charge in to gore at its abdomen with their hooked jaws, twisting and pulling to cause massive wounds, then jumping away from defensive strikes, returning to bite again and again. They cause horrendous damage, darting frantically to and from, biting and tearing until the prey collapses, and death eventually comes from shock and blood loss. The strongest of their genus, the gutguzzler can take down prey some five times its own size this way - singly. The gutguzzler is a more specialized feeder than its relatives, and rather than consume an entire carcass in typical thorngrazer fashion, this one is adapted to quickly and neatly remove the soft inner organs as its preferential meal. Once the prey is immobilized, it juts its teeth into the body cavity and extends its lips to create a seal through which it sucks out the viscera and the soft fat under the skin, a modified behavior based on how young thorngrazers suck crop milk from their mothers' mouth as infants.  Muscle tissue and bone are left largely untouched on a typical gutguzzler kill, so that other scavengers - especially pickbirds - often follow the hunter to capitalize on its leftovers before other animals can find them.

Gutguzzlers primarily use their lower tooth hooks to kill prey, using their fang-like tusks more for self defense. For though a predator itself - and a wicked one, too - the gutguzzler is as much hunted as hunter. Food chains in the hothouse are complex, and meat-eaters are often the meat of a series of ever larger carnivores. An ambush predator and strictly terrestrial, it is easily surprised by it own nightmares - arboreal hunters, including trithons and the tacklesnatcher, as well as the ruffed rasp in the northermost part of its range. Though it is strong, it has little flexibility; a climbing predator which grabs it from behind the neck has little to worry about from those snapping jaws. If caught in the open, the gutguzzler is also a favored snack of many larger vultrorcs - and rarely, a predatory unicorn such as a literal nightmare will catch one. Serina in the late hothouse is a thorngrazer eat thorngrazer world: there is always someone meaner.