Huntear

275 Million Years Post-Establishment

In general, the antlears have struggled to adapt to the hothouse climate in comparison to other survivor groups. Surviving only by the skin of their teeth from a single ancestor that was already fairly rare, the very damp climate and intense competition for resources with both more efficient herbivores like thorngrazers and specialized predators like sawjaws often leaves little room for them to coexist. This is further worsened by the homogeneous state of continental Serinarcta that is predominately made up of a single vast biome, the sogland, where a few highly successful species can dominate most of the biomass over extremely wide areas. And the sogland is a grassland kept trimmed by thorngrazer herds with very little opportunity available for the growth of woody plants, shrubs or trees: foods that the antlears, as circuagodonts, were adapted to most effectively gather. The antlears, faced with a world uniquely hostile to them, still barely eke out their survival on the isolate fringes of the early hothouse world. A handful of species manage to survive in islands of suitable habitat - both literal and metaphorical - where thorngrazers are rare or absent, and where trees have begun to take new root. Likewise, as ancestrally omnivorous animals, it is only in such environments that have few or no competitors like gravediggers and sawjaws that the antlears have much opportunity to feed on meat, be it live prey or carrion. Yet though only a few of these relic circuagodonts still exist today in a world that seems to have been made for anyone but them, there are a few far-off places where these animals are doing some interesting new things. These animals are unlikely to survive long into the hothouse, for their continued existence depends on their habitats remaining cut-off from a wider world, and this will not last forever, but in this momentary snapshot in time, we can observe a glimpse at what could have been. A look into how the future of Serina might have come to be across the whole of Serinarcta, if the climate had changed in only a slightly different way.

On the Trilliontree Islands of coastal southeast Serinarcta, hundreds of islands exist in varying degrees of separation from the mainland as sea level rise devoured the land several million years ago and covered much of its lower elevations in shallow oceans. Thorngrazers, being heavy and poor swimmers, can only reach those which are only temporarily detached from shore by the tides, and then can become marooned there if the sandbars that connected them to land wash away. This leaves most of the islands, and all of its more distant ones, entirely free of their influence. And so this is one of few places in the northern world where sogland is replaced by forests of broad-leaf plants such as ant trees and dancing trees that on the mainland cannot grow past the jaws of the grazers, which has slightl favored the antlear's survival up to this time. This is where the largest antlear can be found. Known as the huntear, it is a behemoth that can weigh 700 lbs, an omnivorous, bear-like organism that feeds roughly equally on both plant and animal kingdoms. A powerful slicing bite lets it tear bark from trees and cut branches just as easily as it can rip flesh and crunch bone. It is a powerhouse of muscle, all brawns, but very little brains. Far from their woodcrafter cousins of a bygone era, the huntear is exceedingly simple-minded. It is, in a way, an antlear that has become a thorngrazer in their absence. But of course, they retain their uniquely antlear feature - a pair of grasping arm-like limbs derived from their jointed ears (and if thorngrazers, too, had such arms, who knows what elevated level of destruction they might bring.)

The huntear's broad skull is immensely large and its neck densely muscular, supporting its ears that have become its strongest - and strangest - pair of limbs. Huntears are solitary, ornery animals, and will strike with their trademark appendages at anything in their way; they clear trails through the forest like bulldozers, and they pummel anything that doesn't run fast enough with a bone-shattering blow. Huntears have evolved in isolation, knowing no threat of predation, and have no sense of fear. Everything they encounter, for now, they can dominate and devour. Even their own kind is barely tolerated; individuals formidably defend familiar territories, battering opponents that don't respect the scent marks and lines of torn-up ground that identify the edges of each other's property. Females and males are identical, differing only in color, with males having brighter orange hues on their bellies and cheeks, and outside a narrow breeding season, the opposite sexes fight as much as those of the same. Huntears eat basically anything around them when they are hungry, from leaves to sticks to any unfortunate smaller animal that was unwise enough to continue living on the same island and not swim far, far way while it still had a chance. Prey is always killed with a strike of their ears, for the animal itself moves slowly and has little agility except in swinging these arms, which it can do so suddenly it often catches its victims unaware of the threat it posed. Male huntears will kill and eat their own young too, retaining no memory (or assigning no value) to their relationship with the calf's own mother, and so females with young must be proactive. They brutally attack males that so much as look their way, forming a living wall of bone and muscle to protect their infants, if only for a little under one year before they, too, are driven away.

The huntear, for now, is a rare success story among its contemporary relatives. It is the biggest, fiercest, and perhaps - despite its size - the most abundant. But its future is not bright. It is able to be all that it is on the trilliontrees only because, until now, nothing else has reached these islands that can do them better. On the mainland today, there are evolving much bigger herbivores and far more coordinated and cooperative carnivores. The thorngrazers as we currently know them may never reach these islands, but by the time other species make landfall, the huntear may wish it had only those ancient and predictable brutes to deal with. Pigeonholed by its own evolution into a corner from which it will be unable to back out of, the huntear's fate may already be sealed. Too aggressive to even tolerate its own fellows, yet already becoming encumbered by its size, how could it hope to form a herd and work together to defend itself from new predators that will have grown large enough and social enough to tear the powerhouse down? The arrival of descendants of new predators and rival herbivores popping up on the mainland in the not-too-distant future will ultimately bring about the end of the huntear's brief reign over these islands. And in only a few million years, only one of the scattered, struggling antlear lineages will still remain to face an ever-changing world.

The huntear will be remembered by none, in the end. An early evolutionary experiment not destined for grander things, it nonetheless provides look at how things might have been elsewhere, had things gone just a little bit differently.