Petalpiercer

In southern Serinarcta, 290 million years PE, there lives an extremely aberrant animal, a four-legged creature almost totally hairless with smooth skin unmistakably marked in vibrant orange and yellow spots and stripes over a green background, with a sword-like red tooth that juts forward and upward from its jaws. It moves slowly and deliberately through the branches of short bushes and occasionally higher in the scattered savannah trees, without any fear of harm from predators even though it is barely seven inches long and not well hidden. 

All of its feet are good for grasping, and it steps from one twig to another with ease, wrapping its toes around each perch as it goes, sometimes using a hook-like claw at the tip of its tail as a fifth additional leg to cross an especially wide gap in the branches. It seeks out the large, unopened bud of some flowering clover bush and positions itself just beneath it. Then, with a rapid jerk of its head, it punctures a hole into the base of the petals. A flow of nectar begins to dribble out, which the petalpiercer sucks up with its syringe-like jaws. The flower's nectar reserve is soon depleted before it ever blooms, and the petalpiercer, an animal that has evolved to circumvent all the complicated symbiotic relationships between a plant and a pollinator, makes its way on to its next heist. It has not benefited the flower at all - it will not be pollinated when it opens tomorrow and produces no nectar. The petalpiercer is a plant parasite. And it is one of the strangest of all molodonts.

This molodont is a species of siphontooth descended from the gash-hopper, and belongs to the only group of these animals that is partially herbivorous. While other siphontooths feed exclusively on animals, be it on blood or on flesh liquefied by a venomous bite, the petalpiercer's diet is over 75% flower nectar and fruit juice, rounded out with caterpillar-like insect larvae that it gleans from leaves, sucks dry with its beak, and so acquires necessary protein and vitamins from. While other non-parasitic siphonteeth are often fearsome and aggressive hunters, this is not true of the petalpiercer, which is slow-moving and placid. Neither does this one need to be fast or wary, for despite its size, it has no significant predators. Its bright markings are a warning sign. Handle one roughly, and it will jerk its head to the side and stab its harasser with its beak. This, alone, isn't especially damaging. But the bite of the petalpiercer is still venomous, only now used defensively rather than only to hunt. It injects venom to produce an agonizing sting that will hurt for days to larger animals, and be fatal to anything closer to its own size. 

Not even cygnosaurs will eat the petalpiercer; just seeing one in a tree is sufficient to deter them from so much as taking a nibble of its leaves, and it quickly moves on. This interaction can mean that some plants are benefited by the petalpiercer's presence even though it reduces their reproductive capacity, for it keeps away browsers. A solution to benefit both parties even exists in some dancing trees which leak sugar-rich sap from their stems and so help satiate the animal and reduce its damage to their blossoms - a balance that provides for both parties.