Survivear

Not all survivors of the great thaw of ten million years ago found the hothouse world immediately hospitable. For some, it was hardly tolerable. While thorngrazers and archangels, poppits and porplets, foxtrotters and trunkos and most of the rest of the surviving land animal lineages immediately began to radiate into new species and spread out again over the newly green world, the circuagodonts just barely clung on. Their whole diversity, by the end of the ice age, had fallen to a single species, an aberrant form adapted specifically to a world harsh, cold, and most importantly, dry. The scorplear was aggressive, unusual, and tough. But it was not primed to exploit any benefits of sudden climate change. For the scorplear, the great thaw would lead to millions of years of chronically low populations, and numerous brushes with extinction. For scorplears were intolerant of dampness. High water tables from increased rainfall led to flooded den sites and drowned offspring. This immediately limited the already small survivor pool to isolated (and rare) higher elevations. Survival early in the hothouse was complicated even more by the scorplear having evolved as specialists of a dry tundra environment, and now elevated humidity and warm conditions led to frequent outbreaks of bacterial disease causing blood poisoning, or septicemia. 

For the last ten million years, the descendants of the scorplear just barely persisted in a single region, the upland plain (as all other populations across western Serinarcta gradually died out.) In contrast to other survivor clades, their evolution was slow, and they changed little, neither diversifying into multiple species, nor radically changing as a species. The hothouse was highly competitive, and even as they became more tolerant of the climate, they bred more slowly and fed less efficiently than thorngrazers which exploded in number at the end of the ice age. Not all animals are like thorngrazers - many don't make good disaster taxon, and simply succumb to sudden changes, even those that might seem beneficial. 

But the antlear lineage didn't quite die out, either, as some other ice age life had done. No, they were left in the middle - clinging to life, but doing little more than that, left almost static in a changing landscape. They became larger, as almost everything in the hothouse initially did, and their reliance on burrows reduced significantly as alternative cover - plant thickets - was made available. But they remained solitary, arguably even more so than their ice age ancestor. Both sexes evolved more striking markings - bright flashes of black and white, and bold red - which let them see each other easily from far away on the flat landscape, and so present their claim of a territory. They weren't disappearing - but they weren't spreading out or diversifying, either. They were simple surviving. They were the survivears.

The survivear is still the only living circuagodont of the middle hothouse, and it now appears a living fossil relic of bygone days. But for the first time in over ten million years, this may at last be set to change. Finally, the hothouse's wet grip on the global climate is lessening in places. Southern Serinarcta is beginning to dry out as gantuans replace the more destructive thorngrazers as the dominant herbivores and alter the landscape, allowing trees to grow and reducing the spread of muddy wallows. Savannahs are forming where once the soglands stretched on forever. For the survivear, it's a new opportunity - and some are migrating off the upland plain to new, uncharted lands. Fewer thorngrazers shredding the landscape means the plants that they favor in their diet - woody shrubs - are becoming numerous again. They are bigger now than before, no longer reliant on their burrows, and they can make the trek to find new food sources. Their aggression still protects them, and their antlers have only increased in size to make effective weapons to slash would-be attackers.

As the survivears begin to trickle out across southern Serinarcta, the sun is shining upon them. After so long holding out on the edges of a new world that seemed not meant for them, another change is ongoing, and this one once again favors an ancient survivor, for whom things can now only go up from here.