The Spire Forest

280 million years PE, Serinarcta's ecosystems are taking shape as spire forests formed by ant-symbiotic cementrees spread over upland areas, forming patchy, open savannahs between the vast stretches of flooded marsh. The formation of forest in this thorngrazer-dominated region, after several million years of almost nothing resembling a tree except upon isolated, out of reach sites, has changed the trajectory of animal life that can now seek shelter from predators by climbing these trees, or simply hiding between their fortress-like, stony trunks. Some animals live in these new forests full-time - but others are only part-time, moving between this biome and others adjacent, as their boundaries are often indistinct and interwoven depending on altitude differences of just a few meters that greatly influence where water does and doesn't collect.

Spire forests are widespread, spreading furthest across the plains but also forming stands on isolated islands within the low-lying soglands, and their endless, flat, wet expanse. It rains everywhere almost daily for short but intense periods, and rainfall rolls down from the plains and pools here keeping the soil saturated and the water table high. Water floods anywhere it can, pooling often just a few feet deep. Grasses and herbs adapted to the conditions thrive here, and many grasses are now adapted to intensive grazing by thorngrazers by growing watery foliage which is easily replaced and not very nutritious. Higher in calories and much richer in vitamins are fully-aquatic plants as well as the tubers of the grasses, and so many animals seek out these more worthwhile foods hidden beneath the surface of the countless lakes and ponds of the region instead of grazing upon the more obvious leaves. Crested thorngrazers have become more diverse, some developing their hollow nasal chamber into curving, resonating structures that carry their calls across the landscape. The handlehorn, Pallucaprus sibilatus (whistling swamp-goat) is a fairly small early crested thorngrazer descended from the rumbling helmethead, clearly more gracile than ice age thorngrazer species, but still robust and sturdy with a hog-like, sturdy shape. It feeds mainly on floating water plants, but lives along the margins of the soglands, where it can still retreat to dry land frequently. A male on the edge of its herd, kept away from the breeding females by a larger dominant competitor that trumpets its territorial claim loudly across the wetland, dips its long head below water to grab a mouthful of water weed. It doesn't realize that it has been being stalked until it is too late. 

Scalperelatus tacivenatus (side-slicing silent-hunter) or as it is sometimes known, the cookiecutter kittyhawk, lurches from cover at the thorngrazer. These gravediggers are descended from the swamp kittyhawk; they have become larger again, some 140 lbs of muscle, and their shape again resembles the savage gravedigger though their coloration has shifted strongly to a striped green and brown pattern that matches waterside reeds nearly perfectly. These gravediggers are ambush predators that create hides for themselves like human hunters, bending and weaving plants and stalks into tent-like structures from which they can see out while being hidden from their victims. They build these all across their territories in suitable shoreline vantages near water, and hide them amongst the natural vegetation. In this way they do not need to rely on natural cover and can effectively let their prey come to them. 

These carnivores have a particularly specialized, vicious way of killing prey. Their keratin teeth are all serrated down the length of their jaws, with the bill hook relatively small. They are now designed to shear flesh with sideways bites, like a set of kitchen shears. The cookiecutter chases its prey and aims to bite the flanks as it flees with the side of its beak, neatly removing a mouthful of muscle tissue as the victim struggles. These injuries are severe and debilitating; the hunter can often merely let it run a short distance and collapse from blood loss. 

The cookiecutter kittyhawk has rather specific habitat preferences to avoid severe competition with sawjaws and other social carnivores which will take its food. They are good swimmers and hunt near open water where reeds are tall enough to form into hide-behind structures, but they need to store their kills, which are often as large as themselves or even bigger, up in cementrees to keep them safe from other land predators. As soon as prey is brought down the gravedigger must quickly dismember it into manageable chunks with its teeth and cart them up to a predetermined storage site. Incredibly strong, these animals carry their carcass in pieces up nearly vertical cementree trunks, pulling themselves up with their large hooked arm claws, and there deposit them in the branches. Once in the trees, they may feed at leisure. 

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Some other animals spend their entire lives in the spire forest. Native exclusively to the uplands where they reach their greatest growth, and not venturing far beyond their safety at any time, is a small and cryptic crested thorngrazer known as the spiresprinter. These shy, fast-running herbivores are descendants of the battering helmethead, and they have become thinner and evolved much longer legs, giving them a circuagodont-like body shape. Littler and lighter-build than their ancestors - a change which has occurred partly due to the evolution of larger and more aggressive competitors their slow, bulky ancestors needed to avoid - they can now shelter from predators in the dense forests of earthen pillars made by cementrees, and here find their food too in the form of undergrowth that grows protected from heavier grazers in between the spires.

 Spiresprinters' coats are dull and earth-colored, banded with stripes and white patches that break up their outlines against the open forest background to help them hide from predators, and only males show a small bright blue patch of bare skin around each eye. Their skulls are very elongated and their teeth form a narrow cropping beak to reach into narrow places and bite off mouthfuls of vegetation, including from within openings in the spires themselves, making them one of few herbivores which can still sometimes reach and threaten seedling cementrees as they grow in their earthen fortresses. Their crests are sturdier than those of many relatives, being reinforced with a core of bone but surrounded with cartilage so that they bend, rather than break, and spiresprinters use these structures not only to fight amongst themselves for dominance but also to headbutt and break into young cementrees to eat the plant tissues within. For this reason both sexes have prominent tooth-horns along the length of the crest and over the front of their snouts, though those in males are somewhat larger.

Spiresprinters live in small, transient herds of unrelated individuals which move freely between different groups for half of the year, while males spar to establish dominance over harems of female partners for the rest. These thorngrazers have evolved long tufts of white bristle-like fur that hangs from the underside of their ears when at rest. The purpose of this hair is social communication; though its first instinct is to freeze and hide, when a spiresprinter is sufficiently alarmed, it bounds away while demonstrating a dramatic hopping behavior known as pronking in which they spring up and down very obviously to tell others in the group to flee; they raise their ears high and the hair flairs outward like two white flags as a clear signal for others to follow. Pronking also demonstrates physical fitness to predators, suggesting that there may be easier prey to catch elsewhere. If hunters do give chase, however, spiresprinters can run quickly in the forest, dashing between narrow gaps in the trees and turning faster than most of their enemies. If pursued into the open, and able to avoid soggy wet patches, they may attain speeds over 45 miles per hour, some of the fastest speeds of any molodont ever to live, and certainly the fastest contemporary species, and can leave most predators behind in the dust. Yet they are poor swimmers, and enemies such as sawjaws can catch them if they drive them into marshes where they can only slog through at a very poor pace. For this reason, spiresprinters strongly prefer the drier uplands and may even avoid coming to the edges of pools to drink the abundant open water, preferring to shelter within the spire forests and sustain themselves by licking rain from the tree trunks and making use of temporary puddles.

But the spire forest is not a refuge without any dangers - just as prey come here to seek sanctuary so have followed new enemies. Some are carnivorous tribbetheres known as repanthors - a genus of fierce cat-like foxtrotters. Others, however, are so unlike any predators before them that they may come almost as much a surprise to the reader as to their unfortunate thorngrazer victims. And sometimes, both deadly threats may even work together to catch their prey - albeit inadvertently.

Deep in the spire forest, group of spiresprinters are feeding in the early dawn hours. Golden hour soon fills the woodland with brilliant yellow shafts of sunlight, streaming between the long shadows of the cementrees as the herd of thorngrazers browse on the broad-leaf bushes and tall, colorful flowers that grow up between the trees, whose close proximity to one another functions as a barrier to incursion by larger species that mow the plains nearby. These grazers are small and more importantly they are nimble. They can get through the tight spaces with ease, and so can find themselves food and feed peaceably away from more aggressive competitors. But that doesn't mean the spiresprinters should become careless.

A foal of about four months old lets out a cry that alarms the whole group. Sticking its nose into a hole in the side of a young cementree tower, it has gotten its nose pricked by a bundle of razor-sharp leaves - a booby trap put there by its ant colony specifically as a deterrent to keep out overly-curious nibblers that will not likely cause lasting harm to older trees but could easily kill a seedling. A blade-shaped hooked leaf remains embedded to its snout, and the young animal paws at the irritation in distress, only driving the barbed hooks in deeper. The herd's attention is all upon the baby now, as it whimpers in its discomfort, and its mother nuzzles it and attempts to pry the leaf off but only seems to make things worse. The herd is distracted... and someone else takes advantage.

In an instant it drops from the canopy above, silent and deadly. Only half the size of its prey, the spireclimber repanthor relies on surprise to take down the spiresprinter. This hunter has evolved to use the cementrees as an ideal perch in which to watch and pounce upon prey. Now, she drops upon an individual lingering on the edge of the herd, in doing so buckling its legs and knocking it flat to the ground with her weight and momentum. As it tries to stand despite the shock, the killer has already grasped around it with her arms in a deadly embrace, digging eight sharp claws deep into the muscle and securing her jaws around its throat. With one of their own left kicking madly on the ground but going nowhere fast, the other spiresprinters make a speedy retreat, even the littlest one having forgotten altogether the spines still stuck to its nose as it dashes like a flash of lightning to cover. The predator keeps hold, and the prey runs out of oxygen in under two minutes. Only once its legs have fallen still and its heartbeat gone silent does she let go. 

She will feed quickly as soon as the prey has died, gulping down as much as she can possibly eat, just in case a cookiecutter gravedigger or some other stronger scavenger comes by and attempts to drive her off her kill, though she is no pushover either. Her arms are incredibly strong and both her teeth and her talons wicked sharp, and she will defend her kill with admirable effort. Yet she is not the biggest hunter around, weighing only about 65 lbs, and so losing her meals is a very real threat. By wolfing down up to 20 lbs of meat in a few minutes, focusing on the soft underbelly and the nutritious organs, she can assure that she gets her effort's worth from the kill and has enough to take back to the den and give her cubs at least one good meal. 

The violent plant which attacked the spiresprinter youngster and gave the repanthor its chance to strike is known as the vampire centipedeweed - a carnivorous plant with a particularly vicious method of gaining nutrition.

In the thickets of the spire forests, only small herbivores can easily navigate the maze of cementree trunks, and this allows plants to grow on and near the ground which would be destroyed by herds of larger thorngrazers elsewhere. As a major keystone species, old cementrees allow the germination of other types of trees beneath their canopies, getting them through their vulnerable early years, and these trees may eventually outgrow them and take their places after many, many years in the process of succession.  Undergrowth that grows beneath the spire forest attracts smaller herbivores, including the less destructive crested thorngrazers with their smaller mouths, species such as the spiresprinter which browse upon but do not generally kill of all of the young trees.

Yet there are some plants here, very unusual ones that grow upon the cementrees, which turn the tables upon the thorngrazers. A family of specialized razorgrasses grows here, which despite their grass-like resemblance are actually descended from the cactus-like sunflowers, and more closely allied to the now rare cactaiga that reached widespread success in the ice age than anything else still extant. They are the centipedeweeds and the wireweeds... and they include some of Serina's most vicious living organisms.

Razorgrasses dominated open grasslands in the late Pangeacene and their sharp silica-infused stems - sharp as razorblades as their name suggested - were cause for the rapid decline of serezelles and cataylist for the evolution of circuagodonts which fed freely on the plants with permanently-growing specialized teeth and so kept it in check. Now serezelles are extinct and circuagodonts fallen from grace and reduced to a few lingering specialists, yet the razorgrasses have survived. Small creeping tundra plants made it through the ice age, and though they have not returned to any significant dominance in terrestrial habitats due to the presence of thorngrazers - which share the closely-related circuagodont's grazing teeth - these hostile plants have found their own new and intriguing places in the new global hothouse world.

 Centipedeweeds, named for the centipede-like shape of their hooked leaves, and wireweeds, named for their longer, coiling foliage are mainly lithophytic (rock-growing) plants which grow as tumbleweed-like masses of tangling hooked leaves. They have the feel of stone due to extremely high silica concentrations in their foliage, which they take from the rocky substrates they grow upon. Many species grow on glacial erratics and other isolated, ancient boulders left behind on otherwise flat land by the ancient ice age while others grow on eroded cliffs. These plants get the nitrogen necessary for their growth through the capture of organic material in their leafy crowns; leaves, animal droppings, and even blown soil itself are common nutrient sources, but almost all of them have a more frightening ability; they often snare small birds and other animals in their deadly tangled spines which are dig further and further into flesh as an animal struggles to break free. These plants have become carnivores. When animals die stuck on their spikes, the plant's leaves produce digestive enzymes and absorb nutrition from the carcass as it decomposes.

Vampire centipedeweeds are a little different than other species. For one, they are often much larger, up to eight feet across and weighing hundreds of pounds - suggesting they get more nutrition than others. They grow exclusively on cementree spires, usually between three and seven feet high, and primarily in narrow gaps between two trees rather than in exposed places. They attack small thorngrazers such as the spiresprinter, hooking them as they run past with their fearsome leaves. Yet adult thorngrazers are too big to be kept captive, and so with some difficulty they will eventually escape the plant's murderous hold... if only by tearing their own flesh and leaving a bloody wound, and thus leaving behind a significant amount of blood and tissue upon the plant, which it then consumes. By feeding on living animals in this way, even if they only brush against it accidentally every few months, the vampire leaves its victims alive to hunt them again, and can get a concentrated dose of vital nitrogen and so grow more aggressively than other species which can only feed on smaller prey. Thorngrazer calves, however, may be much more unlucky; it is not rare for them to become fatally ensnared, die of exposure, and be entirely eaten by the centipedeweed over a matter of weeks. Cementrees themselves benefit from centipedeweeds growing on their trunks, for they can also utilize the carrion collected by the plant for themselves as symbiotic ants scavenge its kills, and so these lithophytes are tolerated. 

Vampire centipedeweeds spread their seeds, too, upon their unfortunate prey. Small, barbed, hooked seeds are grown on the tips of wiry branches that intertwine with the leaves so that they catch hold on passing animals, only to get deposited somewhere else the animal rubs against - at the perfect height to grow up into a new killer itself.

But the interactions between living things are never simplistic, and some animals are able to exploit even such dangerous hazards as the centipedeweed for their own gain. Smarter animals, with the capacity for tool-use - animals like the gravediggers.

Walking through the Serinarctan spire forests you will likely come across a variety of organisms. From the gentle spiresprinter nibbling on leaves, to more fearsome cookiecutter gravediggers that hide their kills in the branches, and the vicious vampire centipedeweed that would catch you if you weren't careful, these forests abound with strange forms of life. If you are quiet and attentive, and don't make too much noise, you may even see something that at first seems familiar. It emerges from the bushes and looks around warily. A gravedigger, walking on two legs. About 3.5 feet tall, this creature is not a thalassic gravedigger - for they have long left this world - but a newly-evolved relative specialized to live in these forests. She is a spirepryer, a descendant of the slenderbill bumblebeast, and while she is not a sophont like her ice age relative was, she is one of the most ingenious living species today.

She walks through the clearing quickly and delicately, with far more balance than it seems such an upright animal should have. Unlike many other gravediggers, she appears quiet and alert, almost dainty, and not at all aggressive.  She comes to a large spire - the trunk of an old cementree. A small hole in its side attracts her attention and so she sniffs inside with her long and narrow face. The scent seems to agree with her, and she becomes more animated and excited now. She circles back around to the bushes, and there picks up a thin branch about two feet long. Then she walks a bit further into the thicket, to where a centipedeweed grows from another, thinner spire, and using her tweezer-like beak, carefully pulls a few of the viciously barbed leaves off the cluster and wraps them around her stick, securing the bundle with the thin and wiry leaves of a wireweed plant growing upon the same tree. A few hooks stick to her as she pulls away, but they cause no harm, for her hair is especially long and protective; only a few tufts of it, which break off easily, are left on the plant as she returns to the hole in the other trunk. 

Now she carefully inserts her tool into the crevice, holding it in her beak which features a small notch just past the sharp "teeth" on top to fit such a stick perfectly. She scrapes it around, making sharp jabbing movement up and down in the hollow space. Often, she would be seeking to catch a hiding bird or molodont as it rests in a den, the hooks of the centipedeweed's leaves catching on its fur, feathers or skin, and allowing the spirepryer to fish it out and pull it into the open as if on a kebob. Now, though, she seeks a different treat. Inside this hole, honey-ants have a large nest in which they store a sweet delicacy of concentrated nectar gathered from the blooms of clovers and other blossoms across the soglands. The spirepryer, unlike some of its relatives, is not a strict carnivore but a true omnivore, and as it at last catches its tool onto the honeycomb and pulls it out in one big piece from its hiding place, she rapturously eats it - honey, wax, and insect larvae all together. Yet she cannot stay too long, for already the flying ants have begun to swarm, spraying acid that stings her eyes even through her nictitating membranes, and so she picks up her meal and moves on to another opportunity. 

She drops to all fours to flee the bugs quickly, but walks on her knuckles with her fingers held inward, not out as in most gravediggers, for her claws are large and ungainly, but well-built to help break into the spire holes and expand them in the event even her clever tool use cannot quite reach her prey. Once a safe distance away, she finishes her meal and immediately begins peering into other crevices, seeking more. Something small scurries within one dark crack - she can hear it in the shaded interior of the spire, but cannot see it. Yet before she can reach in with her fishing pole, something else takes her attention. Some sort of larger predator is moving in the bushes not far off, and so she pulls herself up the trunk with those huge claws and climbs up to safety as whatever it is passes by. The trees here are all marked with the two-clawed scratches of climbing gravediggers, both those like her, which seek to avoid trouble, and those like the cookiecutter that face all comers head-on. 

Spirepryers are gentle animals toward anything close to their own size or larger, and they don't hunt large prey. Only about half the diet is meat, with the rest well-rounded out by honey, fruit, nuts, roots and as much as 15% of their daily calories come simply from leaves. They are thus some of the most herbivorous gravediggers, and some of the most gentle - unless you are a small animal hiding in a tree-hole. They spend much of their time simply lounging in the trees, chewing on plants, or rooting along the ground for bugs and roots. Indeed, the only time that these animals will readily face larger rivals and go on the attack is when mothers are caring for their young, and even then only if they absolutely cannot escape up a tree.  

A forest wouldn't be a forest if some animals didn't specialize themselves to live up in its canopy all the time though, and this is exactly what a somewhat similar-looking group of birds has done here. Skuorcs may resemble gravediggers in some respects; both are able to walk on four legs, have clawed arms, and have similar serrated bills. But they are not at all related, their ancestors having diverged in the first ten million years upon Serina. Unlike gravediggers, skuorcs (a group of metamorph birds) have elbows and - particularly - long tails, a relic of a bygone larval life stage. 

One of the first almost exclusively arboreal animals to evolve on Serinarcta, with the spread of cementrees, comes from the skuorcs. These metamorph birds, whose ancestors went through prolonged ontogeny from tadpole-like larvae to lizard-like juveniles and finally winged adults, have condensed their lifecycles again and spend their entire lives as quadrupeds that resemble somewhere between a lizard and a primitive mammal, albeit with the beak of a bird. They give live birth, producing small independent versions of the adult that are given no parental care. With three-fingered hands, proper elbows, and long balancing tails all retained from their convoluted larval ancestry that effectively allowed the metamorph birds to reset their evolution to a more primitive level, skuorcs are some of the most pre-adapted animals to take to new forest habitats.

Skuossoms are one branch of these strange birds which have evolved in the north to take advantage of spire forests. They are skilled climbers, with long digits and sharp hooked claws, and their tails provide unrivaled balance as they jump from branch to branch. Though two of their three fingers are not homologous to the fingers of the bird's dinosaur ancestor (and the first digit is a fusion of two fingers, and evolved from the ancestral canary's wrist) but rather evolved new from novel spike-like structures on the wrist of ancient metamorph's larvae, the development of them is controlled by the same genes and so there are no obvious structural differences; this is true also of the two wing fingers of seraphs. 

These quadruped birds are omnivores and nocturnal skulkers, spending the days roosting deep within cementree trunks and coming out after dark to catch insects, small birds, and molodonts as well as to gather fruit, seeds, and buds. Though they are not pro-social, they aren't especially territorial either, and so will sometimes gather around abundant food and occasionally share roost sites. Much of their body plumage has been lost, with the face, underside, limbs and tail now armored with scales of widely varying sizes; these structures provide some protection from ant bites and from aggressive plants such as centipedeweeds that are evolved to tangle in hair. What feathers do remain are long, brittle and unkempt. If they catch on a snag, they easily fall out and do not regrow as long, so that adults past a year of age are often nearly bald. Only juveniles have fur on their faces, which extends to the nostrils.

Skuossums, like most skuorcs and metamorphs broadly, have small brain to body ratios and are unintelligent by the standards of contemporary birds. They rely on rapid reproductive rates to sustain their numbers; females can produce litters of up to forty young at one time. Though she doesn't protect them, she usually births them in the safety of a cementree spire, and the species is not highly cannibalistic, so that young may roost near adults and find safety from their larger relatives whose nearby presence may deter smaller predators. Though skuossums prefer to run from their enemies, if caught their beaks are sharp and can deliver bloody wounds which have a high probability of infection due to a the amount of harmful bacteria that grows in its mouth. Combined with a foul-smelling musk which is produced when attacked, these animals are not a highly-sought after prey species by most animals, with one exception: spirepryers seem unperturbed by their secretions and can kill them from a distance with tools, so avoiding their nasty bite.

Following one of the smaller residents of the forest comes the largest of all. The tallest animal of the spire forests, 280 million years PE, is one that seems at first out of place, for most of its relatives live an ocean away in the southern hemisphere. It is the skreehonk, a medium-size giraffowl, standing about ten feet tall on all fours but much higher when reared up, and it is common in these northern woodlands. Here they stride delicately through the narrow gaps in the cementrees on their lanky legs, and stand up on two legs to reach the green crowns at their peaks. Some of Serinarcta's first high browsers, they have adapted to browse on the only significant trees in the environment, despite their defensive ant colonies, being more gracile than Serinarcta's other rising megafaunal quadruped birds and so better suited to move through a thickly wooded environment. 

To avoid acid spray, their heads and necks are mostly without feathers and defended by thick, wrinkled skin while a clear nicitating membrane protects their eyes like a pair of goggles. Yet they still don't browse with impunity; they must follow a system. Herds of these seraphs have to move through the forests upwind as they browse, or the trees' ant colonies will communicate the threat and advertise to one another via pheromones for their neighbors to get ready for battle. Walking into the wind, so that the warning messages are sent the wrong way, the trees are taken by surprise and these tall quadruped birds can get a few minutes to quickly eat what it can, cutting branches and gobbling them down whole to be broken up in a stone-filled gizzard. 

Ancestors of the Laminiugops genus flew here from the south just two million years ago. Though wayward juvenile giraffowl have been arriving as vagrants for millions of years, since the fallen angel that gave rise to all living giraffowl evolved, the majority would die out as they matured and outgrew the available food plants in areas lacking forests. The rise and spread of cementrees at last opened up the north for permanent colonization, though the better defenses of these plants required additional behavioral and physical adaptations to circumvent efficiently. The skreehonk and its relatives are generally all smaller than their largest contemporary relatives elsewhere, for the spire forests are dense and do not permit wide or ungainly creatures easy access, yet they show similar derived traits to larger Serinaustran species including the total loss of the wing finger in adulthood. Their chicks are comparatively less eager flyers than others, and spend most of their time on the ground even at very young ages, living along marshy areas and behaving similarly to rails; they thus disperse much less widely, perhaps an adaptation to these forests being relatively clustered, with vast stretches of unsuitable grasslands between them, meaning birds which simply fly off far and fast in any random direction are more likely to die in unsuitable habitats. Because they do not readily go far from their birthplaces, this genus speciates easily; there are already several species across Serinarcta, living in isolated spire forests located in different parts of the continent. The skreehonk, an orange-colored bird whose males sport a red, white and blue striped crest in the shape of an ax, is the most basal and also most widespread among them, found across the south of Serinarcta. It is named for its distinctive contact call, a loud, two-syllable cry that sounds almost exactly as it is spelled. These birds are too large to be threatened by most animal predators once fully grown, but the legs of adults frequently bear the scrapes and scars from "attacks" by centipedeweeds as they maneauver through narrow gaps between trees.