Crowned Imphound

295 Million Years Post-Establishment

Guest entry by Trollman

As the habitable era on Serina gradually comes to an end, the climate begins to cool once more, and the good times have finally come to end. The endless swamps, jungles, and lush savannah that once sustained vast herds of gargantuan herbivores are becoming a distant memory. Only in the lower elevations of the craterlands does the climate remain warm and humid enough for pockets of this once fertile world to survive, while dry scrubland and steppe now dominate outside. With the gradual disappearance of such plentiful and large prey, so too have the mega-carnivores that once ruled the the golden twilight of this world. The massive devils, multi-ton predators with jaws built for crushing some of the largest bones in history, are no more. However, vultrorcs as a whole continue to persist, in smaller and more agile descendants, which are no less efficient and powerful hunters than their larger ancestors.

By the standards of Holocene Earth predators, the imphound is still quite large, up to two-hundred pounds heavy and over nine feet long; only relative to its lineage would it ever be considered small. Because vultrorcs are independent from birth, they could rapidly shrink in size in response to diminished resources by simply reaching sexual maturity earlier in life, and in a short span of evolutionary time were a fraction of their original size. This carnivorous skuorc nonetheless remains an apex predator adapted to hunt large prey of the craterlands, now primarily loopalopes, trunkos, and smaller grazing skuorcs. Its build is far more slender and long-legged than the older devils, adaptations for chasing down smaller and faster prey than it would have normally been ill-suited for a few million years ago. They are explosively fast, but only in short bursts; they spend much of a hunt attempting to close the distance from its prey by stalking so they can rapidly overcome it in a quick chase. Imphounds are grappling hunters, attempting to first grab and pin their prey with their front claws first and then dispatching it with powerful bites. Its bite force is not nearly as powerful as the devils of old, but it makes up for this with tusk-like beak serrations which can puncture deep into flesh to instantly cause catastrophic wounds and prevent any chance of escape. Smaller and broader serrations near the back of the beak act like carnassials to help rip apart carcasses and crush bones while feeding.

Males are easily distinguishable from females by their bright facial and gular colourations and larger horns. These are used only for display, but tend to be cumbersome during hunts, since it makes them more easily noticeable by prey. To offset this, males tend to live and hunt in small groups, almost always siblings, while females are mostly solitary. This also allows males to tackle larger prey on average than females and chase them for longer, as another male can take up the pursuit when the initial runner tires. Male groups tend to be lead by the largest and most colourful individual; this one is usually one that mates with females, but as most groups are made up of siblings, they will intentionally assist him in his displays to make him seem even more impressive to potential mates, which helps pass on their own genes by proxy through kin selection. Groups made up of unrelated males tend to be more volatile, with a pecking order established and maintained through violence and aggressive displays. Imphounds rarely bite while fighting one another and never use their horns (because the horns are actually rather fragile), preferring to claw or, more commonly, batter one another with their armoured tails.

Imphounds are born weighing less than three pounds at birth, and are immediately independent, rushing off into the safety of more forested habitat that the pursuit-hunting adults avoid, helping prevent cannibalism. They are born in litters that tend to number around eight to twelve, but can sometimes be up to eighteen. They remain together in a creche as they grow; once nearing maturity females will become independent and go on to spend the rest of their lives alone, which helps avoid inbreeding, but males will usually remain together for their whole lives (in the very rare case a large portion of males survive to this point, they will splinter off into smaller groups). Males which do not have surviving brothers have a much lower chance of successfully attracting females of males that do, and this helps females to select for fitter mates, as it signifies more of the litter survived to adulthood, making it a greater likelihood that their lineage has a better chance of future success.