Savage Unicorns

As the hothouse world gives way to the cool, dry final stretch of 295 million years P.E. the forest unicorns from the Nightforest must travel south, following remnant forests and milder weather. Fierce competition and limited green food soon mean that strict herbivores struggle to find enough to eat. Just two carnivorous survivors will ultimately remain.

The corocotta is a descendant of the kelpie which has migrated onto the spreading temperate grasslands after the end of the hothouse. It is known for its high intelligence, as the kelpie already demonstrated, which now goes hand in hand with living in the most socially complex groups of any thorngrazer. To survive in their harsher and more arid world, these kelpies now work together for the benefit of all. Clans of four to fifteen which skillfully work together to kill - as well as outsmart - both their prey and rival predator animals. Corocottas have a complex vocal language which is learned rather than innate and includes dozens of distinct calls, each used in some different social context to coordinate behavior. Individuals in a clan specialize toward certain roles in every hunt; there are chasers, which are the fastest with the best endurance and pursue their quarry sometimes for miles, and then beaters, positioned far ahead in advance to cut off a target and grab a hold of it while the rest of the group comes up to aid in pulling it down. The activities of every individual are timed with whistles and other vocal cues that can give a precise rundown of the situation, down to how many seconds it will take the chasers to arrive and when the beaters should jump into the fray. There are even calls used before the hunt begins at all, to vote on whether to hunt now, or to wait until later. This wide degree of versatility and teamwork makes the corocotta a very efficient predator; about 80% of its hunts succeed. 

Like kelpies, corocottas are skilled vocal mimics, too, and employ every conceivable manner of trickery to catch their prey and reduce the work needed to fill their bellies. During the foaling season in spring, when other unicorns are giving birth and hiding their young in thickets, the clans split up into single hunters that go out in the night like pied pipers to sing out soothing croons to the sleeping babies to lull them out of hiding, then snatches them up and runs them back to the clan to distribute evenly among the group. During the autumn, when species like capricocks begin rutting and competing over females, they imitate the crows of a rival male to lure them into ambush and surround them on all sides. They do the same for all but the largest rival predators, leading them away from their groups with lies, often with the sound of a rival of their own species, an injured infant, or even an interested member of the opposite sex. Then they jump them, overwhelming them with their numbers and so picking off the competition one by one. By doing so in such an intelligent way, corocottas - though only weighing a few hundred pounds - have become an apex predator with little to fear of their own. Corocottas have such a wide range of ways to get food that they have time for additional activities social activities which appear recreational. Corocottas like to sing, each clan developing its own entirely unique songs which sound to a human ear like a songbird's voice upscaled to the size of a wolf. Though these songs may serve to defend territories against rivals, corocottas are nomads: they do not stick to any one territory, and aggression is usually minimal between clans, which often exchange members or group up for a time. This singing seems to be more for fun than anything, especially as songs change over time as individuals explore different sequences of sounds or tones of voice that sometimes gain favor among the others and replace old versions. Once a clan has all learned a song, they usually harmonize their voices and sing it together. If another corocotta wants to join an established clan, it will first emulate their clan call to demonstrate its willingness to be part of a new group. Singing together likely strengthens social bonds and helps keep the clan strong.

Corocotta ties are also kept tight by their inherently equal distribution of resources that make it worth everyone's while to stay in the group and help out, rather than to leave. There is very little in the way of a dominance hierarchy among them unless food is very scarce, and in that case it is simply afforded to the young before the adults (foals are raised within the clan structure by all adults, and all individuals within a clan can reproduce.) Such a system is likely only possible because corocotta's have evolved such clever and varied ways to hunt that they rarely experience prolonged hunger. In some ways the corocotta's success may be creeping up from behind to bite them, however, because in many cases they are slowly using up their food resources as their prey animals are unable to keep up with the many and diverse ways the corocotta comes up with to outsmart and kill them - those which do survive eventually grow wise and stop falling for them. The corocotta thus is always on the move, and populations generally are moving south from the cooler polar regions to warmer grasslands where food remains more abundant, and potential victims still naive to their tricks. 

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Named for vicious, man-eating horses of Greek legend, the Diomedes' mare - usually just shortened to the mare, is another predatory unicorn descended from the nightmare. Having also migrated south, it has found a new place for itself in the northernmost craterlands - deep, sheltered valleys formed by the draining of the large lakes in central Serinarcta, where it is still wet enough to support some forest habitat. The mare is a successful mid-sized predator where it occurs, and it too is social, hunting in packs of up to six animals to take down prey many times their own size, but its range is fragmented and does not include the largest crater, Sanctuary Crater, perhaps because the species competes so strongly with the corocotta. That species has greater endurance and is not reliant on plant cover to hide and ambush its prey, so that it largely has limited the spread of the mare any further south to additional refugia that would be suitable for its survival. In turn, where the mare has already established it is a formidable foe to the coracotta, being larger and extremely fierce. Though less intelligent than it, it has the benefit of having co-evolved with it over millions of years, to the point that now it rarely falls for its lies as so many other rival predators still do - by sticking together, they cannot be picked off. Wherever one is abundant the other is thus likely to be rare or absent altogether.

Though the mare and corocotta are now in different genera, they are closer related to one another than either is to any other surviving unicorn, and they share some unique anatomical traits not seen in other species. As their upper teeth became narrow and blade-shaped, to deliver a quick, sharp bite, this has come at the expense of having the necessary surface area to perform significant crushing, chewing movements further back in the jaw and so both these unicorns have evolved a serrated bony plate in the roof of their mouths that serves as a false set of teeth for the lower tooth plate to shear against. This is larger in the mare and much more obvious when the mouth is open, as the jaws of this species open wider and the lips pull further back to reveal it. This is because, unlike the corocotta, the Diomedes' mare jaw is adapted to crack bones and consume nearly an entire animal carcass. Both animals are mostly nocturnal hunters, but while corocotta run down prey to exhaustion over miles, mares strike from the edge of vegetation and run their prey down in a short time but at a high speed. Their hooves are wide and splay on soggy grass or mud so that they don't become slowed down or mired, and they are very often found in very moist, low-lying marsh regions of their crater habitat, as this also helps them avoid direct competition with rival predators of the higher elevations, such as manticores, descendants of sawjaws that are especially skilled social hunters.

Diomede's mares have had to become more gregarious to compete with other craterlands predators more to keep other species from usurping their kills than to improve hunting success. For though they work together well enough to dispatch a prey animal, they live very differently than the corocotta. Among mares there is a very strict dominance hierarchy as to who eats first, and each additional animal must wait its turn so that the lowest-ranking is left with the scraps and can hardly be said to benefit from hunting as a team. This strict order limits the size of mare packs to an average of four, and any more than six are unlikely to ever get enough to eat and so will not stick around long. Groups are not any more likely to consist of relatives than of strangers, and there is no direct cooperative parental care; usually only the dominant female in a group will breed, because if others do so she may kill their foals. Even when she has her own, she leaves the group for up to five days to rear it in a safe and quiet spot in thick vegetation before returning to introduce it to the group, so that it is strong enough to run quickly if need be if there is any aggression; though she will brutalize anyone, even within her pack, who tries to harm it, damage can be done quickly to an infant, and it is best if it can help protect itself by running away at the first sign of danger. The foal of the lead mare is allowed to feed with its mother and so access the choicest parts of the carcass, ensuring it gets the nutrients necessary for its growth. Though mares communicate with whistling vocalizations, especially to claim territorial rights, recognition of pack members is entirely based on scent. Packs usually form with groups of adolescents, sometimes with a senior mentor who has been cast out of another pack, and are stable once developed and may last for several years; it is a prolonged and violent process for another animal to join one which has already been established, taking weeks to months of patient trailing behind another group until they acclimate to their presence and stop becoming defensive. Sometimes it never works, and the pack will eventually kill and eat the would-be new member; this is more common if food is already in short supply.