Snufflejaw

This guest entry was written and illustrated by Troll Man.

Ten million years have passed since volcanic armageddon, and life has gradually crawled back from the brink of total oblivion. The surface of Serina's land once again flourishes vibrant green with grasslands and forests carpeting nearly every square inch of its surface. And great numbers of megafauna have once again begun roaming these lands. Although no animal over five kilograms survived the Thermocene, creatures weighing over one metric ton are just begun to appear, rapidly increasing in size at an accelerated evolutionary rate to fill the vast ecological void left by the mass extinction of nearly all life. As in the aftermath of any major biospheric upheaval, there is a secret war being waged over a timespan of countless generations, as many different plant and animal species experience practically explosive evolutionary radiations. This is always an unusual time, as many peculiar and unique forms appear, a hodgepodge of radically differing creations from natural selection, like trying to build race cars out of junkyard scraps for a race about to start. Only a lucky few will land upon a winning design that survives past this early stage of ecological recovery. So it is that many animals of this time are of appearances that have never been seen before and will never be seen again, products borne from unique conditions unlikely to ever reappear in the same way.

During the apocalypse, the only oasis in the midst of vast burning wasteland was situated around a single river system near the south pole. The decay of a dying world flowing into the steams formed the bedrock of this ecosystem; organic detritus was consumed by planktonic animals and algae, which was in turn consumed by slightly larger aquatic animals like fish, crustaceans, and freshwater gastropods. These were in fed upon by what few piscivorous hunters could be sustained by, at best, minnow-sized prey. One of the very largest fish-eaters of the time was the water snuffle, a flightless bird about the size of a cat. Hair-like bristles covering the underside of its numerous facial tentacles allowed it to grasp and strain even tiny organisms from the water column; a vital ability to scrounge even the smallest amount of resources during one of harshest periods of Serina's history. Now a time of plenty once more, its descendants have radiated into many different forms, including one of the largest land predators that has yet evolved in the Pangeacene.

A common sight across many wetland regions is the snufflejaw, a peculiar hunter that is still among the most successful of its day. Standing up to to six feet tall and over five-hundred pounds in weight, it is enormous even among other water snuffle descendants, as this animal has evolved to tackle much larger prey than minnows. Although, in practice, it has ultimately not changed drastically, as its prey too has simply increased in size. What once were pectin bristles for filter-feeding have been modified and repurposed into blade-shaped, tooth-like projections that line the undersides of each of its twenty facial lobes. What once were mere minnows have become hefty catch-of-the-day specimens, sometimes over a meter long. Dozens of these sharpened spines are able to grip slippery prey such as these due to its facial tentacles being semi-prehensile, with simple muscle contractions causing them to instinctively curl and contract on touch. Highly sensitive sensory pores covering their surface allow them to grasp a moving object in a fraction of a second, without even it's eyes needing to see the target (very useful for fishing in murky waters). While the grip strength of a single tentacle may not be too strong, so many tentacles gripping at once, or even just a third of them, is a nearly inescapable vice, especially in tandem with a hook-like projections on the paired tips of its lower bill. As the tentacles tighten their grip, the keratin spines cut into any captured prey, naturally inflicting many wounds that only worsen as it struggles to escape; for larger and stronger quarries, this may naturally kill them through exsanguination and shock, especially as the snufflejaw shakes its head back and forth to slice though skin. This is an extremely crude and messy killing method, but it works well enough. Each of its spines sheds and regrows every few weeks to ensure they retained a sharpened edge.

At the Thermocene-Pangeacene boundary, the ancestral water snuffle survived as a semi-aquatic predator, sometimes wading, sometimes diving underwater to forage. Despite being much larger, the snufflejaw for the most part remains the same way. However, it is a surprisingly generalist hunter and powerful enough to opportunistically go after land-based animals. At this time in Serina's history, most herbivorous megafauna consists of large mucks and flightless fowl descended from duck-like animals. Just as with the snufflejaw, they have ultimately changed relatively little except through great increases in size, and flourish only now because they grow too large for most predators that have appeared up to this point and breed rapidly to offset high juvenile mortality rates (a reproductive strategy which was crucial for their survival past the Pangeacene). Such young are easy pickings, and, particularly during drier times, the snufflejaw will frequently prey upon them. Of particular interest are young mucks; adult mucks do not provide parental care and the young are awkward toddling animals, and so are quite easy, even for the rather slow-moving and heavily-built snufflejaw, to catch. However, if properly motivated, the snufflejaw can bring down prey nearly its own weight, cutting into its hide with countless lacerating attacks, sometimes over a period of hours. This is generally only attempted by pairs working together on a target already obviously weakened by injury or sickness; far more commonly, they simply scavenge the bodies of larger land-based prey or bully smaller carnivores from their kill rather than attempt a hunt themselves. At this time, very few purely terrestrial hunters get larger than a dog. Potential competitors like wolf shrikes or carnivorous tribbetheres currently present very little threat to an adult snufflejaw, although the crude feeding methods of the soft-billed bird all but ensure many scraps left over to pick over. Just as they use their facial spines to kill prey, it utilizes them as cutting utensils to remove strips of meat from food items too large to simply swallow whole. After feeding, the snufflejaw often spends some time washing its face to clean the lingering scraps of meat and offal that inevitably gets caked around its bill.

A relatively slow-growing and slow-breeding animal, the snufflejaw only produces one or two young every three or four years. Both parents feed and protect the offspring continuously, as it takes nearly two years for a chick to grow in the spines that adorn its facial tentacles and shed its insulating down for a more waterproof coat, and longer still to learn the skills of an effective hunter. As a full-grown animal has little to fear from any other animal in its environment, a chick can expect a long life ahead of it should it survive to independence. However, this is a rapidly changing world; while the snufflejaw is currently ahead of the curve, the Early Pangeacene is a transitionary period, one where it won't be long before the biosphere recovers completely, the climate continues to shift, the floral composition continues to evolve, and more efficient predators appear that will usurp this early apex predator from its seat, for the snufflejaw may do many things moderately well, it is not especially skilled at any one thing. Like the anomalocaridids, mesonychians, or erythrosuchids of a distant Earth, this is of a lineage that has taken advantage of a voided ecosystem and had early success, but may not be destined for long-term survival as Serina enters fully into a new age.