Elefinches

Elefinches

above Sunrise in the Kyran islands reveals a community of strange creatures beginning their day in the meadow. A large browser plucks small, sweet fruits from the tall branches of a tree with the aid of a pair of strange, dexterous tentacles upon its snout. Just behind, a pair of smaller grazers, exhibiting their own smaller version of the same appendages, pass by. These strange trunked birds, collectively known as elefinches, are the most prominent large herbivores across the archipelago that is the Kyran Islands.

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Moving silently though the dark understories of the forests of the Kyrans as much as trotting conspicuously in great herds upon its savannahs are many species of large, flightless bird. From a distance, many might seem relatively ordinary. Like many birds which have evolved in island habitats rare in predators, they have lost their wings. Like the emu, the ostrich, or even the aardgoose across the ocean, they're largely plant-eaters, and they brood their eggs in the usual manner ancestral to Serina's birds and utilized by most on Earth as well - there are no live-bearing avians here. But a closer look at any one of these birds on the Kyran Islands will quickly reveal an attribute of these particular animals which is as wholly unique to they alone in the entire bird order just as the evolution of live-birth was in the vivas. Where on most other birds could be found a hard, keratinous bill or beak, on the elefinches is instead replaced by a fleshy snout; this alone isn't a wholly unique feature - though it has evolved only twice in birds - for it is similar to that of a serilope. Utterly unique to the elefinches alone, however, are an additional two mobile tentacle-like appendages, in fact extraordinary extensions of either nostril. These are utilized by the creature for myriad purposes; bringing food to the mouth, grooming, social display, even as a pair of snorkels for use underwater. Indeed, the paired trunks of the animals are certainly far more effective manipulators than the forearms which the group has long since lost, so much so that the elefinches seem not to miss their wings at all. Small and fast-running forms utilize their nasal appendages in place of their wings, spreading them to the side to aid in their balance whilst lumbering giants, twice as tall as a man and many times heavier, use them to pull down the branches of trees to secure succulent fruits and buds which would otherwise remain beyond their reach.

Surely the only thing more interesting than the ways that the elefinches utilize their unique nasal appendages, however, is the history which led an initially ordinary colony of canaries - just like those anywhere else on Serina at the start of the Hypostecene, to go down such an evolutionary path to come to produce such an aberrant innovation. How, most people surely would be inclined to wonder, did the elefinch get its trunks?

To find out, we must go back to the beginning, just a few million years PE, when the life on the Kyrans was still largely alike that across the rest of the world.

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Elefinches: A Natural History

150 million years ago, perhaps one million pairs of domestic canaries of all breeds and colors were freed into the newly planted grasslands of a young Serina, and from there on out, things would never be the same again. The canaries were released in groups of about a thousand across approximately two thousand release sites to cover all habitable land. At least one of these releases occurred on the Kyran Islands.

A yellow domestic canary, similar to those introduced to Serina - including the Kyran Islands - 150 million years ago.

Like many small birds marooned on islands before them, the Kyran canaries quickly adapted to exploit the resources of their new habitat. Flight, for many, became unnecessary without predators to worry them, and many birds rapidly developed proportionally smaller wings and larger bodies.

1 million years PE: a plump, mostly herbivorous canary with reduced flight capabilities. Like many other birds of this early time, even with few predators, it has reverted to a dominant natural coloration over many generations of breeding which has largely removed most recessive color morphs.

A total loss of flight was the inevitable next step for many birds, and due to the isolated nature of this particular canary colony's habitat, it would remain relatively free of terrestrial carnivores for far longer than those on the mainlands, permitting the long-term survival of this first wave of early flightless birds.

2 million years PE: a flightless, entirely terrestrial quail-like bird has evolved, which feeds on both plant and animal foods it can forage for on the ground.

A variety of groups would soon radiate from these primitive ancestors, including large herbivores, defenseless creatures not terribly dissimilar to the womblers and similar early giants which evolved in mainland environments around the same time. But these birds were not the ancestors of the elefinches - no, this group would not stake claim on these niches for many more millions of years. At this time, their ancestors were headed down a very different evolutionary path, not as herbivores at all, but insectivores.

5 million years PE: one lineage of flightless canary, now larger and longer of leg and bill, specializes toward feeding on insects, particularly the soft-bodied sorts that it can scratch out of the leaf litter of bamboo thickets and grass tussocks.

There were many birds competing on the Kyran Islands by this point, however, and resources once abundant were now limited. To avoid competition, this particular lineage of canary gradually began to forage by night, when most other birds were inactive. With sight of less use, its bill became longer and more sensitive to touch, so that it could be probed into the soil in search of worms and burrowing insects and locate hidden food sources. In effect, they came to resemble a Serinan kiwi bird. The wings became smaller still until they were totally vestigial, while the eyes - less necessary, became smaller, and its vision less acute or sensitive to color. To avoid predators now during the day, they begin to shelter in crude burrows. To dig these, the foot claws become larger.

15 million years PE: a nocturnal insectivore, with poor eye sight but an acute sense of smell and a long, sensitive beak.

Once this niche was established, it was highly successful, providing a springboard for the further evolution of adaptations suited to finding food without sight. In some, the eyes became smaller still while the bill developed an extra sensitive covering of soft, rubbery tissue, retaining a hard nail only at the tip to grasp prey dug out of the earth. The legs became more powerful and the claws especially large and curved, suited to digging out large burrows in which the young could be raised to protect them from new predators and a slightly more temperate climate during the Tempuscene. The bill becomes broad and flattened as a shovel to move soil loosened by the claws, while whisker-like bristles appear on the face, further increasing the tactile sensitivity of the bird as it burrows and searches for food.

25 million years PE: A badger-like bird has evolved, well-suited to digging and finding food underground. Its eyesight is now almost vestigial, able to sense light and dark and movement, but little more, while its sense of smell is especially acute, with the nostrils having migrated toward the end of the snout. It is now exclusively active under cover of darkness.

Birds like this persisted in similar form for a very long time, having found a successful niche otherwise unoccupied by animals on the isolated archipelago. Some gave rise to the snuffalo, a huge herbivore that used its large bill to walk. But some forms were destined for more long-term success. The first of what would become this later dynasty evolved fleshy cilia along the tip of the bill, made of the same rubbery tissue that otherwise covered all but the very leading edge of the beak. These were connected directly to the nerves of the snout, giving the bird even greater ability to detect and capture prey by sensing the vibrations produced by burrowing worms and insects in the ground. The legs grew shorter and the body longer, to move through tunnels. Its tiny eyes give it vision that is heavily blurred and extremely nearsighted at best, but even these birds were not entirely without sight.

The strange burrower with its fleshy finger-tipped bill lasted many millions of years beneath the feet of the larger dominant fauna of the islands, changing little until a tragedy befell their world, giving it its time in the sun.

75 million years PE: the bird is now almost mole-like and rarely comes above ground; its wings have been totally lost, without even internal remnants to show they ever were. Using its noodle-like nose appendages to pick up ground vibrations, it hunts for worms in elaborate underground tunnels, but also forages above ground at night.

Eighty million years after their colonization, a freak natural disaster would change evolutionary history upon the Kyran Islands forever as an asteroid approximately 600 feet in diameter strikes the largest island in the archipelago. Not large enough to cause lasting worldwide harm, small asteroids have struck Serina fairly frequently over the course of its history, usually crashing into the sea or burning up before reaching the ground. Due to the specific location of the Kyran impact, however, the event was highly destructive on a local level. Though the asteroid burnt up considerably through Serina's atmosphere, it was still sizable at the time it reached the ground. The impact created a shock wave sufficient to level most of the forests on the island and kill or maim any animal caught in the open across most of the region, except for those which were sheltered underground. The asteroid event effectively extinguished more than ninety percent of the Kyran's endemic bird diversity and all of its megafauna.

The burrowers inherited the islands. Most of their competitors wiped out, if not by the impact itself then by the resulting loss of food and cover due to the loss of the islands' forests, the formerly nocturnal and largely subterranean birds were able to expand their horizons. Their eyesight quickly improved after a number of generations bathed in the sunlight of the surface world, but the reversion occurred too late for one aspect to be restored: color vision. Being entirely useless in the dark, the cones required to pick up colors were long ago lost, so that even once the birds became terrestrial and diurnal again, they remained color-blind. Nonetheless, as the forests recovered and birds began to arrive from distant offshore isles, some of the former burrowers remained, growing larger and adapting adaptations used in their former niches in new ways. The fleshy nose appendages mostly disappeared, but the bill itself retained its rubbery and flexible covering. Muscles had developed in the upper jaw which were able to move their snouts while rooting for food, and this continued to be the initial way that the former-burrowers found their food above ground. Their diets became more generalist, incorporating tubers, seeds, and fallen fruit in addition to invertebrates. Gradually, they started to pick food from the plants themselves. The soft tissue on the upper jaw extended past the edge of the beak, forming a mobile lip able to reach up and grasp food from branches above their heads. The beak itself became relegated to a broad plate on the upper and lower jaws; all food was swallowed whole.

The first true elefinches - megafaunal terrestrial birds with flexible noses - can be said to have appeared around 90 million years PE, ten million years after the asteroid impact event, though the exact form to be considered the first is largely an arbitrary distinction.

100 Million Years PE: one of the most basal elefinches, here a badger-sized bird which spends all of its time above ground, feeding mostly during the day. Its claws are still large but now blunt and hoof-like; its nose is long and flexible, and though it cannot see in color, it has developed obvious black and white markings on its face for communication. The eyes are larger and the whiskers on the face are reduced in size and number. It feeds on a variety of food which can be found in or on the ground or on low bushes, including fruit, nuts, worms and birds' eggs.

From here on out, the elefinches diversified substantially, becoming the Kyran's most prominent large herbivores, though many species are still actually opportunistic omnivores. One group adapted its digging claws into ungulate-like hooves, specializing to feed on the open savannahs - and to flee newly arrived predators in the form of giant flightless shorebirds distantly descended from stiltskins, which colonized the island's impoverished ecosystem at the same time as the elefinches. But most importantly, they further adapted their noses. To reach higher food sources in the trees, their snouts became longer and more mobile. All the while, their nostrils remained at the very tips of their snouts, as they'd been in the burrowing ancestor. With the snout's interior already divided by two distinct channels, it was fairly easy for the nostrils to separate at their tips, eventually producing some forms with two distinct, and equally dexterous, trunks. The trunks served several purposes; they could be used to reach food and to manipulate the environment, but also provided a huge area of surface for the olfactory receptors, allowing elefinches an unrivaled sense of smell. The hollow chambers were highly conducive to amplifying sound; many of the group additionally developed a hollow crest from the upper jaw and extending to the back of the head to resonate their calls for communication over great distances.

The bills of elefinches were now totally covered in soft, muscularized tissue, with horny portions of the beak only present at the tips of both jaws, where they were used to crop vegetation. The jaws themselves were, however, lined with small keratin teeth known as "tomia", which also occur in Earth waterfowl, and were the predecessor to the proper teeth of the serilopes. Tomia were useful for cropping grass and leaves, but their avian jaw structure inhibited an ability to grind the lower jaw back and forth to chew their food, meaning it has to be swallowed whole. Certain elefinches got around this and developed a mechanism to masticate their food before swallowing it by sliding their upper jaws forward on a hinge from the cranium (all birds exhibit a degree of cranial movement - it's particularly obvious in Earth parrots.) Elefinches can thus grind their food to a pulp before swallowing it, aiding the primitive, non-ruminating stomach to break down coarse plant foods. Unlike serilopes however, which also chew (but through a different mechanism, namely a muscular, toothed tongue and the roof of the mouth), elefinches do not have cheeks, and their method of eating is thus not quite as efficient, as some food may spill from the mouth during the chewing process. Even so, the end result is a net gain in efficiency versus simply swallowing their food whole.

150 million years PE: two modern elefinches with mobile trunks, hollow crests used to amplify sound, and herbivorous diets. On the left is a large browser, on the right a lithe grazer. The grazer shows a more basal appearance and could reasonably be used to demonstrate the form from which the left animal arose. Like their ancestor, even though these species cannot see in color and are thus colored in natural shades of grays and browns, they use bold black and white markings on their heads for purpose of display.