Predatory Ornitheres: The Corona

Ornitheres - vivas which bear live young, which have evolved a highly efficient chewing apparatus and new, enamel-covered tooth-like structures on both jaws and their tongues - are by any account extremely derived birds. This group has overcome some of the most restricting constraints to bird evolution and has subsequently seen incredible evolutionary success upon the eastern landmasses to which they are native. Ornitheres evolved their teeth and complex chewing adaptations, which use the tongue in place of the lower jaw, to facilitate the consumption of grass and leaves. The system has since been exapted to other food sources as the ornitheres diversify, and now among many vared herbivores, there have also evolved fearsome carnivores in the form of the aberrant trunksnouts: birds which still exhibit resonating, fleshy snouts and teeth structures first evolved for herbivory, but which nonetheless have now adapted to feed not on plants but upon the flesh of animals, particularly other serilopes.

Trunksnouts are social predators which evolved from omnivores that fed on water plants, gradually transitioning to eating fish and insects and from there very quickly adapting to eat mostly flesh and to kill larger animals. They still strongly resemble herbivorous ornitheres, but their teeth and beaks have become very sharp, with the tooth battery present on the tongue now sporting several especially large bladed cusps, which align neatly against similar teeth in the upper jaw, forming a carnassial shear that slices flesh as cleanly as a set of kitchen shears. These teeth make them more effective at stripping all meat off a carcass than earlier competitors such as banshees - more primitive predatory vivas without lips or a well-developed flesh-slicing apparatus - and this along with more cooperative hunting behaviors have now allowed the trunksnouts to become the more dominant carnivores upon their native continent.

The largest trunksnout of all has evolved in the early Thermocene. A one-ton giant able to stand ten feet tall even despite its horizontal posture, the corona - named for a flashy yellow crown of feathers it can erect behind its head - is a massive and powerfully-built predator well-adapted to kill its plant-eating relatives. A muscular neck powers its jaws, which in conjunction with a single massive claw on either arm let it wrestle even the biggest ornitheres to the ground and to kill them by constricting the windpipe. Males and females form lasting and affectionate pair bonds, cooperating to kill prey and to rear and protect their young for a prolonged length of time. While many smaller trunksnouts live in multi-generational packs, the corona is so large that it more effectively utilizes resources living in smaller units, so reproduction is only every two years, and only one young is born at a time, after the last offspring is independent.