Bewildering Beasts | The Crawling Hand and the Dropbear

250 MPE 

Rainforest (equatorial Serinarcta)

Deep in the Ultimocene rainforest live many fierce and unusual specimens, creatures transformed by time from their ancestors into now wholly unrecognizable things...

~~~

There is to be found in Serinarcta's coastal jungle an oddball creature that appears equal parts bird and beast, and which makes use of two very different manners of getting around. Much of the time, and especially during the day, it is rarely seen, clinging upside down from high canopy branches in the jungle, or clung to the trunk of an old forest tree, its mottled, spotted fur breaking up its outline against bark and branches. Its claws are sharp, scythe-like, but it does not hang by them so much as by its wrists, which are sharply angled at rest, closing into a hook-like position, in which tendons lock, and the animal remains suspended. Long, muscular arms occasionally reach forward, and as a new hold is secured, the hind leg with its three long grasping digits is carried ahead too, in a slow upside-down crawl, often toward a patch of fruit which this animal enjoys. Its jaws are bird-like; a true, keratin beak covers its snout, with which it easily plucks berries, but the back of its jaws are full of molars, and rather than swallow the fruit whole and pass the seeds, it chews it up and spits them out. It is not a good seed disperser.

And it does not really have to be, because fruit is only a supplement to its diet, and this quiet and lazy daytime behavior is not really indicative of its true potential. To see that, night must fall.

When darkness descends on the jungle, the animal becomes active, and its steady, suspended climbing is replaced with quick, agile leaps from the top of one branch to another. Its pupils grow wide in the dark, and its tufted ears flick back and forth, picking up every sound of predator or of prey. Now, it has become a hunter. It probes its long talons, each resembling a butcher knife, into holes beneath tree bark, and sometimes it may skewer a small molodont on the end of its claw, feeding rapaciously from the meat hooked on its own digit as if eating a kebab. But other times, it watches the forest below, and sees other opportunity. A flock of terries - emu-sized tentacle birds, nibbling bushes with deer-like wariness - are moving just beneath. And the dropbear has seen them.

Dropbears, a species of tribbird - beaked tribbetheres distantly related to tribbats and canitheres - get their name from their most exciting hunting technique; leaping from the canopy straight down, and catching passing land animals by surprise with a fatal embrace. It is not a new way of hunting - it was well-used by leopards so very long ago on Earth - and it will surely be used again by hunters not yet known. But while effective, it is also risky. The dropbear must pounce only at the exact moment when the prey is in position; it must not miss, or it risks fatally injuring itself in the fall. It stares, its head not moving, its eyes fixated in place, as its muscles tense in preparation. A little closer... and then suddenly, it is gone, launched into the open air, into the dark, into the void. A shriek follows, then a crack, and the thud of footsteps into the distance over twigs and leaf litter. Then nothing, silence in the shadows. Not even insects call, for a few moments there is total silence. And then, eyes glinting in dim planetlight, a hunter rises from the back of its prey lain out neck-broken on the damp ground. Success. A proud hunter begins to feed immediately, opening the carcass with its claws, then tearing morsels with its bill. It eats the choicest organs first, lightening the load before it will haul the entire kill up into the trees and guard it for days from competitors, until all that remains are neatly cleaned bones hanging by dried up tendons from some arboreal perch. Tribbirds like the dropbear are very unusual animals, and only a few species have managed to become large predators in this way. For a short time, the widespread warm, wet and abundant climate of the early Ultimocene allows for a greater variety of species to coexist than was often possible before, and unexpected species like the dropbear can live alongside more numerous predator guilds simply because there is so much food, and so many ways to get it.

But the Ultimocene will be a time of many changes, and this era of bounty will not last forever.

~~~

"Crawling hand" is an unusual name for an animal, much moreso than "dropbear", but a fitting one for this species, one of the most bizarre and frightening-looking of any true bird ever to live. For though the dropbear has come, over deep time, to acquire a few bird-like traits, the adaptations seen in the crawling hand are beyond the ordinary in every way. A small and early-divergent lineage of glove, and only distantly related to the grapplers, it lurks in the undergrowth of the equatorial rainforests of Serinarcta, 250 million years P.E. Like all gloves, the crawling hand is a hunter, and eats only meat. But this is a fairly small predator, growing to a length of just 28 inches. It is also especially short-statured, its body stil long and its legs short and set far back along its body as in its earliest Pangeacene ancestors. Crawling hands dwell in burrows, blocking entrance to predators by backing in so that their horrific array of five fiercely spiked facial tentacles faces any intruders, and at night they emerge to hunt, scrambling along with a gait supported with a shuffling movement of their three center tentacles. The crawling hand is a functional pentapod, bearing its body weight on five points in each walk cycle. The last joint of each facial limb folds up against itself when bearing weigh, protecting the large talon that projects from its distal tip. 

Crawling hands have decent eyesight, suited to lurking in darkness; they cannot see color, but can spot movement even in dim light. But their primary sense is a keen sense of smell, though their nostrils are not externally visible, for they now open into the upper surface of the mouth and are largely fused with the sense of taste; receptors along the wet, fleshy inner edge of each tentacle detect scent particles in soil and in air, letting this eerie hunter track down its quarry over the jungle floor. When seeking prey, they first amble seemingly aimlessly in different directions; this is an attempt to find a scent trail, indicative of something having passed by recently, which it will then follow. With each stride, it picks up new scent molecules in its tentacle ridges, and if it can sense the prey is small, the closer it gets the more it picks up its pace, a scuttle becoming a bounding, scampering gallop. Much of its food is small; insects and earthworms, slugs and snails, the odd nest of molodonts are all taken. And most things it kills are bite-sized; it must eat often, for its high activity level requires a lot of calories, and its quota is most easily filled with casual consumption of small but superabundant invertebrate foods.

But not always.

The crawling hand is not especially fast, and many things can outrun it. But it is very powerful, the spikes along its jaws robust and relatively huge compared to itself; with them, if it can get in the first bite, it can hold onto even animals bigger than itself and ultimately kill them. The trick is to get close enough to grab on, and so when the hand follows the tracks of a larger, vertebrate prey animal - a small circuagodont, a terry, or a larger tribtile - to a common trail where many such tracks converge, and where all sorts of animals pass by, it slows its approach, quieting its steps on the leaf litter, dips off to the side, and prepares an ambush. At such times freezing unmoving, its eyes flicker left to right, looking for motion; it listens acutely; even the slightest sound will hold its attention. It moves through thick cover, brambles and thorns and thickets its prey will avoid, avoiding walking directly along the game trails the many small animals of the woods traverse in their day to day foraging. It vanishes into the thicket. And there it waits, quietly breathing, quietly waiting. It is a gamble; if enough time passes with no visitors to the trail, it will have wasted time it could have spent hunting smaller things. But sometimes there is success.

A molodont, perhaps about as big as a hare, comes unwarily down a route it has passed every day perhaps for its entire life. Today, it will be different. A horrific, spider-like thing rushes from the thorns - prey cannot hope to identify what it is before it engulfs them, strangles them, before claws cut like blades into soft flesh and before the wicked hooked beak hidden between those spider-like tentacles cuts through windpipe and breath is lost. The crawling hand drags away a prize that may be as big or even heavier than itself. It rushes home with it, to get it safely below ground, away from prying eyes and competitors. There, in the darkness, it will feed. But this one is not alone. Back in her den, in shadowed shelter beneath the forest floor, she is greeted with soft peeping. Two chicks, their feathers white and fuzzy, their eyes squinted almost shut, await her, hungry and restless. She hatched them here just a few days ago, and for the next six months she will attend to their needs. She will have to hunt the game trail more than ever now, for her chicks need lots of meat if they are to grow. She opens the gut of the carcass, spilling soft, warm entrails - easy pickings for the chicks, with still small jaws. Once satisfied that they are able to feed, she turns around to face the tunnel exit, her jaws still bloody with her victim - and if anything, anything at all, dares try and go after her babies, that blood will be joined by blood from a new victim. Nothing will threaten her family and survive. Of that, she will make certain.