A wonderful wonderlont's life

Despite the undisputed supremacy of borax and ovoviraptors, the geotters group, which currently includes the arboreal ragos and the cursorial wonderlonts, has managed to maintain a fair level of diversity despite suffering several heavy losses in the past. Today, geotters can be found across Antarctica and display a wide variety of diets, ranging from primarily herbivorous to fully carnivorous.
They are generally small to medium-sized, no larger than a lynx... but there are exceptions.
One such exception is a species of wonderlont that entered the macropredator guild of the Great Depresseaon, a highly productive environment where gallery forests alternate with dry grasslands. While borax prefer more closed habitats, ovoviraptors and certain wonderlonts thrive in open areas, developing long legs and endurance-based hunting strategies to capture prey. Among the wonderlonts of the Great Depresseaon, the largest known species is also the largest geotter in modern Antarctica: the maned wonderlont (Equitocyon megaornithophagus), which can reach the size of a large dog. Its general appearance is wolf-like, though it has a broader, more robust skull and enlarged carnassials, adaptations linked to hypercarnivory that make it closer in feeding strategy to the African painted dog.

The trait that most clearly distinguishes this species, aside from its size, is the short mane around the neck, similar to that of a young lion. This mane is present in both sexes and likely functions in interspecific communication and recognition. Its color, shape, and length are highly variable, which helps individuals identify other members of their family group. Like most wonderlonts, maned wonderlonts are social pack hunters that live in family units consisting of a reproductive pair and their offspring from the previous five years. A female can raise up to six pups per year, but fewer than half survive their first year, meaning some large packs can number more than 20 individuals.
Young wonderlonts abandon their family when they reach sexual maturity, tipically at five years of age, which is unusually late compared to other carnivores of similar size. This delay is likely linked to the importance of maintaining large packs for successful hunting of their typical prey: hoofpoles and brumbles.
Maned wonderlonts are ground bird-specialist predators, but their prey are far from easy targets. Hoofpoles are fast and difficult to catch, while brumbles can be enormous and hard to bring down. Large, coordinated packs are essential for success, which explains why individuals that remained longer in their natal groups were favored over time. With such cooperation, maned wonderlonts can take down nearly any hoofpole species and almost all brumble species, though not without long, exhausting chases that can last several hours until the prey collapses from fatigue.

Another distinctive adaptation of maned wonderlonts and their close relatives is their locomotion. While they gallop when running, like many mammals, they adopt an ambling gait when walking quickly. This gait is rare among cursorial carnivores, otherwise seen only in plantigrade predators such as bears. The ambling gait conserves energy and provides stability, especially useful in the rocky and semidesertic terrains that are sharply increasing in the Great Depresseaon and northern Antarctica as a whole in the last million years. If environmental conditions continue to change, the high productivity of the Great Depresseaon and its complex biocenosis may be at risk. But, as always, when a species perish, another one can flourish.