The East Coast Forest

The Pocket Forest along Pangea’s eastern coast. From what’s today the Middle East and Austro-Asia to the south to the seas of Japan and Okhotsk in the north makes is a very small portion of land compared to the forests along the west coast or the southern coast but makes up a unique environment.

With the Coastal Mountains separating them from the lowlands and an entire supercontinent of hostile open terrain superating it from other woodlands, it allows for the evolution of creatures unique from the West and South who share a high amount of faunal exchange as animals cross via its western tip.

A boreal forest of abundant greenery provided by warm summers and harsh winters fed by snow from storms of the sea this climate of extremes creates a unique environment where new animals evolve.

With the absence of horned squids outside of Squeezebra that seasonally appear the role of large browser has gone to a Blish.

Rapstriders are giant relatives of the Rapducken that have completely lost their front limbs among the largest of all Ichthyopterans. Standing 12 feet tall only passed by the Moa Blish on the Cryptoland Islands.

Highly social browsers, highly colorful males compete in displays for flocks of females nesting in large communes like the modern ostrich. With a bright head crest and long tail bristles (not a single feather as in birds bit multiple hair strands woven together)

The throat pouch of earlier forums has been dramatically expanded with an eye-like pattern by gulping air males can create creepy scream-like calls that can carry across the woods for miles

(Dinosaur Vocalization Study (2022) | Cretaceous Era - YouTube The section on Dryptosaurus is what they sound like)

However such disturbing calls from males only come in summer when the giant Blish can bulk feed on deciduous plants in the winter they stalk quietly through the barren snow-swept forests much thinner than in the summers of plenty always on the lookout for their one common predator.

Like most of the world, it is a Terra Squid that is the dominant predator for its ancestors evolved in the Coastal highlands and were one of the only animals to cross the Coastal Moutain Range.

The Kracougar is a typical member of the Kraken Cats. Ambush predators descendants of the Twizzletooth are notable in having some of the most reduced limbs of any Terra Squid.

The mouth tentacles already reduced in Neck Snares are almost gone in Kraken Cats reduced to giant claws used to help restrain large prey like Stridraptors Blish that are 7 feet taller than them. Killing prey is left entirely to the beak which is large and serrated like Pelagornids with an enlarged buccal mass to anchor it well bitting.

The other notable part of these Tera Squid limb reductions is a switch in locomotion. As they evolved from ancestors who continued to specialize in pouncing on prey they favored strength in only the first two pairs of walking limbs.

By the time we get to Kraken Cats, the last pair of limbs are now held off the ground used to provide balance when sprinting at prey and as an extra anchor point to hold on to deliver a bite to the head. Overall this gives the Kraken cats a gate more similar to mammals(although a lot of Terra Squid features are surprisingly mammal-like) more than any Protostome.