The Early Therocene: 30 Million Years Post-establishment

The Early Therocene: 30 million years post-establishment

Tallest of All: The Girats

The great success of the boingos across the plains and grassland of the Early Therocene would spell bad news for the hamtelopes. While enjoying a brief success in the Middle Rodentocene, they would eventually be outcompeted by the boingos, with a more-efficient means of locomotion and more-specialized teeth for eating tough grasses. As such, the hamtelopes would be pressured into other niches as they were pushed out of the plains: many would become forest and jungle herbivores, others would remain as small hare-like grazers in the plains, and only on isolated environments do the hamtelopes get to dominate with the absence of competition.

But one family of hamtelopes stubbornly stuck to the plains, and despite the abundance of competing boingos grew to megafaunal sizes. However, they reached higher up, into the treetops where the boingos could not reach, and so were selected to grow taller still, and so this trend reaches its logical conclusion in the Early Therocene, with the tallest hamsters ever to walk the planet: the girats.

Towering high-browsers that feed on the sparse trees in the open plains, the girats reach tremendous heights of up to 16 feet, with their long legs and even longer necks. They evolved prehensile lips and long, flexible tongues to grasp and pluck branches and stems from trees, while their incisors served as pruning shears to clip off leaves to be swallowed. With virtually no competition for these high leaves the girats dominate and thrive, managing a coexistence with the other grazers that drove off most of their smaller relatives.

Girats are mostly solitary, though occasionally gather in groups to seek out mates during the breeding season. Male girats are easily distinguished from females by the presence of large, keratinous horns sported on their protruding cheekbones, which they use in headbutting contests with other males, swinging their heads at each other and trying to inflict bruising whacks onto their rivals with their blunt, hammer-like horns.

At least a dozen species of girat range all across Nodera and Easaterra, where they vary in color and the arrangement of their horns. The axehorn girat (Altocervimys securiceros) is the most common species in Nodera, while its relative the trihorn girat (Giraffacricetus triceros) lives further south in the savannah of Nodera. Meanwhile in the tropical forests of central Easaterra lives the splendid girat (Procerocricetus magnificens), one of several species in the genus Procerocricetus that adapted to denser jungles instead of the open plains. Unlike their cousin the axehorn girat, the trihorn and splendid species possess sharper horns, due to the need of extra defenses with the increased number of larger predators further south, and as such are less aggressive toward their own species than the axehorns: with more pointed weaponry, a headbutting contest between two rival males can easily result to death for them both, and such they rarely fight unless absolutely necessary.

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More Posts from Enbylvania65000 and Others

enbylvania65000

4 years ago

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enbylvania65000

4 years ago

i enjoy playing this game on tumblr dot com called, “is that tag a keysmash, slang i dont know, or initials for some media i’m not familiar with?”

The Late Rodentocene: 20 million years post-establishment

Quick Before The Hamyenas Come: The Hamyenas

As larger and more specialized forms become more common in the Late Rodentocene, the diversity of predators has also become more populous. On most other continents, the ferrats become the dominant carnivores, but on the continent of Ecatoria, a different predator reigns supreme: the hamyenas.

Descended from the hammibals of the Middle Rodentocene, the hamyenas are the top predators of the continent, and have expanded into a great diversity to take full advantage of the wide array of biomes on the continent. Some smaller species such as the dwarf hamyena (Microcutamys minimus) thrive in the Great Ecatorian Desert, while others, such as the black bear-sized greater plains hamyena (Crocutacricetus magnus) make a living on the continent's open grassland, preying upon the large grazing jerryboas and hamtelopes that are abuntant in these regions.

Some hamyenas, however, have begun to diverge away from the stocky, short-limbed bodyplan, and taken on different carnivore niches available in Ecatoria: some, such as the maned biteyeena (Barognathomys shenzii) has developed a powerful jaw for cracking apart bones, often scavenging the leftovers of other hamyena species and chewing apart carcasses to get at the bits of meat inaccessible to other carnivores. Others, such as the fox-sized prairie zingo (Cynocricetus canioides) specialize on smaller prey, and thus have developed a much-more slender build, adapted for running and making fast turns in pursuit of its agile and elusive prey.

Like all rodents, the hamyenas lack canines: however, they compensate for the lack of these trademark killing tools with the help of highly-specialized jaws and teeth. The upper incisors, which grow continually as typical of rodent teeth, merge together into a single stabbing point that is kept well-ground and sharp by the whetstone-like lower incisors, which grind against the fused upper 'fang' and keep it in deadly shape.

Hamyenas are typically solitary ambush hunters, pouncing on their prey after stalking them at close range. Their jaws, which can open extremely wide up to an angle of 90 degrees, allows them to get their jaws over the necks of their victims and puncture the carotid arteries: once sufficient damage is done the prey quickly bleeds to death, making a safer and more efficient kill for the predator as opposed to a suffocating bite to the neck, which risks injury to them as the prey struggles for a prolonged period of time.

The larger species of zingoes, however, have discovered a new tactic of hunting: cooperation. Multiple individuals, usually a mated pair and their adult offspring, work together to take down larger prey, especially the browsing forest hamtelopes of the continent. These species are less agressive toward their own kind compared to other hamyenas, and adults stay and hunt with their parents and siblings until they eventually depart the pack to find new mates and territories of their own.

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