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captainswaglord500 · 1 year ago

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Pushantan/Rotlen

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Chordata

Subphylum: Vertebrata

Infraphylum: Gnathostomata

Clade: Placodermi

Clade: Antiarchi

Clade: Euantiarcha

Clade: Xenodontimorpha

Class: Xenodontida

Order: Prenocaudata

Family: Phrynorhynchidae

Genus: Phrynorhynchus

Speices: P. apintajara (“toad beak of Apintajara" [/apiⁿtəd͡ʒarə/, a shapeshifting demon in the local folklore])

Ancestral species: possibly Bothriolepis ornata

Temporal range: late Miocene to recent (6.5 mya - present)

Information:

Though this creature may look cute and innocent on the exterior, do not let that fool you, as P. apintajara is actually a highly-aggressive predator. A monstrous, terrestrial antiarch-derived placoderm competing with the likes of theropods and pseudosuchians for the niche of apex predator, this creature is exceptionally territorial and does not readily tolerate other large predators, readily attacking on sight and regularly destroying the eggs and nests of other large predators if it comes across them. Lightweight in build, this creature is limber, flexible, and quick on its toes, able to run down prey which would tire out similarly-sized theropods with ease. The second-largest largest member of its clade, the xenodonts or xenodontians (class Xenodontida, “strange teeth” in reference to the sharpened bony plates in its mouth) and the only obligate carnivore within it, this creature’s bony mouth plates can shred through bone like a cleaver and pierce the armor of even some of the most well-defended herbivores. Primarily a sound-based predator, this creature’s eyesight is actually relatively poor, instead using its peculiarly-shaped gill-like pinna to help locate the point of origin for sounds in its environment and pinpoint prey in the dense thicket. In fact, this species’ hearing is superb, able to hear infrasonic frequencies across long distance.

To aid in blending in with its surroundings, the pushantan has two distinct color morphs, one found in the far northern jungles and lush alpine forests it prefers and the other in the northern dry forest regions it sparsely inhabits. The former tends to have a green and gray body with black bands and stripes on its legs and a lime green throat pouch with black highlights while the latter tends to have orange backs with yellow flanks and a red throat pouch but still the same black bands and stripes. Though it prefers inland forest ecosystems, coastal populations are a notable phenomenon, in part due to the lack of competition from other large littoral zone terrestrial predators. Specializing in hunting land-dwelling prey, its long legs also make it adept as an intertidal predator, wading in the shallows for large fish and other creatures to swim by before striking. Typically occupying an area of a couple hundred square miles, it has been known to migrate long distances in search of food, sometimes up to 50 miles in a day. Diurnal in nature, it prefers to hunt during the day, when its eyesight is less heavily impaired and when some larger theropods are asleep. At night, it sleeps under large trees, typically standing up, something which allows arboreal primates to climb onto the creature’s back and pick off insects and other parasites which might otherwise bother it. In times of ecological stress, this species appears to be able to enter a torpor-like state, significantly slowing down its metabolism to reduce its energy expenditure.

While it is far from the largest land predator in its ecosystem, being only around 20 feet long, 10 feet at the shoulder, and weighing around 1.5-2 tons, this animal makes up for this setback through its highly indiscriminate feeding patterns, something which is rare amongst the region’s large carnivores, who typically experience a high degree of niche partitioning. Willing to consume just about anything it can outrun and overpower, its diet includes a wide variety of terrestrial vertebrates. In the mountains, it primarily hunts camelids, deer, notoungulates, horses, and giraffids, and even large mammalian carnivores like amphicyonids, bears, hyaenodonts, and big cats. The most daring may even go after young proboscideans. At lower elevations, non-avian dinosaurs and other megafaunal up to the size of hadrosaurs may be taken as prey. This habit of indiscriminate opportunistic feeding has led some to dub it a “land shark” of sorts.

Though more vocal than its theropod compatriots, its repertoire of sounds is more limited. A loud, booming sound variously compared to a “croak”, a “roar”, or a “bellow” is used as a broadcast call to notify other large carnivores of its presence as well as to establish its territory. Hissing appears to communicate aggression and a deep-pitched “warbling”/“bugling” bellow or roar has been described as being used as part of a threat display to intimidate trespassers on its territory. A sound known as “wooning” has been observed as a form of communication with juvenile specimens.

Unusually for their clade, the pushantan is a sequential hermaphrodite, with most individuals being born female before switching their sex and becoming male as they begin to reach sexual maturity. The mechanisms behind this aren’t entirely known, though it’s believed that certain environmental pressures force this change. Mating occurs year-round and courtship rituals are relatively simple: flashing his bright throat pouch, the male bobs his head up and down while strutting alongside the female. If she accepts his courtship, she will begin to mirror his behavior whereas if she refuses, she will simply walk off. Coitus occurs under a tree, wherein the male, using an organ referred to as “claspers” (modified back fins from its aquatic ancestors), stands side-by-side, angling himself so he’s able to penetrate her and deposit his sperm. As pushantans mate for life, both parents will raise the offspring. In a few weeks time, the female will lay her amphibious eggs, formed in clutches of around 5-8, in a stagnant body of water near the shallows, making sure not to the leave the water’s edge while the male hunts for the both of them. In about 2 weeks, the eggs will hatch, giving birth to a larval tadpole-like form known as woggins, which have fins in place of arms and a prominent tail fin. Over the course of nearly 2 months, the woggins will grow to 16 times their birth size, begin to lose their fins, develop feet, and begin to lose functional gills, the gills instead becoming part of their ear. At this point, they can leave the water but most occasionally return to the water to keep their skin moist, as their skin has not yet developed the airtight scales of their adult forms and is thus susceptible to dehydration. By around 4 months, they will no longer need to return to the water, having begun to develop the spiny horns and scutes of its adult form, at which point, the mother will start to take them hunting. By around 9 months, they will be large enough to fend for themselves, and at around 2 years old, they will have reached adult size, followed by reaching sexual maturity in another 1-2 years. From there, the young pushantan can expect to live well into old age, a good 20-25 years in the wild and an even longer 30-38 years in captivity.

Regularly attacking livestock and humans alike, one of this creature’s names in Xenogaean, sykansykantuẋôtôtna (/sɪkansɪkantuʃɔtɔtnə/), literally translates to “(the) great scourge of (the) heavens”, as this species appears to be one of the few large terrestrial predators in Xenogaea which doesn’t naturally fear humans. This has led the creature to be killed on-sight by most farmers and hunted to near-extinction several times throughout its history, with the current population rebounding from a particularly deadly wave of exterminations in the last 19th century. However, with only around 14,000 mature individuals across its entire range, the species is still at imminent risk of extinction. Other names it goes by include the most commonly-used name, pushantan (/puʂaⁿtan/, a word of unknown etymology but likely a loanword from a pre-Xenogaean substrate language), rotlen (/ro̞t͡ɬɛn/, “thorn back”), or, in English, the thornback. Featured prominently in local artwork, particularly in murals and textiles, it is also considered an underdog in the minds of some locals, seen as a creature which prevails in an environment with much larger and more dangerous predators and in an environment in which humans has attempted to all but exterminate them. Peculiarly, it appears to be one of the few creatures in Xenogaea which shows adaptations specifically for hunting other carnivores, suggesting it may have originally evolved to hunt other predators before adapting into a generalized predator. Though this creature shows the ancestral trend towards 8-toed feet like its ancestors, this appears to be a derived trait rather than a true atavism. Within its class, it appears to be a rather derived branch with few close living relatives, with its closest living relative being the land pufferfish, with which it shares part of its range. Out of all the xenodont placoderms, this species’ evolution is the most well-understood, with fossil relatives known all the way back in the Eocene illustrating the slow upsizing of this species over several tens of millions of years in response to environmental pressures, having evolved from humble origins along the shorelines of an inland sea which would later become the Arava Desert before the drying-up of this region forced them to adapt to hunting larger, more land-based prey. The pushantan appears to be the apex of its clades’ current evolution, having emerged in the late Miocene as the largest of its family to ever live. Popular in online circles for its peculiar appearance, some Western internet users have dubbed it an “axolotl-chicken-porcupine”, its likeness being used in reaction images. In higher elevations near the base of the Isanunti Mountains, it has been known to stalk areas around volcanically active geyser vents and mud pools, ambushing animals which become trapped in the mud or injured by the scolding waters. Due to its peculiar appearance, it is in high demand amongst Western private collectors and is one of the most trafficked megafaunal animals in Xenogaea, further endangering its long-term survival as a species. It is one of the first placoderms to have had its entire genome sequenced.

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psykulor · 1 year ago

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This is my place to put stuff, so I'm putting this stuff here. It's a fanfic I wrote for Jurassic World that follows the Evolution video game AU - multiple working parks around the world, with incursions from new genecorps.

The Park Vet

"Dedi!" The radio crackled and hissed, transmitting Alonso's voice along with a half-kilometer's worth of interference. The storm was getting worse. "Dedi, wake up!"

Daedalus heaved himself from the sagging couch and grabbed the handset from the card table. "I'm here, Lonzo." He didn't bother explaining that he hadn't had enough time to open his book, let alone get some sleep. "What is the emergency?"

"Susan is attacking the wall again."

Those words replaced the haze of sleep curling around Daedalus' brain with a cold shock of alarm. Any animal attacking their enclosure was an issue - mostly for the animal. Dedi had just this week finished a course of antibiotics for a pachy that wedged its skull in between two steel wires and scraped its neck raw trying to get unstuck. A small miscalibration in fence spacing or installation could result in animal injury or escape. But Susan was a rex…

Jurassic World Yucatan opened up twelve years ago, to little fanfare. Its modest herds of stegos and trikes, together with a smattering of smaller de-extinct animals, made it more of a regional attraction than a destination. The director, unsatisfied with this, cut backroom deals to bring more unique attractions to the park. The star acquisition was Gerald, a young bull rex who hatched at roughly the time Dedi was hired. In a time when most parks were refusing to stock rexes due to their reputation for attacks, JW Yucatan launched the most ambitious rex attraction ever. The reasoning was that a rex with the right enrichment - challenging prey - would be easier to manage. Gerald's enclosure was stocked with a flock of struthios and a herd of Cory duckbills. It was an open secret that both prey animals were fertile. The director must have thought a self-replenishing food source made economic sense, Gene Guard Act be damned.

Dedi scrambled to the gear room. One leg hopping into his boot, he cradled the walkie in his neck. "Do we have tranqs in the air?"

"Negativo. ACU was cut to two shifts, recuerdas? No vale la pena proteger a los trabajadores solos, sí?"

Shit. He had forgotten. Dedi barely ever did third shift on-call. Budget cuts were everywhere these days, even the Asset Containment Unit. Dedi slapped the We Spare No Expense - Please Spare No Effort! sign above the armory door. He signed out a dart rifle, a six-pack of large animal tranquilizers, and two deterrent flares. His hand paused over the Nitro Express with its dull heavy cartridges.

While Gerald was growing, they kept him in moat containment away from the viewing enclosures while they tested his strength against various fences. By the age of six months, he could pull steel cable out of its mounting posts. At three years old, he could bring down a six-inch concrete wall. Dedi had to operate on the rex's fractured orbital rim afterwards, but the wall was destroyed. At last, the final design was implemented. Gerald and his entourage of prey animals debuted in a double-walled enclosure of steel bars wrapped in electrified barbed wire. The public flocked to see the first wild-fed rex in the world.

It lasted five weeks.

The heavy rifle felt cold in his hand. Dedi loaded two explosive cartridges and put on a bandolier of ten more. He prayed they wouldn’t be necessary. “Lonzo, I’m equipped. What’s her status?”

“She stopped beating on the concrete, but she’s pacing the same wall and making threat displays. I don’t know how much time we have.” Over the radio, Dedi could hear the trumpeting boom of the rex’s territorial call.

“Sit tight. I’m going to swing the Jeep around near the duckbill nests, then cross the enclosure. Are the duckbills agitated?”

“Most of the herd has moved to the nesting site, but we have a few still roaming the feeding ground. They don’t seem that worried, chief.”

While Gerald had been growing and stress-testing construction materials in a pit outside the park, the struthios and duckbills had been multiplying in the enclosure that would be his. The day the rex was brought in, the Struthiomimus moved their nesting site to the far end of the enclosure. Gerald was stalking the perimeter when, assessors reasoned, he found an exposed support beam where a struthio had dug out her nest. Using his powerful legs, he scraped away enough soil to get his head under the frame and then simply levered the whole fence out of the ground.

It was early in the day, before the gates were open, so there would be no guests to worry about. Park management had sounded the alarm and dispatched two ranger teams with instructions to lead Gerald back to his enclosure if possible, or to sedate and haul him if necessary. Daedalus' team was ordered to go the long way around the enclosure in case Gerald broke and ran.

Dedi was already in the Jeep, barreling towards the enclosure gate. The night was warm, and a light breeze whipped through his thinning hair. It was almost relaxing until the telltale buzz of the enclosure gate reminded him why he was here. The Jeep crawled over the deterrent spikes into the simulated Cretaceous lowland of the rex exhibit. To his left, he could hear the disquieted honking of the duckbills - as well as smell the ammonia of their collective waste. He couldn’t see Susan over the fern-covered hills of the feeding ground, but he knew she was there; the closer he drove, the more he could feel the periodic rumbles as she pounded the ground. Whatever had Susan upset, she was more agitated than he had ever seen her.

The headlights probed the sky as Dedi's Jeep clambered over the ferns that crested the central ridge. For a second, his breath caught in his chest. A huge grey-brown shape was illuminated in the beams! Then Dedi saw the dorsal stripe, the small cartoonish head - just a duckbill. The animal bellowed at him fitfully, but allowed him to move on. Dedi tried to regulate his breathing. Stupid animal.

As they drove past the neighboring parasaurolophus enclosure, the animals let out a chorus of bugle calls. The noise was deafening - Dedi couldn't even think for a second. The next second, he saw Gerald. The rex was standing in the corner where the enclosure met the indoor shelter, whipping his tail and rumbling with interest. Then Dedi saw the duckbill keeper cowering in the corner, waiting to die. No tranquilizer would work quickly enough to save her. Unthinking, Dedi pulled up the heavy rifle.

Right behind the rex's skull, where the powerful neck muscles attached, there was a weak spot. Dedi visualized his paleoanatomy diagrams from vet school, pointed the gun where he had labeled the ligamentum nuchae for his exams, and squeezed the trigger.

Susan was at the bottom of the hill, a hundred yards away. She was a mess. One side of her muzzle was bleeding from a hundred different scrapes, and her left eye was swollen shut. Susan was pacing the same section of wall, weaving and listing madly. Dedi could tell she was favoring her left leg. But as he approached, Susan lifted it high and stomped the packed earth with all her might. The half-full water bottle in the Jeep's cup holder rippled meaningfully.

“Easy, girl,” Dedi whispered. The massive beast swung her head to look directly at him. Then she let out a short, sharp call, a sort of braying whine. Dedi had never been trained on this vocalization. He pulled up the dart rifle, flicked the safety, and fired.

The image of Gerald's head breaking open burned into Daedalus' brain that day. He could still see the crater that the explosive cartridges left in the rex's skull, how the head flopped down like an old animatronic puppet, the leisurely way the rest of the body slumped into a lying position. He could smell the nail-polish sting of cordite coming from the barrel of his gun. He could hear the duckbill keeper - what was her name? - screaming, then laughing, then crying as shock and relief and horror mingled in her body.

They had congratulated him publicly for his quick action to save the keeper's life. Privately, things were different. Dedi was not asked to work on training projects or stress tests, and he was moved from the first to the second shift. He spent the afternoons administering evening meds and the odd first aid case, and Dedi's boss no longer talked about presenting together at the JW trade convention. His career was over.

As a child, Dedi had played the Jurassic Park arcade games religiously, blasting away at escaped Velociraptor and Pteranodon with tranq guns that made them fall immediately and harmlessly to the ground. In real life, the only doses of field sedative strong enough to work that way were lethal ones; a well-dosed tranq took nearly a minute for full effect, and only rarely rendered a large animal unconscious. Susan didn’t charge the Jeep when the needle hit her neck. Instead, she snapped halfheartedly in the direction of the dart, stumbled around for thirty seconds, and lurched into a lounging position. Dedi waited until the head was fully on the ground before approaching; still, Susan’s one good eye followed him blearily, sending prickles down the back of his neck.

Dedi circled the rex’s tail to get to the haunches, where it was safest to draw blood. The prick was nothing to the giant animal, but he half-expected her to lunge even in this state. Rexes had metabolisms like a train engine, and more than a few attacks had been attributed to incautious rangers agitating the animals to the point where they overwhelmed the sedatives in their blood. But Susan didn’t stir.

The autolab would take a few minutes to analyze the blood sample, so Dedi moved to Susan’s eye. A quick inspection showed no breaks, just lacerations around the lid and the orbit. Susan reacted to this intrusion, waving her head around and huffing loudly through her nostrils; so Dedi sprayed on some liquid bandage and hustled back to the lab station by her hip, which was flashing COMPLETE.

“Let’s see here… protein is a little low, hematocrit too… have you been eating okay?” Susan had killed two struthios in the past week - she was still too small to hunt duckbills and would probably remain so - but she usually dragged her prey into a privacy stand. She could have been refusing to eat what she’d hunted for some reason and the ranger teams wouldn’t know until they risked their weekly cleanup. Dedi checked the fine print. “No major antibody reactions, but what’s this?” Dedi expanded the display. Susan’s cortisol levels were almost triple the expected rate. Dedi flipped through other common biomarkers of stress - all off the charts. Susan’s behavior wasn't due to any toxin or pathogen. In rough terms, she was having a panic attack.

Daedalus almost flew back to Greece a dozen different times. His mother called him every day, even as she complained about the international calling fees - telling him about a new Mantah genepark opening in Pikermi, no matter how many times Dedi told her that an VMD in saurischian biology left him totally unprepared to care for swamp elephants; telling him he did the right thing and everyone knew it; telling him to just get some sleep, to try the extracts she had sent him, they’d help; telling him to just hold on another day and it wouldn’t hurt so bad anymore.

For two months, he dragged himself to work every afternoon, dodging park management and the pitying glances of the keepers until he could shut himself in his office for his daily breakdown. The new day vet, an Anglo named Lizzie, gave the shift-change notes as briefly as possible, dipping in and out of the office as if she would be tainted by association with him. Then one day, she was there when he arrived, looking harried and clutching a med file. She thrust it into his arms. “They’re trying again.”

Dedi had already done a visual check for parasites - he remembered one of his first treatments was a trike who had become maddened by ticks and broken a horn charging the gates - but this time he worked over Susan’s skin, checking the toes for lodged stones, botfly lesions, anything that could be a new stressor. Nothing fit the bill. Dedi jumped as something pelted his head. Then raindrops started coming down, and he forced himself to get back to work. The rain would wake Susan up, and besides, there was nothing more to be done. Maybe something in her daily routine had changed that he wasn’t aware of, or maybe she’d just gone bad. It happened. If the cause couldn’t be isolated and Susan kept attacking the walls, she’d be -

A trumpeting noise broke the steady shush of the rain. A flash of lightning illuminated the enclosure, and the silhouette of a duckbill loomed over Dedi and the languishing rex. For what seemed like the tenth time that night, Dedi’s heart skipped a beat. “What are you doing here? Are you mad?” he muttered. And then, as the duckbill advanced into his headlight beams, he saw the frothy spittle running from its flattened jaw, saw the eyes rolling back in its domed head, and realized. “Rabies,” breathed Dedi, backing away slowly. And then his back hit a pillar of scaled flesh. Susan was standing up.

“I tried talking to them,” Lizzie complained. “The director is adamant. He said we have this big enclosure with nothing but multiplying herd animals, and that it’s time to make some money again.” Dedi said nothing. He couldn’t. His guts were churning. “Listen, Dr. Samaras, I’m sure this is tough on you. But she’ll need round-the-clock care and I can’t trust the rangers to administer it.” She began to detail the routine she’d mapped out, while Daedalus stared at the file. A young female this time, younger than Gerald had been. The picture showed a spindly rex chick the size of a golden retriever. She would barely be able to chew her own food.

“I want to see her,” Dedi surprised himself by saying. Lizzie seemed just as surprised, but she walked with him to the seclusion cages. There was the chick, curled up on a dog bed in the corner of a cage built for a much larger animal. At the sound of approaching humans, she swung her birdlike head towards the door and flopped clumsily onto the concrete.

“She begs,” Lizzie said. “A black market rescue. Some oil baron wanted something more impressive than a pet lion. Apparently he was feeding her by hand until she chewed him up by mistake.” The chick wedged her downy head through the bars and chirped insistently. Dedi closed his eyes, trying to banish the thought of the last time he had seen a rex. He didn’t realize how close his hand was to the cage until the baby’s snout pushed it open, snuffling madly in search of some imagined treat.

Dedi didn’t dare move. With any luck, he thought, Susan would go for the sick duckbill and give him time to dive towards the Jeep. Or she could snap him up right there, crush him like an egg in those vicegrip jaws, and he would die quickly. Susan did neither of those things. Her legs shifted to flank him. She ducked low, so low that her neck was brushing the top of his head, and produced a rumble so deep and loud it shook Dedi’s chest. The duckbill was unfazed. Susan pounded the mud with her clawed foot, backing away slightly as the other animal advanced. Dedi was frozen. His body had released urine in a vain attempt to encourage him to flee.

Susan was still staggering, listing slightly. She backed up until Dedi was right in front of her, her breath on his neck. Suddenly, the huge head advanced, swiveled downwards, and the broad jaw struck Dedi in the chest. He stumbled backwards, landing in the earth between her and the Jeep. The duckbill chose that moment to strike. It was nearly the size of the underfed juvenile rex, and the virus drove it onward; ramming and battering, snapping at Susan with its toothed bill. Susan seemed reluctant to bite back. Dedi scrambled backwards in the mud, then made a break for the Jeep.

Susan seemed determined to die. Dangerously underweight, she refused to eat unless she was hand-fed. So for four hours a night, armed with hide gloves and a bucket of cubed goat, Dedi coaxed her to eat at least some of what she required. In the cowboy days, when JW had carte blanche to sequence and incubate animals at will, she would have been euthanized. But now the company had regulations and competitors, and any rex - even a sickly runt - was irreplaceable. So Dedi came down to the holding pens after evening meds with his book, and took turns feeding and reading while the infant ate and slept, or trudged around the cage mewling for parents who had likely never existed. When she had more energy she would attack the walls and bars until her jaws bled. Occasionally she needed infusions of fluids or nutrients, and Dedi had to wrestle her down to get the sedatives in and then monitor her ragged breath while the IV bag did its work. The director visited, some evenings. “She needs to get her weight up,” he would say, reprovingly. Dedi did not respond.

Slowly, Susan went from hand feeding to toss feeding to eating from a dish. When she learned how to open a goat carcass herself, she was deemed fit for display and released into Gerald’s old enclosure. From there, Dedi had less contact with her - she no longer needed evening medication or supplemental feeding. But she would never reach her full weight, and her sheltered upbringing meant she had difficult behaviors. Susan would attack the walls every time the feeders came, perhaps seeking human contact. By this time she was the size of an elephant. There were a few near misses.

Dedi hustled to the Jeep as fast as his gasping breath would allow. His shaking hands uncovered the Nitro Express - fumbled the cartridges - slotted them into the side of the heavy gun. When he looked up, the animals were still battering at each other, the duckbill lacking natural weapons and Susan refusing to use hers. Finally, for a moment they were separated. He pointed at the duckbill’s heart and fired.

For a second he worried he had missed the vital zone. The duckbill bellowed and charged at Susan again - but this time it stumbled, slid headlong into the mud and lay still. For a moment all was silent. He and Susan stared at each other. He turned the key on the Jeep - Susan started towards him - he fishtailed away into the night.

Two weeks after the incident, the infected duckbills had been culled and the remainder immunized, then moved to the parasaurolophus enclosure. Susan was closely monitored for infection, but it seemed likely that she was immune to rabies. Dinosaurs weren’t supposed to be susceptible, anyway - the Corythosaurus sequence had been filled in with mammalian blood markers, a key weakness that would have to be addressed later.

Dedi experienced no return to glory. The rabies outbreak had officially never happened, so there was no recognition for uncovering it. But Dedi’s friend Alonzo spread word among the rangers and keepers, and Dedi could feel a change in attitude from the glances he got in the halls. He was no longer ducking into his office or taking lunches on the roof. He was learning Cenozoic paleomedicine and going on dates with Lizzy. He wasn’t sure what would happen next, but for the first time in a long time, he felt ready.

#jurassic world evolution #jurassic world #jurassic park #t rex #fanfic #gen fic #writing

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