Saucege

The saucege (pronounced like “sausage”) split from its ancestor. It is the result of wolverbacks which begun hunting burrowing prey by scraping with their claws. Due to their burrowing larval form, this encouraged larval traits to be inherited into adulthood--resulting in them relatively quickly taking on a neotenous form where they never truly grow out of their “fat hairy sausage”-stage fat, as they do not burn it off switching to endothermy like other shrewbacks. This cylindrical form allows the saucege to easily move about underground as it hunts.

The saucege digs by clawing top-to-bottom in front of itself with two huge claws on each foot, similar to golden moles and marsupial moles. Unlike its Terran counterparts, however, it has no back legs to kick dirt behind it--as, being a sauceback, it has just one pair of legs--so it instead sweeps it backwards with the same feet it used to dig, more similar to true moles. It is enabled to do this in part by its open hip joint, which is present in all saucebacks and allows it to swivel its legs around more freely than it could with a more mammal- or dinosaur-like hip.

The saucege uses its jaws, blackened with hardening sclerotin, to easily grapple with and kill burrowing creatures. It primarily eats vermees and their descendants, as well as the larvae of related saucebacks. It can detect them using seismic vibrations, similar to Terran moles, both audibly through its ears and by feeling with its feet to get a three-dimensional image of all tunnels and solid objects in its surrounding area of soil.

The saucege breeds in the early spring, as winter eggs often freeze and die. After mating, a female will lay about 300 eggs, two at a time every 2 hours, as she burrows, spreading them over a wide area. Upon hatching, juveniles will immediately begin burrowing and searching for food on their own. Sauceges perform no parental care, and in fact will eat their own babies indiscriminately.