Ballichehara

Within the Dixon Tropical Rainforest and Dixon Tropical Woodland, the many species of large flora thrived due to no large browsers feeding on them. This ecological vacuum provided a lot of opportunities for any species able to take such a niche. This led to the local populations of grabnubs to expand their diets and become giants, becoming the ballichehara. Due to its ancestral eye-hearing method proving very ineffective at actually picking up sound, the ballichehara had to make some important changes. The crests do still provide some help with hearing, as the sound passes through the skin of the crest and resonates with the thin bone core, which is detected by jaw bones adjacent to it, but they now better serve as display structures. The large nasal crest also helps with their sense of smell, allowing them to sniff out potential predators or other members of the same species. The two digits of the hand have become longer with large claws, helping them pull down branches to their mouths. Their two large upper front teeth help with shearing off bits of flora like leaves or berries for their back teeth to then grind up. As they feed on large trees like obsidiroots or mainland fuzzpalm saplings, they open up space for smaller flora like carnossamers to grow. While the species no longer utilizes echolocation, they still make a wide variety of high frequency sounds to communicate with others of their kind. For protection, the ballichehara travel in small herds consisting of females and their young and one mature male. If not leading a herd, mature male ballichehara live solitary lives. Every spring, males will seek out herds and challenge the alpha male for mating rights. When this happens, both opponents size each other up by holding their heads high up to display their crests, with one of the two often backing down. If neither is willing to give up, however, the two males will then turn to physical violence to establish dominance. These physical fights can be brutal, with each combatant using its large claws to deliver deep wounds on their opponent. While one male directly killing the other is rare, the loser in these physical fights often leaves with torn crests and deep gashes on their chest and flanks, leaving them more vulnerable to predators. Due to their large size, the ballichehara cannot dig burrows for them to lay their eggs. Instead, the herd will dig out shallow pits to lay their eggs, with the mothers guarding their nests from predators such as the stink shrew for two weeks. Once the young hatch, they take about one and a half years to reach maturity, with females typically staying with the herd they were born in for their whole lives while males are forced out to live a solitary existence. On average, the ballichehara can live for around 20-30 years, with the females usually breeding about 6-10 times in their lifetime(males can potentially breed every year after their second birthday for the rest of their lives). The ballichehara thrives in the Dixon Tropical Rainforest and Dixon Tropical Woodland due to a lack of competition, replacing their ancestor in these areas. The species was unable to, however, establish permanent populations in the Javen Temperate Rainforest due to the presence of other large browsers such as the westward haglox in the region. This resulted in the grabnub only surviving in the Javen Temperate Rainforest while dying out elsewhere.