Megalosheh

Megalosheh split from its ancestor and became larger, making it one of the biggest saucebacks to ever live (and certainly the heaviest). While there were several factors to this occurring, the biggest of them is its tail. Calling back to the two-tailed saucebacks of long ago, the Megalosheh’s tail is forked. Having not been an obligate tripod, this was retained long enough for it to be perfected for walking and permanently established in the species. The fork occurs well after the lung segments, affecting the last five segments of the tail, though only four are especially mobile. This allowed it to become an obligate tripod as it grew larger, as the twin tail tip is more stable than a single hoof. An adult cannot walk bipedally at all. The Megalosheh’s feather coat is thinner, as its colossal size makes a full coat disadvantageous, and it has taken on a greyish coloration because normal camouflage is pointless at large sizes and it may as well pretend to be a rock.

Being so large, the Megalosheh no longer needs to stand up to eat from trees, simply raising its beaked trunk to pull down leaves. However, it will balance on its tail to knock down trees for younger members of the herd to feed from. Similar to its ancestor, doing this helps control populations of black flora which otherwise block too much light from reaching the undergrowth. It has a large fermenting gut, which is visibly located in its chest area, as unlike tetrapods which have their lungs in their chest and the guts behind them, saucebacks have their guts in the same segment as their legs and brain and the lungs behind that.

The Megalosheh, in order to reach the point where they are consuming flora and therefore able to reach adult size more quickly, metamorphose much faster. While eggs still take 4 months to hatch, the worm-like detritivore larva stage lasts only a single month before their legs erupt, though it takes another month for them to be developed enough to stand, at which point they join a herd. They usually join their parents’ herd, as they stick around while the babies are still larvae, but if this is impossible they can join other herds just as easily. Young legged Megaloshehs are cursorial and bipedal, able to sprint deeper into the herd at any sign of danger while the larger, slower, but more powerful adults fend off the would-be predator. Much like its ancestor, male megaloshehs attract females with bellows and shaking displays. It lives for 30 years and breeds about every 5 years starting in warmer months, laying 20-25 eggs at a time.

Megalosheh activity has caused the Mainland Fuzzpalm and Qupe Tree, already having been spread to the beach by the Seashrog, to also spread inland into Barlowe Temperate Rainforest and Barlowe Temperate Woodland.