Weird-Boned Twintail

The genetic instability the Chasing Twintail inherited from its ancestor would continue to plague its descendants. The Weird-Boned Twintail split from its ancestor and developed perpetual bone cancer in its twin backbones. Though referred to as "cancer", they generally cannot grow large enough in an individual's lifespan to spread. Still, their position is rather precarious; it only survived this development because their placement caused the resulting growths to form upwards, creating irregular skin-covered neural spine-like structures rather than slowly paralyzing it. These proved to be fairly useful in deterring predators, however, and allowed the Weird-Boned Twintail to continue a trend towards smaller sizes.

The Weird-Boned Twintail didn’t continue its ancestor’s high-metabolism trend, however. The rise of Teacup Saucebacks, which are cosmopolitan and fill a similar niche, made this problematic. The saucebacks were bipeds and used sonar, so they expended less energy looking for food than the quadrupedal, six-eyed twintail. So, the Weird-Boned Twintail had to evolve to expend less energy itself in order to compete. The giant obsiditrees in its environment naturally warmed the environment around them to thermoregulate and in turn also trapped heat with their dense canopies, and so the Weird-Boned Twintail opted to generate significantly less body heat when not actively chasing prey and instead depend mostly on its environment to do the work for it. This means that the Weird-Boned Twintail will no longer starve to death from just a few missed meals. The saucebacks remain a competitive problem, of course, especially with their rapid reproduction, but the Weird-Boned Twintail mitigates this by actively preying on them and their larvae, similar to how apex predators will sometimes prey on their competitors.

Like its ancestor, the Weird-Boned Twintail has a frankly rather excessive number of nipples, over 100 total. This allows it to have a very large number of offspring at a time. Its maximum breeding rate has gone up to about 12 times a year. Its gestation lasts mere days, the initially fetal offspring grow large enough to leave the pouch when they are only one week old, and they become independent at two. They initially live off of smaller prey such as tiny ukfauna, but slowly move on to bigger and faster prey until they are fully grown at 3 months. Though it can still burrow, its perpetual bone cancer makes subterranean life more difficult, so the Weird-Boned Twintail is more likely to repurpose burrows made by larger fauna.