Dinotuga

The dinotuga split from the flutuga and moved out from the crowded Biocat-Huggs River System into the eastern region of the Dixon-Darwin supercontinent. While it already had basic means of handling life on land, its ancestor still depended on water and it was not exactly equipped to handle some of the faster and more powerful predators living on land. To deal with this, the dinotuga had to make several quick evolutionary changes. The first of these is its skin taking on varying hues to help it blend in better with its environment. For those living in heavily wooded areas, they take on different shades of dark blue and indigo, which provides camouflage amongst the forest underbrush; while those living in scrublands have a golden color along with purple spots to provide camouflage in the golden dirt and purple flora. In addition to its camouflaging skin, the dinotuga has evolved bipedal movement. However, because of it shifting to bipedal movement in a relatively short span of time, it had to start out as a facultative biped. Being a facultative biped means that it sits and walks on all fours, but it can stand up and run on two legs. This comes in handy when keeping an eye out for potential predators and being capable of better endurance running than its ancestor could. In order to make this happen, the dinotuga lost all the shell armor, except for a pair of plates protecting its neck, on the front half of its body to reduce the weight bearing down on its front limbs. Further helping it with watching out for predators is the dinotuga's enhanced vision that gives it a better chance at seeing predators before they see it. Another anti-predator adaptation it has are that the remaining spikes on its lower half have elongated, which triples not only as a means of keeping the dinotuga from overheating in the obsidian forest or the sun beating down on the scrublands, but also putting more weight on the rear, which helps further maintains its bipedal stance. The dinotuga has also evolved into a heterotherm that basks and uses its muscle movement to help with its body temperature; while it does need to eat more than the ancestral flutuga, the dinotuga can go into torpor when it gets too cold or when food is less available. Because it does not have a steady supply of water to lay its eggs in, the dinotuga's eggs have become encased in a leathery shell that helps retain water and protect the developing young from the outside world. Not only have its eggs changed, but the dinotuga's reproductive rituals have advanced to a degree as well. While male dinotugas will still butt-fence to some degree, they also include bouts of wrestling into their fighting. This wrestling is specifically wherein the males will stand up on two legs and use their front limbs to push against each other until one of them falls to the ground. The loser is driven out, while the winner mates with the desired female. After mating, the female will dig a pit in the dirt and lay her eggs in it then leave the male to raise the eggs. Similar to Terran snakes, the eggs will be slightly wet and stick together into a clump of eggs as they dry. Next, the male uses its mouth and front limbs to gather plenty of leaf litter, grasses, sticks, and mulch that it uses to form a large mound that keeps the eggs warm in order to allow them to develop safely. The male maintains vigilance over this mound by chasing off potential predators that get too close to the mound and changing the amount of litter to keep a stable temperature to ensure that reduces the likelihood of losing any eggs in the clutch. The young hatchlings are already well-developed, resembling their parents, except with an egg-tooth that helps them hatch and a set of stubbier spines that will grow with time. Once these hatchlings burrow out of the mound with a little help from the father, the father stops guarding them as dinotugas have no parental instincts to care for their young beyond hatching. Fortunately, the young are super-precocial, meaning they can already hunt and run on their own in a matter of minutes. This makes it easier for the adults to reproduce a lot, which means that dinotugas are a fairly common carpazoan that can provide food to all kinds of other organisms such as argusraptors, slitherworms, shrogs, and flunejaws. Another interesting thing about dinotugas is the fact that they do feed on soriparasites and will even pick them off from larger fauna like the hornfaces and phlocks, which helps rid them of parasites; sometimes these larger fauna will even seek out dinotugas to help pick them off. Ironically, dinotugas will sometimes mooch tamed berry arbourshrooms from darth shroom herders when the opportunity arises. Lastly, in terms of diet, it still feeds 50/50 on fauna and flora, just like its ancestor.