Velocitoon

The velocitoon split from its ancestor. Through convergent evolution, it closely resembles its extinct distant ancestor, the velishroot. Much like the velishroot, it is very fast. Though it still feasts upon the eggs of saucebacks (now identified more by scent than sound), it will eat other eggs as well as egg-eating competitors such as the eggslurping sorite. It has also adopted a taste for fruit, allowing it to avoid too much direct competition with either its direct ancestor or with the neoshrew. It is also able to utilize its very good hearing to locate and gobble up adult teacup saucebacks like they're popcorn, keeping the populations of the rapidly-reproducing tiny saucebacks in check. The velocitoon is also able to break open the shells of eggs, crystal fruit, and rarely even fraboos by holding them in its mouth and chucking them sideways into rocks. It has four toes on each foot.

The velocitoon's coloration allows it to blend in with soil. Vivus populations are often melanistic to match darker soils. Male velocitoons have unusual blue fur on the insides of their ears, which are attractive because they serve as a health indicator and can be used to signal status to other males. Normally, fur cannot be blue because it is a monofilament, but the velocitoon has found a workaround using the arrangement of the hairs themselves. This only works because the hairs are very short, so they remain in the right position to maintain structural color rather than flopping around too much like the longer fur on the rest of the body.

Unlike its ancestor, the velocitoon lives in small groups. It still lives in burrows, often much deeper than those of its ancestor, and when it steals burrows it excavates them further for its own use. It travels far from its burrow to find food, but when confronted by a predator it can almost always sprint straight home. Each social group contains a single dominant male, some number of subordinate males, and several females. The dominant male is generally the strongest and most attractive and gets first choice of females to mate with. Mating occurs every year in late winter. Velocitoon offspring are born as helpless fetal larvae, much like those of terran marsupials, and live exclusively in their mother's pouch suckling milk early in life. They develop enough to leave their mother's pouch in early spring, but in colder parts of their range they nonetheless remain in the burrow or rest in their mother's pouch to avoid being killed by predators or unexpectedly by late-arriving frost. Upon reaching adulthood, about 1 year after birth, most of them disperse to join other social groups.

The velocitoon indirectly caused the local extinction of the shikaaree. This is because the pressure caused by the consumption of their eggs caused shikaarees to experience a considerable dip in their population. The shikaaree was not eaten to extinction, but rather was unable to eat enough to maintain itself after the population dip because, without group tactics, large prey were able to successfully defend themselves against it more and more often until the local populations either starved to death or collapsed from inbreeding depression.