Short-Necked Shrew

The Short-Necked Shrew split from its ancestor and became an omnivore. As having multiple eyes didn’t make having a neck especially advantageous for looking around, its neck is reduced—allowing for some strange new adaptations. It has developed new muscles connecting its head to its shoulders, greatly increasing its strength. This has made its forelegs slightly less useful for walking, so it has become a facultative biped. However, at the same time, this also ties its forelimb and head strength, so it can also use its forelimbs to help it latch onto prey like an extra pair of jaws.

The short-necked shrew has wider hips than its ancestor. This allows it to give birth to more developed young, though nowhere near the level of a placental mammal; it still spends much of its early life helpless inside its mother's pouch. With the extra development time inside its mother, it has more energy to spend on frivolous features, so it has developed a display structure in the form of a mane running down its back. This causes it to echo the appearance of the prehistoric Cantro, which was also a meat-eating bipedal shrew with a mane. This mane can be raised in a threatening display, telling other shrews or potential predators to back off, and its quality can be used as a health indicator when choosing a mate.

Like a terran grizzly bear, the Short-Necked Shrew is an omnivore. Despite having carnivorous ancestors, it instead prefers to eat a myriad of different types of food, faunal and floral alike. It is incredibly strong, and when it does hunt it is capable of taking on relatively large prey. Like its ancestor, it mostly lives inside burrows of its own creation, though due to the changes to its forelimbs making digging somewhat more difficult it may sometimes prefer to steal burrows.