Gossarat

The gossarat split from its ancestor. It lives all over the Dingus landmass, where it lives as a small burrowing omnivore reminiscent of some kind of unspecialized mammal. Its living carapace, which like in all binucleid worms is made up of chitinous walled cells rather than solely dead material like an insect’s exoskeleton, is covered by leathery skin rather than a dead chitin layer, similar to the most basal lizardworms. Its skin in particular is so thick and hairy that it largely obscures the exoskeleton underneath. The skin does not extend over its claws, and its segments and joints can still be easily felt through its skin. The thick hairy skin serves to keep it warm at its small size in its relatively cool environment. Fully endothermic, it is able to be active throughout the year, unlike many other lizardworm species; in winter, it mostly scavenges and feeds on dead and dormant flora under the snow.

The gossarat’s many chitinous teeth are serrated similarly to a troodontid’s, and are black and faintly banded from layers of heavy sclerotization, which slows the rate at which they wear down in a pattern which maintains the serration. It now has a pair of primitive tympanic ears, formed from skin stretched between the protrusions of its “skull” which were present in its ancestor. The ears allow it to hear predators and prey alike, increasing its chances of survival.

The gossarat’s respiratory system consists of many tidal lungs analogous to the microlungs of saucebacks. Unlike most living lizardworms, which have small, obscure spiracles where visible carapace meets skin, the gossarat’s spiracles are fairly large and visible. Like all other lizardworms, it inhales and exhales by expanding and contracting its back carapace laterally. Because of the redundancy, its lungs are all fairly small, which allows it to breathe very quickly. This is quite valuable for a small burrowing creature due to low oxygen conditions underground.

The gossarat catches its prey in a similar fashion to other gossalizards--by firing gossamers from the nozzles on either side of the face and reeling it in. Its saliva contains warfarin, which prevents its prey’s blood from clotting so it can’t get far before bleeding out even if it escapes. This also makes its bite dangerous to potential predators, should it turn to defend itself. It also eats various flora, and it can use its gossamers to reel in leaves it could not otherwise reach.

As the gossarat is small and relatively easy prey, it breeds several times a year to keep up its numbers. It is hermaphroditic, so all gossarats can breed with all others. Like many hermaphroditic species on Earth, they scuffle over which one gets to be fertilized, though quite unusually for a hermaphroditic species, it is the stronger of the two that is fertilized rather than the weaker. It takes two weeks to produce a clutch of eggs after fertilization, and the eggs are wrapped in silk, buried underground, and abandoned. After laying, a gossarat is fertile again almost immediately, but it is usually weakened--if it tries to lay another clutch so soon, the energy it has to expend doing so might kill it and thus prevent any further breeding opportunities. But breeding often is necessary to keep numbers high in the face of predation, so it retains the drive to mate. This is why the victor being fertilized was selected for--to be able to breed as much as possible while ensuring that the one that lays the eggs is the one that actually has the energy to do so.