Flutterboks and Trunksnouts

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A drama unfolds on the lush temperate highlands of a mountain range in equatorial Wahlteria, 65 million years PE: two strange, colorful creatures engage in a race for survival as a predator viva pursues a vegetarian relative. Both males, and more colorful than the females of their respective species, both animals are adapted to endurance running with lean figures and very long legs, making this a race whose outcome is very much up to chance.

The prey animal is a member of a primitive lineage of serilopes known as flutterboks, highly dimorphic herbivores with colorful, long-plumed males and dull colored females whose wings and tails are short and stumpy, in sharp contrast to the long colored feathers that adorn their mates' bodies. The dimorphism is due to the fact that the males are highly polygamous, competing with their colorful plumage and elaborate dances to breed as many hens as possible. The flutterbok is mainly a low-level browser, feeding on tall grasses, sunflower trees, and dandelion shrubs, with well-developed chewing abilities and a tiny reduced bill with spacious cheeks to accommodate this.

The predator is also a serilope, albeit one which has evolved into a dramatically different niche. The third lineage of carnivores to evolve in the vivas, trunksnouts, despite their funny appearance, are a group of cunning and almost completely predatory animals. Unlike the primitive banshees with their long open jaws, this very derived group diverged after the evolution of cheeks in their herbivore ancestors, and in addition males sport a large inflatable trunk on their snouts which is used in their own courtship displays and to amplify their calls. The tongue jaw is well-developed and contains the most specialized keratin teeth of any viva; most notable are two pairs of pseudo-carnassials on each side of the tongue and the upper jaw which work together in a shearing motion particularly effective at chewing meat. This particular species, the sabertooth trunksnout, does not actually utilize its "sabers" to hunt at all; rather, they're weapons for intraspecific fights against other males and, like the trunk and bony ossicones on the head, are absent in the female sex.

Trunksnouts are often social, hunting cooperatively with a mate or a small pack, in which case they may operate as a relay to run prey animals to exhaustion. Prey is disabled with a crushing bite to the windpipe which is particularly damaging due to a combination of a sharply hooked bill and the jagged "teeth" that line the jaws, but a group will start eating as soon as it stops struggling, whether or not the victim is actually dead. Though they can and do hunt other large flightless birds, a substantial part of the diet still comes from small animals and carrion. Trunksnouts are opportunistic, and though their digestive system is very short and no longer suited to eat grass, they will also still eat certain seeds and fruit whenever they come across it.

Carnivory in the trunknout first evolved at the end of the Tempuscenic, 40 to 45 million years PE, by which time the first recognizable cheeked serilopes had just diverged. Judging from their jaw morphology, their earliest ancestors likely fed on aquatic vegetation, gradually including aquatic animals in their diets before moving to carrion and living terrestrial prey in a very rapid progression of under ten million years. Upon evolving the shearing "teeth" which make them especially effective predators - which have their basis in sharply cusped structures likely used to crush the shells of crayfish and freshwater invertebrates - their group has since been evolving and diversifying at an exceptionally rapid rate and spreading both northwards and southwards and shows a high degree of evolutionary potential.