Four-horned Petratel

Fierce and formidable, four-horned petratel, with its bone-crushing beak and remarkable resistance to injuries, is an animal best not messed with.

The skuorcs, a group of quadruped metamorph birds descended from ornimorphs, now live worldwide. They combine a strange set of very derived attributes, acquired over hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary change from a flying biped bird, with a primitive appearance harking back to a reptile or early mammal. Skuorcs are generally generalists and omnivores, favoring meat, and are dim-witted in comparison to most other bird groups and generally solitary, but they find success in being able to reproduce quickly due to their precocial and independent young, eat a wide variety of food, and dominate competitors with aggression. 

Petratels are a genus of relatively primitive skuorcs that live across Serinarcta. They have very large beaks and strong jaws which can break bone, which  combined with their long, featherless snouts make them good scavengers when the opportunity arises. An open septum in their nose, like that of sawjaws, gives them a good sense of smell over long distances to track carrion. Most of their food is caught alive, however, consisting of quite literally any animal they can catch. Four-horned petratels, named for two bony spurs that protect their eyes during confrontations and two large tufts of feathers along their necks that make them look larger to rivals, live on the upland plain and arctic plateau. Here they are primarily predators of burrowing molodonts, using their huge, wicked bill like an excavator to dig out their tunnels and kill them while keeping their jaws at a safe distance from their own faces.

These strange quadruped birds are territorial and savagely intolerant of their own sex. Male territories are large and encompass as many as six female territories, however, and the males will fight to the death to claim land with access to the most potential mates (females, for their part, mostly merely avoid each other.) Fighting petratels stand on their hind legs and wrestle, smacking their large spiked heads into each other and seeking to knock over their opponent and then, if it doesn't run away immediately, to tear out its throat. Both sexes use their ferocity to unnerve potential predators and food competitors, putting on a display of might that is not matched relative to their fairly small size. If caught by a predator a petrate's skin, particularly along the neck, is loose and easily detached, letting it turn and clamp its jaws on its enemy's face with sufficient force to break a jaw, usually causing its attacker to drop it and letting it escape - or turn the tables and kill and eat its attacker. Though the large wounds left behind by losing its own skin look bad and bleed significantly at first, petratels have evolved a remarkable healing ability to endure frequent large wounds, for they face injury frequently. Their blood clots in minutes, and in as little as a day a large, dark scab covers the open tissue to keep out bacteria. In a week to ten days the skin will have repaired itself without scarring, and feathers will have returned in under a month, leaving the cantankerous creature ready to fight another day.