Greater Squelican

A strange seabird with the face of a squid, the charismatic squelican represents yet another venture from land to sea among hothouse animals, and one of the first significant changes in morphology in the scrounger lineage, a group of animals that more often innovates behaviorally to survive instead of adopting great changes to their bodies.

Squelicans are fish-eating marine softbilled birds descended from the shorescrounger, which are native to oceans worldwide in the middle hothouse age, 280 million years PE. They are the result of one population of snowscroungers becoming increasingly aquatic in order to find food following the thawing of Serinaustra, transitioning from shoreline scavenging to actively hunting in the shallows and eventually swimming and diving in pursuit of prey. Many scroungers make use of new foods through behavioral changes, including tool use. To swim faster, though, has required physical changes, and so their feet are now large and lobed, but not webbed. This is due to their recent ancestors having needing dexterity in their toes to help manipulate prey, and though this is no longer a concern, their digits remain free from one another, like the toes of a grebe.

These birds are now entirely marine and can barely walk, with the largest species, the 60 lb greater squelican of the Serinaustran coast, being only able to scoot itself forward on its belly. They haul themselves out of the water only to breed, at which time they incubate a single large eggs beneath themselves on rocky islets free of land predators. The fully-feathered chick can swim within a day of hatching and so the family leaves back to the water nearly immediately, but it will tire quickly and so will spend much of its first few months riding on its parents' backs.

Though they are some of the most derived descendants of the snowscrounger, squelicans remain socially complex and highly intelligent, and cooperate to corral and catch baitfish. Their four facial tentacles are now connected with a skin membrane most of the way down their length, which forms two pouches on either side of their lower jaw in which large scoops of both fish and seawater are gathered. The water is then drained with a sideways tip of the head, filtering through a mesh of interlocking spines at the distal edge of the tentacles while not allowing the fish to escape.

Though both sexes of all squelican species are the same size and both parents raise the single chick, males are usually more ornamented with brightly colored pouches and featherless skin along the face and forehead.