Viridescent Sawjaw

A super-successful yet remarkably little apex predator, the small but fierce viridescent sawjaw knows that teamwork makes the dream work.

These sawjaws are the main predator of social thorngrazers such as helmetheads, targeting the young, sick, and weak. Though individually standing just 2.5 feet high and weighing only around 40 lbs, and so much smaller than their ancestor, the hook-clawed sawjaw, they have managed to eke out a role as a dominant predator in their environment through the use of sheer numbers and highly coordinated groups. Being smaller than the earlier sawjaw, which grew quickly to tackle heavier thorngrazer species than it now eats at the expense of its agility, viridescent sawjaws have more easily been able to fully adapt to their new bipedal bodyplans. Their hind leg is now held out, rather than curled in, becoming a balancing tail to counter their heavy heads and necks. They are now fast, athletic animals capable of high-speed chases and nimble maneuvers, with a general shape resembling that of theropod dinosaurs such as Velociraptor.

Viridescents can be found in packs of up to one hundred animals or even more, with complex social relationships between individuals but only weakly-defined dominance hierarchies. Sawjaws are highly notable for lacking the traditional dominant breeding pair-based reproductive strategy common to pack animals such as earth wolves. All adults in a pack have a primary mate and will bear young, which are born singly, and the entire pack cooperatively protects and feeds all of the young, for the benefit of the group. Such large social groups provide ample protection against even the largest predators of the soglands, which will not target one individual and risk the retaliation of the swarm. Likewise, cohesive hunting parties allow these animals to take down prey ten times their size and even larger. Victims, usually already in poor condition and rejected by their herds, are overwhelmed as the hunters jump upon their backs, holding on with their claws and attacking the head and neck with their slashing teeth. Large packs will need to kill two to three adult thorngrazers daily to sustain themselves on around five pounds of meat per adult animal per day. Their diet is specialized to very little except for this type of prey partly due to how unlimited it is in the environment, meaning experimenting with other food isn’t necessary, but also due to the phenomenon of food imprinting in which sawjaw pups only recognize what they are fed during a window of a few months early in life as food throughout the rest of their lives. Hunting is not instinctive in sawjaws but is entirely learned and taught by adults, with the result of these two factors being that viridescent sawjaws not only don’t hunt other prey, such as trunkos, but do not even consider them edible. Such birds are intelligent enough to realize this, and so occurs another phenomenon which though not wholly unknown in Serina’s history remains incredibly unique among non-sophont animals: predator and prey mutualism.

Trunkos, especially wumpo and snoot species, will seek out sawjaw groups to graze among for protection from their own predators. Pro-social interspecies interactions are well-documented between this sawjaw species and many conventionally prey-type animals, particularly between juveniles, which may groom one another, play together, and develop social bonds. Both predator and prey benefit, for they have different senses that balance each other to keep watch for mutual enemies - other predator species to which sawjaws are competitors and trunkos are potential meals. Trunkos have acute vision, while sawjaws have superior hearing and a powerful sense of smell to detect traces of blood that means injured prey. By combining them, both species gain a more sensitive view of their environments.

The viridescent sawjaw’s most striking physical feature is its coloration - it is a vibrant, at times almost neon, shade of green with dark around its eyes and variable black spotting that breaks up its outline. Both skin and fur take on this unusual hue due to the presence of a green liver pigment, biliverdin, within their hair and skin. This pigment occurs in other tribbetheres too, most notably in some extinct circuagodonts. It provided them cover in forest, and aids sawjaws in hiding in the grassy green landscape of the hothouse age as they sneak up on prey with acute color vision, against whom more neutral brown tones would likely not suffice.