Canitheres (dogbeasts)

Canitheres

Canitheres, or dogbeasts, are a family of cursorial pursuit predator tribbetheres. They have been the most successful and prominent group of large predators on Serina through the early and middle Pangeacene and arose early after the Thermocene-Pangeacene boundary into recognizable forms in less than ten million years, now being found across the supercontinent from the southern interior desert to the tropical jungles and the temperate forests to the north. Canitheres have heterodont dentition, including fang teeth used to subdue prey and slicing cheek teeth to chew flesh before swallowing, a notable difference from earlier ancestors which swallowed all of their food whole. Their jaws are strong, able to grip large animals and pull them to the ground. The legs are highly elongated and digitigrade and weight is born on only four toes on the forelegs, with the outer three toes reduced to vestigial dewclaws, improving their speed. Canitheres are cursorial and pursue their prey to exhaustion. Though most are terrestrial, one group of canitheres has become aquatic and seal-like, colonizing the seas.

above: A dogbeast pursues a precocial young serezelle which it has separated from its herd. The predators' flexible spine, which moves in an up and down arc, works like a spring, collecting energy as it contracts its legs and releasing it as it extends, making for the most efficient running gait. The single hind limb gives the dogbeast an edge in maneuvering over its quadrupedal prey, allowing it to make tight corners and gain the upper hand in pursuit.

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Canitheres are furry and warm-blooded, like all tribbetheres. Their brains are relatively large, though proportionally less so than most equivalent Earth carnivorans. Most species are fundamentally solitary but will tolerate each other in the presence of abundant food. Canitheres originally evolved to prey on small, quick-running terrestrial birds, especially the quadrupedal unguligrade changelings, but with the gradual displacement of these forms by more competitive molodonts, the canitheres have begun to feed as well upon their distant relatives, pushing some of them to develop their own convergent digitigrade forms just as well-adapted to flee the predators as the hunters are to catch them in yet another evolutionary arms race.

Canithere offspring are born in an underdeveloped and dependent state, reliant on their parents for many months before able to hunt on their own. Females or mated pairs usually dig out dens, though will take advantage of natural caves or hollows, in which to rear their young, which are fed with regurgitated remains of the adults' meals. The cubs are born blind and more or less deaf, but by four weeks of age are well-enough developed to begin leaving the nest for short periods. Though they do tend to resemble the puppies or cubs of Earth predators, with big ears, large expressive eyes, oversized paws and a general infant clumsiness, they are noticeably less playful. While baby cats and dogs spend their days wrestling and chasing their littermates in games which hone skills they will need as adults to hunt, young canitheres seem to rely far more on innate instinctive abilities to hunt and are able to kill prey successfully even without practice in the form of play with others of their kind as soon as they are a few months old. Though they instinctively pursue small insects or animals from a very young age, they do not play to a great deal with one another and most sibling-to-sibling interaction is aggressive and competitive.

Though primarily solitary, some canitheres will cooperate to mob prey too large to tackle on their own. This is a crude, uncoordinated effort, but the animals will usually share the spoils with minimal aggression.