The Clongers

By the late Pangeacene the tribbets have effectively achieved world domination, spanning the globe in seemingly limitless forms of equally varied functions. The tribbetheres in particular get much attention for their active metabolisms and competitiveness with birds, but the tribbets are a more diverse clade that includes a great many other species. Tribtiles, an evolutionary grade between the amphibian-like mudwickets and the mammaliforme tribbetheres that are generally ectothermic and lizard-like, have persisted alongside their more derived relations and are thriving in the currently balmy climate over a large swath of the world that has left the inability of most to warm their own bodies much above ambient temperatures much less of a problem.

The ancestral tribbet was a tripedal animal with one erect hind leg evolved from the tail and two sprawling forearms adapted from pectoral fins. The body was covered in small, smooth scales, the teeth were sharp and conical, adapted to eat mostly insects, and the gill plates had just begun to specialize into ear-pinnae, amplifying sounds into the bones of the inner skull where they were perceived by the brain. They had extensible jaws able to snatch prey ahead of themselves and keen eyesight. The very same ancestor tribbets that gave rise to cirguadodonts and tribbats also gave rise to the varpikes and to another, much more different looking group known as the clongers.

Clongers are either legless tribtiles, or one-legged tribtiles, depending on how you define a leg. The ancestors of them all were burrowers which lost their forearms over millions of years because they served little use in tight spaces; they are now retained as vestigial nubs in just a few of the most basal examples, and so the clongers move snake-like along their belly scales. The hind leg, always sporting large talons, has in all species been adapted into a grasping hand, often used either to secure the highly elongated body while the head grabs prey, or sometimes to catch and restrain prey itself. Most clongers are still burrowers, digging their tunnels backwards with their tail claws, but some have secondarily returned to the sunlit world full-time; the most notable examples like this are the sparrowsnatchers, clongers that have adapted toward arboreality and now use their claws to hang from tree branches in the tropics and ambush birds and other small flying animals. Somewhat ironically the sparrowsnatchers are among the most primitive clongers despite their exceptional lifestyle, and they are the only clade of them that retain the tiny and entirely useless remnants of their front legs, as well as a very small and equally vestigial dorsal fin that was until comparatively recently used as a display structure. No longer of any use underground, it was already lost entirely in all other clongers.

The most derived clongers are still tied to their burrows and entirely terrestrial. The diamond clonger belongs to a subgroup of molodont-hunting specialists that evolved a venomous bite to rapidly dispatch their fast-running prey. Able to slip down the tunnels of these rodent-like tribbetheres and ferret them out of their dens, they strike quickly and wait for their quarry to succumb, then trail them down by scent and swallow them whole. Not particularly fast, the diamond clonger can find itself threatened by a wide variety of carnivores as it moves over land between the burrows of its prey and so has evolved a system to alert other animals of its deadly bite; like a rattlesnake, the clonger can create an audible warning sound, in this case by rapidly clicking together the two central talons in its tail to produce a loud chatter. The palm of the tail-leg is brightly colored as well, and waved around above the animal’s body as a secondary visual warning. Though the diamond clonger relies on its venomous saliva to take down its food, the bite is also deadly even to large predators and very few animals will bother it upon being alerted in this way, giving it a wide berth as it slowly makes its escape.

Some clongers have grown to very large sizes and in turn adapted to feed on megafaunal animals, particularly circuagodonts as well as the larger placental birds. Known as cloas, the biggest among them can grow to ten feet in length and weigh almost three hundred pounds. Very slow-moving, most cloas live in shallow burrows on grasslands and move very little. They wait with their particularly massive talons poised to strike for days and sometimes weeks at a time until a sufficiently large prey animal comes within range. When this happens, the cloa jolts its tail forward, attempting to grab hold of the prey’s head and to squeeze the life out of its windpipe or puncture the jugular vein with its claws. The teeth of the cloas are also formidable and they may also bite the victim if it is particularly large or struggling excessively, but the true specialization of their mouthparts is not in killing, but chewing. The cloas’ teeth are differentiated, with prominent canine-like teeth that serve to hook and pull meat and blade-like molars that shear together, slicing flesh cleanly and so allowing the cloas to break up and process their food before swallowing, letting them kill and eat animals larger than themselves. The largest cloas such as the speckled species have teeth strong enough to crack bones and so leave very little waste for other scavengers. As cloas take their prey underground into their holes to feed and later defecate, and are highly loyal to one den site for almost all of their lives, the land around cloa burrows holds particularly nutrient-rich soil and in turn grow a much healthier and more fertile cluster of vegetation than surrounding grassland. This in turn draws in more prey animals for the cloa to hunt.