Misc. Spec Evo: Five Deaths Fauna

For ’ contest thing.

Name: Nublar armadillo (Megadasypus nublarensis)

Description: A fairly large armadillo most closely resembling the seven-banded armadillo of mainland South America, this armored omnivore has done surprisingly well with the presence of Ingen’s prehistoric menagerie. Unlike their generally small and inoffensive cousins, these are quite big, stocky animals, averaging up to a meter and a half long, with the largest collected specimen weighing in at over 54 lbs. They're built rather like badgers, with a robust body and head and large stocky front limbs equipped with large claws suited for burrowing, and their teeth are quite a bit larger and sharper than the average armadillo, almost like tiny shark teeth; said dentition is put to use shredding up tubers and fungi, cracking birds’ eggs, and tearing apart lizards, birds, small mammals, and in recent years, baby dinosaurs. Coloration is generally similar to a typical armadillo, but with considerably more brown and grey mottling on the shell, almost like a baby tapir in some respects.

Lifestyle: As noted earlier, Nublar armadillos are omnivores, filling the ecological niche of the badger after they rafted to the island in the early Pliocene. They tend to spend the day sleeping in sizable burrows that they dig out for themselves, emerging by night to forage. Eating anything from insects to fallen fruit to lizards and small mammals, they have done very well for themselves even after Ingen’s dinosaurs took over the island; the armadillos’ armor keeps them safe from the jaws and claws of virtually all of the theropods that are small enough to consider it a meal, and their sharp teeth and large claws can leave some very nasty wounds on predators that don’t get the hint. They’ve actually been observed hunting and devouring smaller dinosaurs like Compsognathus, immature Microceratus, and eve hatchling dinosaurs and pterosaurs, particularly baby ornithopods. The hurricane of 1993 didn’t affect them very much due to their ability to simply hunker down and wait out the bad weather, although several specimens did manage to get washed ashore onto the mainland, where they’ve established a fairly sizable breeding population.

Name: Speckled caiman (Caiman nublarensis)

Description: A close relative to the spectacled caiman of the mainland, these crocodilians once sat comfortably at or near the top of Nublar’s aquatic food chain, only disputed by the local crocodiles and a now-extinct giant otter cousin growing to the size of an alligator, but the arrival of Ingen’s dinosaurs has greatly lowered their place in the food web. They’re considerably larger than their cousins at roughly 8-9 feet long, with the biggest specimens rivaling American alligators in size at over 11 feet long; unlike most alligatoroids, they don’t have much in the way of sexual dimorphism. Another marked difference between the speckled caiman and their mainland cousins rests in the jaws, which are proportionally thicker and more robust jaws than those of the spectacled; these jaws are well-suited for tackling big prey items such as tufted deer and wild pigs, a major component of the animals’ diet. The animal’s common name comes from the thousands of black or brown-black speckles that adorn its normally muddy-green scales; these spots aid in helping the animal blend into its environment.

Lifestyle: Speckled caimans were once the lords of the waterways of Isla Nublar, preying upon the large mammals of the island in imitation of the Nile crocodiles of Africa, but the arrival of cloned dinosaurs has been both a blessing and a curse for them. On the one hand, they now have access to nearly twice as many prey animals than they had before, even before the arrival of the first humans on Nublar and the subsequent extinction of most of the megafauna; Microceratus, Compsognathus, Dryosaurus, and the young of various hadrosaurs and ceratopsians, all there for the taking. On the other hand, though, the caimans now suddenly had to share their rivers with a variety of animals fully capable of dining on them: Suchomimus, Spinosaurus, and Baryonyx can and will drag speckled caimans from the water to devour them, and raptors often pounce upon them as they’re sunbathing. To make matters worse, there’s now a fair amount of competition in the waterways, from Parasuchus to the enormous Deinosuchus - needless to say, the speckled caiman is far from the apex predator that it once was. Just as capable in saltwater as they are in freshwater, these crocodilians have been observed swimming through the stretch of ocean in between Sorna and Nublar, and a handful of them were washed onto the mainland by the 1993 hurricane and subsequently interbred with local populations of spectacled caimans.

Name: Great Sorna peccary (Sornagonus grandis)

Description: Ironically, Sorna and Nublar were home to living fossils even before Ingen arrived; one of the biggest examples of these is the great Sorna peccary, an enormous wild pig closely related to the modern-day Chacoan peccary and a reported descendant of the now-extinct and very widespread peccary Platygonus. Weighing in at over 500 lbs. in the biggest individuals and measuring a meter and a half tall at the shoulder, they rival the giant forest hog of Africa for the title of the largest wild pig species on the planet; with a massively built body that calls to mind a miniature bison in its general shape, thick sturdy legs, and a large vaguely wedge-shaped head equipped with tusks longer than a grown man’s middle finger. The animals are a dull muddy brown in coloration with a black ‘collar’ around the shoulders and the back of the neck that connects to a similarly-colored line that runs down the length of the spine.

Lifestyle: Great Sorna peccaries live similarly to the peccaries of the mainland; they’re generalists, moving in sounders of up to two dozen animals as they travel through the woodlands and plains of Sorna, rooting around for anything even remotely edible. Oddly enough, they tend to travel in a V-shape like migrating geese, with the biggest and oldest animal taking the lead to face any predators head-on. Their numbers were significantly impacted by the arrival of human colonists - feral pigs outcompeted them, and people frequently hunted them. However, the arrival of dinosaurs to the island proved to be a blessing in disguise for the huge hogs; most carnivores greatly prefer to take the less-armed and softer-skinned wild pigs, leaving the great Sorna peccary with less competition, and the big suds are fully capable of feeding upon smaller dinosaurs. Although some carnivores do hunt them from time to time, these big pigs aren’t likely to be going anywhere anytime soon. 

Name: Uchaka (Uchaka nublarensis/sornaensis)

Description: Given Nublar and Sorna’s proximity to the mainland, it was only a matter of time before a few monkey species arrived upon their shores; several subspecies of capuchins and squirrel monkeys exist upon the islands, but the one that’s most frequently encountered, or rather heard, is the uchaka, a very big relative of the howler monkeys found on the mainland that is named for its distinctive call, “OO-CHA-KA!” Growing to roughly the size of a Barbary ape, these primates are quite heavily built, bringing the mainland ukari to mind with their bulky bodies and thickly muscled limbs; the prehensile tail is similarly thick with muscle mass, a necessity in order to support its great weight. Fossil evidence suggests that there were once even larger monkeys on both islands, rivaling orangutans in weight, but they disappeared quickly after the arrival of humans. Males are up to 25% larger than females and sport a large throat pouch colored the purplish-blue of a fresh bruise in the Nublar subspecies and bright blue in the Sorna subspecies; the fur of the males is a rich orangey-brown, while females are cinnamon brown.

Lifestyle: With their arboreal habits, uchaka weren’t very badly effected by the introduction of big dinosaurs into their ecosystem; they were out of the reach of raptors and could hide in the thicker jungle canopy to evade predatory pterosaurs. Only when they venture onto the ground to forage occasionally are they at risk; while they’re quite fast on solid ground and can deliver a nasty bite, they can’t hold a candle to the weaponry of various theropod dinosaurs. As such, these large monkeys have greatly changed their behaviors in the past few decades; the Sorna variant spends virtually all of its time in the trees now, not coming down even to drink in a similar fashion to an orangutan, while the Nublar population prefers particularly dense areas of forest where predators like raptors can’t move around as effectively. A sizable population also exists in zoos around the world, with the first institution to hold them being the London Zoo in the 1950s.

Name: Nublar cloud rat (Paramegalomys nublarensis)

Description: Unrelated to the giant cloud rat of the Philippines, the Nublar cloud rat is a large ground-dwelling rodent roughly the size of a muskrat that sports thundercloud-grey fur with twinges of silver down the back, stocky limbs, and a short but thick tail that stores excess nutrients like in certain lizards. The eyes are fairly large, the ears are reduced, and the limbs are quite stocky and muscular with sizable claws on the tips of the fingers to burrow through soil and soft earth.

Lifestyle: Before the arrival of humans, the Nublar cloud rat was actually quite widespread across the island, with subfossil remains having been excavated from riverbanks, areas of thick jungle, and open plains; their generalist diet allowed them to comfortably live on everything from roots and seeds to insects and fungi to eggs and small animals. When humans arrived, however, the huge rats were hunted extensively, wiping them out of much of their native range save for the forests at higher altitudes. Still, they managed to keep up fairly decent populations here, feeding on pretty much anything they could find as they always had… and then the dinosaurs came.

Today, the Nublar cloud rat is critically endangered; only a few dozen animals are believed to exist in the wild, but it may be even less than that. Good survivors as they were, the rats simply had no defense against predation and competition on this scale. Compies could bring down a younger animal easily alone and a fair-sized adult when in small groups, while a raptor could eat one in just two or three bites; Microceratus and smaller ornithopods could beat the rat at its own game of generalist, their cropping beaks and grinding teeth proving just as effective as the rodents’ dentition, and their tendency to move in groups severely limited the amount of food left for the rats. Dilophosaurus, however, proved to be the rat’s most prevalent predator; their taste for smaller prey and their relatively small body size meant that the native rodent was the perfect meal for them. A fair number exist in zoos across the globe, but with the coming eruption of Mt. Sibo, they may become extinct in the wild very soon… 

Name: Muertes collared agouti (Dasyprocta muertensis ssp.)

Description: Common all across Central and South America, the Muertes collared agouti isn’t a single species, but rather five different subspecies for each the Five Deaths, although the type species was found on Nublar. Each one varies slightly in their coloration and dentition; as a general rule, though, all five subspecies are quite a bit larger than the average agouti, ranging from the Isla Nublar subspecies (Dasyprocta muertensis nublarensis) at 20% bigger than the mainland species to the Isla Matanceros subspecies (Dasyprocta muertensis matanceros) at nearly 75% larger. Furthermore, every species sports a thin ‘collar’ of lighter fur going around the back and shoulders.

Lifestyle: Lifestyle is virtually identical to the mainland varieties of agouti, save that the animals dig for roots, tubers, and buried fungi to supplement their diets and excavate small burrows for themselves and for rearing their young. They’re also a good deal more social, moving in fairly large groups sort of like mainland capybaras; before the dinosaurs arrived, they were one of Los Cincos Muertes’ most common herbivores.

With the advent of Ingen, however, the Muertes collared agouti is in serious trouble. Small herbivorous dinosaurs can outbreed it and get to vegetation far more efficiently than the rodents, and the agoutis’ small size makes them perfect prey for everything from raptors to compies to the young of larger theropods. They’re currently classified as Vulnerable one the IUCN Red List, and with the eruption of Mt. Sibo, their situation may get even worse.

Name: Sorna giant iguana (Megaloiguana maximus)

Description: One of the biggest lizards on the planet, the Sorna giant iguana is/was an utterly enormous lizard measuring 8-9 feet long and weighing in at over 150 lbs., although subfossil remains show evidence of utterly gargantuan 15-foot specimens weighing in at over 330 lbs. Much stockier and more heavily built than even the Komodo dragon, they sport large blocky skulls with powerful jaws for handling tough vegetation, thick sturdy limbs with fearsome curved claws on the tips of the fingers and toes, and a very long, muscular tail that can break the leg of a horse if swung with enough power behind it. Coloration is rather drab, a deep mossy green with brown mottling and a paler underbelly, while the dewlap is tinged with reddish-brown in the males. Large durable herbivores, their ample amounts of digestive piping allow them to handle even the toughest plant life as they feast. Eggs are laid in excavated nests in clutches of up to one and a half dozen, and uniquely for iguanas, are actually guarded by the parents to protect against the predations of the islands’ native predators.

Lifestyle: The story of the Sorna giant iguana is a rather bizarre one; technically speaking, it went extinct around the same time as the dodo bird due to rats, dogs, and domestic cats destroying their nests and animals like goats and cattle devouring the vegetation they relied upon and churning up the earth to prevent more from growing. However, that was soon to change; as part of a gesture of goodwill, Jurassic World used collected genetic material from museum specimens to revive the massive iguanas, creating a small breeding population that was put on display both at the park proper and distributed to various zoos across the globe, with several dozen being reintroduced onto Sorna. Surprisingly, the huge lizards have done rather well for themselves; compies and other small theropods do go after the iguanas’ eggs, and midsized theropods like raptors can and will feed upon them, but they also keep the populations of would-be nest thieves at much more manageable levels, and the lizard’s rather tough, unpleasant-tasting flesh means that they’re not a common prey animal. Meanwhile, herbivorous dinosaurs like sauropods leave plenty of fallen plant life for the lizards to feed upon as they plow through the brush, while the dung they leave behind allows plant life to bounce back practically faster than the dinosaurs can keep it down. Some of the iguanas have even entered a symbiotic relationship with large theropods like Tyrannosaurus, laying their eggs in the massive meat-eaters’ nests and taking advantage of the enormous predators’ protectiveness over their young to defend their own nests.

Name: Nublar beef cattle (Bos tauros ingenensis?)

Description: Feral cattle have been a mainstay of Isla Nublar for centuries, escaping from the ranches of colonists in the 1800s and forming a sizable population in the wilderness soon after. Like feral ungulates in Australia, they caused their fair share of damage to the local ecosystem, outcompeting several native grazers for food and tearing up the grasslands. However, unlike those ecosystems, a new factor would soon arise; the arrival of Ingen. After Jurassic Park’s destruction, not one but dozens of species were now suddenly both hunting the cattle and actively competing with them for food, from competing herds of hadrosaurs and ceratopsians to predatory raptors and tyrannosaurs. However, Ingen did not leave just dinosaurs behind; they also abandoned several breeds of genetically-modified cattle and goats bred to serve as meat animals for their dinosaurs, both on Nublar and on Sorna, with both creatures rapidly integrating themselves into the gene pool of the islands’ already-existing populations of feral livestock. Due to their greater size and strength, these breeds of cattle were much more likely to survive dinosaur attacks than their feral kin and had a much bigger advantage in fighting over mates; natural selection soon worked its magic, and in just a few years virtually all of the feral cattle and goats on the two islands carry the genes from Ingen’s ‘mega-livestock’. Of the two, the cattle have been the most successful by far, their greater size and strength keeping them safe from the majority of the islands’ smaller dinosaurian predators; goats, meanwhile, are bite-sized snacks for the bigger carnivores, and as such are quite rare nowadays.

In terms of appearance, the cattle of Nublar are massive, weighing over 3,500 lbs. and built like tanks; they display enormous muscles akin to the Belgian Blue breed and enormous thick horns like those of an aurochs with the length of a Texas longhorn’s horns; the skeleton is extremely dense, with thick, sturdy bones and a fused mass of bone upon the head where the horns meet that extends over much of the cranium; this is due to genetic material from gaur and Cape buffalo being spliced in to provide as much meat as possible for the dinosaurs, as well as to provide bones that theropods could gnaw on to break up plaque building up. However, this also means that the animals are incredibly tough, able to shrug off the teeth and claws of most smaller dinosaurs and even withstand small firearms like the African buffalo that they owe pieces of their genetic code to. In terms of coloration, they’re mostly a dull chocolate brown, often with white markings around the throat and the underside.

Lifestyle: Moving in small herds of up to half a dozen animals, these mega-sized bovines tend to keep to themselves, living as low browsers along the edges of woodlands and pushing their way through the thick undergrowth of the jungles to feed upon bushes, low-growing leaves, and anything else that they can find. They’re known to move alongside herds of ceratopsians and hadrosaurs as well, sticking with the bigger creatures for added protection; despite their size and strength, the massive cattle aren’t safe. While their massive horns can easily dispatch raptors in ones or twos, but packs of them can easily dispatch the bovines, while larger theropods like carnosaurs and tyrannosaurs can easily devour them. And of course, the upcoming eruption of a certain volcano provides extra stress…

Name: Aguapaca (Cuniculus amphibius)

Description: Essentially Nublar and Sorna’s answer to the muskrat, the aguapaca is a big, stocky species of paca that’s roughly the same size of its mainland cousins, but is nearly 15% heavier. Its fur is sleek and waterproof, colored a rich teak brown, and its eyes and nostrils are set a bit higher up on the head. Its body is also quite a bit more ponderous, with a deeper chest and stomach and stockier limbs; the toes are wide-splayed and elongated to match, with webbing connecting them.

Lifestyle: Found along the rivers and lakes of Nublar and Sorna, the aquapaca is an amphibious creature that frequents the waterways and lakes of the islands, feeding upon low-growing plant life found both close to and within the water itself. They’re mostly solitary and nocturnal, avoiding predators through stealth, but the arrival of Ingen’s dinosaurs has done a number on them; most predatory dinosaurs are active during at least some portion of the night, and they can and will sniff out the pacas easily with their acute senses of smell. They aren’t safe in the water, either, thanks to animals like Baryonyx, Suchomimus, and other semi-aquatic beasts. 

Name: Skipping mara (Dolichotis sornaensis)

Description: Found mostly in the highlands of Sorna, although a more lowlands-dwelling subspecies existed on Nublar before being outcompeted by the various dinosaurs, the skipping mara is essentially the rodent equivalent to the klipspringer of the Ethiopian highlands, a petite mountain-dweller that can easily navigate the mountain slopes where it lives. In terms of appearance, it essentially looks like a rather small, gracile mara with considerably larger and more pronounced claws than those of their mainland cousins, with more widely-splayed toes that can grab hold of any handholds that they can find on the slopes. Their fur is a stony grey in color, with lighter and darker specks scattered throughout in order to blend into the rocks to avoid predators like large hawks.

Lifestyle: For the most part, the skipping mara lives much like its mainland cousins, but its dietary habits are different; it browses upon tough scraggly high-altitude vegetation, grazes upon mosses, and even uses its incisors and a rough barbed tongue to scrape lichen off of rocks. In their rough terrain, simply sprinting away isn’t really an option; as such, the maras escape from predators through agility, bounding and leaping with the sure-footedness of goats. Already adapted for evading predators like large eagles and caracaras (Most of which have since been driven to extinction as a result of human habitat destruction, these agile little rodents have been doing okay for the most part; not many dinosaurs on Sorna are able to keep up with them, and the presence of predatory pterosaurs is similar enough to that of their ancient predators that they can handle the flying reptiles.

Name: Pacagrande (Aquadinomys ocellatus)

Description: Another ‘living fossil’ of the Los Cincos Muertes, the pacagrande is by far the largest rodent of the Five Deaths at roughly a meter tall at the shoulder and weighing in at nearly 160 lbs, actually tying with the capybara for the title of the largest rodent on earth. However, it is not actually related to those mega-rodents; the animal is one of the last dinomyids, a lineage of utterly enormous megafaunal rodents that once ranged across South America but are now represented by only the pacagrande and the pacarana of the mainland. In terms of appearance, it looks a lot like a capybara, but the head is a bit narrower and the limbs are more like a giant rat’s than a capybara’s, but quite thick and stocky in order to support its weight. The body is much more ponderous as well, almost like a hippopotamus’, and the tail is fairly long, able to touch the ground; in terms of coloration, it’s a fawn brown in color, with cream stripes and spots like a young tapir’s intermittently scattered over its body.

Lifestyle: Essentially the rough equivalent to the forest hogs of Africa, pacagrande are foraging herbivores that live either alone or in groups of up to half a dozen animals, feeding upon mosses, grasses, low-growing shrubs and hanging leaves, and underground roots and fungi. Before the arrival of Ingen, their bulk and fearsome teeth were enough to deter most predators, but they’re easy prey for the Five Deaths’ newest arrivals; their size, once a sign that they were too large to hunt, now only means that they’re a sizable meal for even a lone raptor, and young carnosaurs and tyrannosaurs are even worse.

Name: Sorna hissing opossum (Didelphovenator ferox)

Description: One of the last few big marsupial predators on the face of the earth, the Sorna hissing opossum is a big, stocky beast that is roughly the size and weight of a Tasmanian devil, although its long, thick tail adds nearly a foot of extra length to it. The body is quite bulky and stocky, with large claws suitable for digging, but it’s the head that draws the most attention; it looks like it belongs on an animal twice the opossum’s size, with more elongated jaws than a mainland opossum that give its skull an almost thylacine-like appearance and a mouthful of very large, sharp teeth, including a fairly pronounced pair of canines. The body is an ashy grey-black in color with a black ‘bandit mask’ around its eyes and a similarly covered ‘cape’ over the shoulders and down the back, while the paws have white ‘mittens’. In terms of vocalizations, they’re normally pretty quiet animals, usually not making much sound besides a quiet chuffing when content and the usual squeaking and mewling as young animals, but when threatened, they become very, very loud, letting loose with rumbling growls, feral snarling, and the loud, hellish hissing that earns them their common name. Should this fail, the marsupials will bite viciously, able to tear through leather boots without much trouble.

Lifestyle: Solitary, these large opossums are native to the brushlands of Sorna, where the dense forests give way to open grasslands, feeding upon pretty much anything that they can find, from lizards and clutches of eggs to carrion, insects, small mammals, and the young of the various larger animals when they get the chance. With such a flexible diet, they easily adapted to the arrival of the cloned dinosaurs; they will readily prey upon compies and small ornithopods, raid nests to feast upon eggs and hatchlings alike, and scavenge the carrion left behind by bigger predators or even bully smaller predators away from their kills. Needless to say, they’re doing very well for themselves.