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Description
above: the snuffalo (Rostrambulus gigas, "giant beak-walker"), a huge softbilled bird weighing up to nine hundred pounds which walks using its huge bill as an additional weight-bearing limb.

40 Million Years PE:

The Kyran Islands are now a very different place than we left them before. Grassland has come to dominate this once forested island chain, with jungles largely restricted to steep slopes and low ravines. Yet the climate is not much different than it was back then and annual rainfall is still high - it is not drought that has reduced the extent of woodland, but deforestation. The Kyrans are now home to huge herds of herbivores, and they have single-handedly transformed this landscape over millions of years simply by grazing.

They are hulking, low-slung animals appearing from above almost as large as cattle, but in fact much shorter from the side - almost comically so. Shaggy feather coats cloak them and largely obscure their underlying forms, making them appear all the more bewildering. Their legs are small but sturdy, just barely lifting their bodies off the ground, and their heads proportionally massive with huge, downward-pointed beaks, fleshy along much of the length of the top jaw but ending in a gigantic, hard crushing implement. They have no forearms at all to speak of, and they walk by pushing their bulking bodies ahead with their tiny little legs, raising the great beak, and slamming it down ahead of them into the earth, using the great neck muscles powering it to pull the rest of themselves up behind and so advance another meter. These are the snuffalo, the thousand-pound, beak-walking descendants of the canary-kiwi. And it is due to them that the islands have all but lost their forests.

The snuffalo is a remarkable animal. An entirely herbivorous descendant of an insectivore, it took advantage of an evolutionary vacuum left after the extinction of the chubbirds to grow large and return to the daylit world but has nonetheless retained many of the adaptations it gained in its past life. Its eyes remain small; it is color blind and very near-sighted, still relying little on sight to survive. It still finds its way around through touch, feeling vibrations in the earth with its sensitive bill and navigating around its world with huge half-inch thick whisker plumes that sprout in a radial fashion around its bill. For safety it seeks the comfort of others, living in great and gregarious herds limited only by the quantity of food they can find - and they find it in great abundance. The snuffalo travel the islands in their herds, moving almost shoulder to shoulder, slowly but steadily cutting down everything in their wake. To feed the lumbering creatures rest forward on their upper beaks, which are longer and stronger than their lower, while the lower jaw can then open and close freely, pulling mouthfuls of vegetation and then cutting them against a sharp, clipper-like edge of the upper bill. The tongue is very long and mobile, having once adapted to aid the animals' ancestors in pulling insects out of their burrows, and the snuffalo utilizes this now to roll beakfuls of cut hay up and pull them back into the throat to be swallowed. When all the vegetation it can reach while so situated like this, the snuffalo lifts its great bill and takes another step to repeat the process. In feeding in this way, the herds of snuffalo continuously cut down the seedlings of trees, which are not so adapted to quickly recover and grow back from mechanical damage as the grass, and so prevent the forest trees from repopulating their kinds except upon the most angled and inaccessible slopes that the snuffalo, clumsy and poorly balanced, cannot cross. The snuffalo feeds entirely within one meter of the soil, and does not bother adult woody vegetation, yet over so many millions of years of such pressure against their seedlings the ancient adult trees die off, leaving fewer and fewer descendants and accelerating the spread of grassland upon the islands. The snuffalo is thus an ecosystem engineer, actively removing plants that it does not feed on and encouraging the growth of its preferred food, albeit unintentionally.

More content for early Serina made possible by my supporters. Read more on the Sites Page: sites.google.com/site/worldofs…

Description
above: the snuffalo (Rostrambulus gigas, "giant beak-walker"), a huge softbilled bird weighing up to nine hundred pounds which walks using its huge bill as an additional weight-bearing limb.

40 Million Years PE:

The Kyran Islands are now a very different place than we left them before. Grassland has come to dominate this once forested island chain, with jungles largely restricted to steep slopes and low ravines. Yet the climate is not much different than it was back then and annual rainfall is still high - it is not drought that has reduced the extent of woodland, but deforestation. The Kyrans are now home to huge herds of herbivores, and they have single-handedly transformed this landscape over millions of years simply by grazing.

They are hulking, low-slung animals appearing from above almost as large as cattle, but in fact much shorter from the side - almost comically so. Shaggy feather coats cloak them and largely obscure their underlying forms, making them appear all the more bewildering. Their legs are small but sturdy, just barely lifting their bodies off the ground, and their heads proportionally massive with huge, downward-pointed beaks, fleshy along much of the length of the top jaw but ending in a gigantic, hard crushing implement. They have no forearms at all to speak of, and they walk by pushing their bulking bodies ahead with their tiny little legs, raising the great beak, and slamming it down ahead of them into the earth, using the great neck muscles powering it to pull the rest of themselves up behind and so advance another meter. These are the snuffalo, the thousand-pound, beak-walking descendants of the canary-kiwi. And it is due to them that the islands have all but lost their forests.

The snuffalo is a remarkable animal. An entirely herbivorous descendant of an insectivore, it took advantage of an evolutionary vacuum left after the extinction of the chubbirds to grow large and return to the daylit world but has nonetheless retained many of the adaptations it gained in its past life. Its eyes remain small; it is color blind and very near-sighted, still relying little on sight to survive. It still finds its way around through touch, feeling vibrations in the earth with its sensitive bill and navigating around its world with huge half-inch thick whisker plumes that sprout in a radial fashion around its bill. For safety it seeks the comfort of others, living in great and gregarious herds limited only by the quantity of food they can find - and they find it in great abundance. The snuffalo travel the islands in their herds, moving almost shoulder to shoulder, slowly but steadily cutting down everything in their wake. To feed the lumbering creatures rest forward on their upper beaks, which are longer and stronger than their lower, while the lower jaw can then open and close freely, pulling mouthfuls of vegetation and then cutting them against a sharp, clipper-like edge of the upper bill. The tongue is very long and mobile, having once adapted to aid the animals' ancestors in pulling insects out of their burrows, and the snuffalo utilizes this now to roll beakfuls of cut hay up and pull them back into the throat to be swallowed. When all the vegetation it can reach while so situated like this, the snuffalo lifts its great bill and takes another step to repeat the process. In feeding in this way, the herds of snuffalo continuously cut down the seedlings of trees, which are not so adapted to quickly recover and grow back from mechanical damage as the grass, and so prevent the forest trees from repopulating their kinds except upon the most angled and inaccessible slopes that the snuffalo, clumsy and poorly balanced, cannot cross. The snuffalo feeds entirely within one meter of the soil, and does not bother adult woody vegetation, yet over so many millions of years of such pressure against their seedlings the ancient adult trees die off, leaving fewer and fewer descendants and accelerating the spread of grassland upon the islands. The snuffalo is thus an ecosystem engineer, actively removing plants that it does not feed on and encouraging the growth of its preferred food, albeit unintentionally.

More content for early Serina made possible by my supporters. Read more on the Sites Page: sites.google.com/site/worldofs…