SmorgasVoid 🐢🦕🦖🐉

Leqdera

(Leqda Derandual-beaked multi-limbed, multi-armed)

[ Synthos ]

The Vietnamese Black-breasted Leaf turtle!

A lichen huntsman spider (Heteropoda boiei) camouflages against a tree in Selangor, Malaysia

Glossy Daggerwing (Marpesia furcula), family Nymphalidae, Panama

A little bit of worldbuilding for TGU - sunfruit jelly

Sunfruit jelly is a Dœnian snack food commonly imported to the rest of the galaxy made from the sunfruit plant. This plant somewhat resembles a mix between a palm tree and a very large pineapple, but in a lot of ways is more similar to a cactus. Due to the intense heat of Dœn’s parent star (known to Eviors as Aa, known to humans as 90 Leonis), a large, blue, B-type main sequence star, Dœn itself is a hot, dry desert planet. To absorb the most light from Dœn’s sun, the sunfruit plant grows a tall stalk and large leaves with phycocyanin (blue) pigment, and stores all its sugars and water at its base. When this massive, spiny bulb is cut open, small seeds and thick, gooey, orange flesh can be found. The flesh of the fruit is extracted, mashed, and chilled to make sunfruit jelly.

The Mazoa’s Oasis company is just one of many distributors of this delicacy, given its name because the Evior name “Mazoa” means “beautiful oasis” or “beautiful water”. I specifically wanted this to be the company’s name since Azadri’s mother was also named Mazoa, and I’d kind of like to think that she eats this snack to remember her and her brother.

Most of the time, sunfruit jelly is packaged with small spoons made from the blue wood of the tree part of a sunfruit plant, carved so that it’s easy to hold between an Evior’s two middle fingers.

Big flying bugs

An African wild dog (Lycaon pictus) guards her den

These will be nicknamed "Leaf wings" until I go through proper naming schemes with them. They're a medium-sized fishoid from the Schkepian oceans.

Armadiles, surface molrocks in the "stem-rattiles" branch of the cladistic tree, were among the first of the molrock family to attain large predatory niches in the Glaciocene. Dominating as the top predators of Fissor, the armadiles preyed on walkabies, rhinocheirids and rattiles alike, spreading onto the Gestaltian mainland when Fissor at last collided with the landmass.

But while the armadiles were initially successful, they would ultimately be a short-lived early experiment in the molrock evolutionary path. They had, unfortunately, spread out during the Glaciocene: a time of cold periods and unpredictable weather, which proved to be disastrous to the armadiles when their ectothermic metabolisms made them barely functional on cold days. Their smaller cousins, the rattiles, were able to endure by becoming dormant and subsisting on small insects and invertebrates, but the Glaciocene and its clime was no time and place for a large, cold-blooded terrestrial carnivore to thrive.

The last surviving species would be the armored brushscute (Pilosquamomys minimus), a species native to northern Gestaltia in the Late Glaciocene, 115 million years PE. A relatively small species weighing two kilograms, it ended up outliving the other armadiles due to its size, meaning it needed less food to survive and could subsist on smaller prey like furbils and duskmice as well as a variety of invertebrates. Brushscutes would enjoy a fair amount of success, inhabiting habitats such as coastal shores, grasslands and temperate forests, and hibernated through the cold winters, taking advantage of brief summers to replenish their stores of food as well as breed. With their very slow metabolisms, their gestation periods were equally long, roughly almost a year: at the end of a summer the females would mate, go dormant, and pass their entire duration of pregnancy during a state of hibernation, birthing their young when they awaken next year to a dozen or so already-independent young that nursed only very briefly before leaving for good: an earlier remnant of a trend that led to rattiles eventually fully abandoning lactation only to re-evolve numerous branches of male-centered parental care now that this constraint was no longer a problem.

Unfortunately, the last of the armadiles would meet their end at the final cold snap of the Late Glaciocene, bringing about harsh winters even they in their hibernation would not survive. The smaller rattiles, better able to wait out the cold with fewer needs, would make it through the brief period of extreme temperatures and begin to re-diversify in the Temperocene, with some, such as the garitors and the varats, eventually coming to fill the empty niches of large predators that the armadiles had left vacant.