#dergen

The venom sack in the neck delivers a paralytic venom either via thru fangs in the lower jaw in a bite, or thru the hollow horn on the nose.  There are heat pits in the front of the face, below the nose, and a forked tongue to smell with. The 2 sets of eyes, which can move independently from each other, provide it with a high accuracy when either biting or stabbing.  The spines on the neck are mostly hollow and made of keratin, and will rattle against each other as a warning noise, along with much hissing.

Not shown in the pic is the tail, which has it’s own venom sack and stinger, and can reach much farther than the head (except for targets in front of it).  Thanks to the dual set of eyes, it can focus on 2 targets at once to strike at with either the head or the tail.  They prefer to swallow prey whole if it’s small enough, however their venom is capable of taking down much larger prey.  In this situation, if the prey is too large to swallow (anything roughly 1.5x bigger than their head), they have large, serrated dew claws to be able to cut the meal down to more manageable portions.  The teeth are all needle-like and retractable, and so isn’t capable of chewing or tearing food apart with them.

The wings are long and thin, and is better at gliding than actual power flight.  There’s only one wing webbing for each wing, as the rest of the wing digits are not connected (like a ptero dino).  The claws are fairly dull, including the ones on the feet minus the dew claws.

No real sexual dimorphism in the species, save females get to be slightly larger.  The Vipera don’t care for much of the glittery treasure most dragons like, and instead prefer to horde organic treasures, like hides, ivory, horns, antlers, feathers, and sometimes the bark and branches of rare plants.  They tend to live in heavily forested areas, mostly in humid climates.  They make small lairs, usually underneath a large tree in the root system.  Smaller ones might make lairs up in the branches of large trees, making it out of branches, mud and leaves.

They’re not aggressive or territorial, and would rather take flight over fight in violent situations.  Their main way of hunting is to sit and wait for something to come by, using the speckled camouflage to hide among the shadows cast by the trees.  It will often lay the head down so the vibrant venom sack isn’t noticeable.

While intelligent, they’re not very social, even with their own kind.  The most interaction they tend to do is for mating purposes, or dealing with the occasional adventurer.  The mother will lay between 3-10 eggs, usually up in a hollow of a tall tree to protect them from wandering predators.  When they hatch, the mother provides for them some, but the hatchlings are fairly self sufficient from the start, their venom just as deadly as their parents.