riv

their skeleton isn’t normal bone, it’s actually a mix of normal and prismatic cartilage! this keeps their bones light and flexible while still giving them the ability to tightly grasp and bite things. they all have prismatic cartilage for their jaws except for spearmaster, which discourages them to eat using their mouth since it’s extremely time consuming and uncomfortable given that their diet otherwise isn’t intended to be small plant particles and plankton.

spearmasters spines/spears from its tail are also full of digestive enzymes. this won’t kill prey by itself, but once downed spearmaster can just chillax as the enzymes do their thing inside the body and the visceral mush is returned to spearmasters digestive system for processing.

all of them have some sort of internal shell in their mantle except for saint. Rivulets is vestigal and very thin to allow for more complex movement but they do still have it. In the evolutionary timeline of scug—>furred scug, at some point it became more efficient to develop thick, dense fur that could deal with the cold while simultaneously protecting them. saints pneumatostome is also almost entirely gone and is more just an unusually soft spot on their back.

I interpret artificer, gourmand, and watcher to be apart of a “future” generation of scugs far beyond survivor, hunter, and monk—though obviously not as far into the future as saint is. they developed cerata to mimic lizards, since a lot of organisms will think twice before messing with a lizard rather than a slugcat, which is (typically) much less deadly.

alt version because i also liek it :)