A Permian Legacy Episode I： The Mogao ｜ Legendary Creatures of Kaimere

The Trakaiam is a vast and very shallow inland sea that separates the two great continents of the known world, Arvel and Nikar. This seaway covers the lowlands of the Arvelif continent and some of Nikar. Its waters are remarkably clear and extraordinarily shallow such that on a clear day, the seafloor is often visible from the surface. Though there are reefs, shoals, deep channels and thousands of islands, the predominant habitat in this seaway are seagrass meadows. Indeed, from looking down from the western Telmead mountains and the few aerial photographs that have been taken, the prairie below the waves are so rich that it can make the sea look a bright green. This lush habitat and indeed the seaway as a whole are a direct consequence of Chimera's high sea levels due to a warm climate. It has been unchanged in all of the known world's long recorded history and is so influential on the cultures and economy of the peoples in Chimera that it can be difficult to imagine the known world without this defining feature. However, 1.5 million years ago, this precise event occurred. The axial tilt of the planet leveled. The exact degree is unknown and it appears to have been multiple periods of tilt fluctuation, but in making the planet quite level with the sun, seasons during these peaks would have been minimal. The equatorial regions became much hotter, likely to a degree that life was prohibited in all but the most extreme specialists. The polar regions became extremely cold. Kaichel still had a cycling current that brought warm waters along its coastlines, but it still saw a dramatic temperature decrease. Most notably, the ice sheets that today span an average of less than 10% of the continent may have covered more than half. The northern pole is much less understood, but as it has a circumpolar current and is much colder and more isolated already, it is possible that it took on even more ice, perhaps covering most of the continent. This resulted in a reduction of Chimera's sea levels. Specifics are unknown, but a culmination of numerous studies suggest this drop in sea levels to be in the ballpark of a 40 meter reduction at its most extreme. As much of the inland sea has a depth ranging from 5 to 80 meters, more than half of the Trochaeum seaway would have become land. Naturally, this resulted in massive extinction events. The highly diverse Desmostylians, which were the undisputed dominant seagrass grazers, were reduced to a single species. The genus of Serenian that shared in this high status went entirely extinct. When the planet stabilized and the inland sea returned, the survivors were treated to what appears to be a great expansion of the meadows. This bounty provided opportunity. While there are still Serenians and Desmostylians, the marine sloths that had played second fiddle during the Anchored Period instead became the dominant seagrass grazers, likely due to needing less food for their size with a slower metabolism coupled with comfort on land to avoid marine predators but also proficiency in the water to get any available seagrass resource. Numerous Serenians and Desmostylians species derived from these survivors, but to this day it is called the Great Sloth Sea for the plethora of this clade in both population and diversity. Even with these three major players, there's still so much seagrass that other minor players have found success. The Bilurk, a giant multi-tuberculate, is the largest of these grazers. The strangest, no doubt, is the Mogau. They have long tusks, a beak, a tongue described as being covered in horned teeth, horned wrinkled skin, and a fluked tail. Early assembly accounts describe this as a walrus or serenian of some sort. Some Kullian legends say they are a hybrid of these two and a sea turtle. The truth is that they come from far north, beyond the equator, and share kinship with nothing in the known world. The Mogau is a Dicynodont, a type of therapsid or stem mammal. On earth, this clade is known to range from tiny burrowers to giant browsers. In Chimera, they can be found throughout numerous islands, small continents, and much of Cairo. After the dynastic extinction around 15 million years ago, it seems two lineages in the region today called the Permian Continent or Realm of Strange Beasts both took to water. The Odobenodonts are a walrus-like clade that swim up and down using the front and back flippers like sea lions. The Cetocynodonts, formerly called the Calonicetids, swim side to side like seals and sharks. The Mogau's ancestors arrived in the known world at least by 3 million years ago, though it was not until the Trachaeum turnover 1.5 million years ago that they thrived. It seems that they had tremendous initial success in this turnover, and while they don't seem to be as common as they initially were for reasons unknown, they are still found throughout the northern Trachaeum Sea all the same. Mogau are specialists in the numerous species of seagrass in this environment. They do feed on other marine plants and algae, however. They lack teeth aside from their tusks, instead relying on the hard, robust tongue and palate which have opposing keratin ridges to grind up their grazed meals. This apparatus of tongue and palate has been compared in shape and function to the teeth of elephants. Sediment and benthic organisms inevitably get incorporated into their diet, but the rapid growth of their keratin tongue makes short work of this abrasive addition. The Mogau shows minimal sexual dimorphism. Males tend to be slightly larger, a bit more robust, and have somewhat longer tusks, but there is a lot of overlap and this is unreliable as a means of differentiation. Both sexes tend to reach around 7m long and weigh 4-5 tons. This minimal dimorphism is reflective of their lifestyle. Mogau are monogamous and generally made for life. Cows tend to bear two pups every three years, with the pair sharing responsibility of rearing these for their first three years of life until the next pair is born. Pregnancy lasts around a year and a half to two years, and the pups are born live and able to swim. Pups grow fast on a diet of exclusively regurgitated half digested seagrass for their first few months, then steadily transition to grazing for themselves by the end of their first year. They are a bit less than half their adult mass and their tusks begin to sprout by the time they reach their third year, which is around when the next siblings are born, then they tend to disperse. They may remain in the area for a year or two until they reach maturity, then depart to seek a mate of their own. Mogau can live up to 50 years, though 30 is more typical. This extended protection is good defense against the many predators that can threaten their pups. Adults are much safer. Between their tusks and tiny osteoderms below the skin making their hide surprisingly tough to pierce and cut, they are a lot more formidable than they might at first appear. Adults can swim with surprising bursts of speed, they are all muscle after all, but when defending pups they almost always have, they are more prone to fight or have the mother and pups flee while the father attacks. They tend to live in shallows where the only megalodon around are youngsters too small to pose much of a threat. Yakuamun, the wolverine shark, is present in the shallower waters, but they prefer hunting sirenians which have much easier hide to strike. Mikurajaku is really their only regular predator of adults, and they can usually outpace these predators as long as they sense their approach and can take to waters too shallow for the enormous theropod to follow. Locomotion in the Mogau has been a source of some discussion. Their lateral undulation, common in fish and sauropsids but rare in aquatic mammals, was consistent with old assumptions of dicynodont locomotion but not with our current understanding. Nonmammal thauropsids lack the full range of motion in mammal vertebral columns, perhaps due to our clade producing milk to feed our young, though grooming our fur, a burrowing ancestry, and other hypotheses for our greater vertebral flexibility have been suggested. Outside of a few specialists, dicynodonts and other nonmammal thauropsids do not have our degree of vertebral flexibility. There is a limited range of motion for lateral bending which contrasts the assumption of lizard-like locomotion. In chimera, numerous nonmammal thauropsids have taken to water. Some adopted a lateral stroke, some a sagittal motion. It seems that a more rigid spine as a starting point permitted them more options than the mammals and sauropsids that, setting aside a few exceptions like plesiosaurs and earless seals, seem more drawn to a general trend of swimming strokes that is an extension of ancestral terrestrial locomotion. The ancestors of the Mogao happened to settle on a lateral motion, perhaps because they evolved as shallow freshwater grazers and a longer body slinking through the shallows facilitated this motion. It is also possible that while they atrophied their hind limbs to the point of being entirely within the body, an initial stroke employing the caudofemoralis muscle system could have meant that a lateral stroke was more efficient less because of the spine and more because of the tail muscles which in mammals had atrophied long before they took to water. However, as we will learn in our next episode, some stem mammals instead opted for a sagittal stroke. Cheers to Ian for sponsoring these episodes! In the build-up to the release of my Dragonrider story, which will take place on the Permian Islands, I'm happy to take some of my episodes exploring animals of the Permian-harvested ancestry of the coming months, both in the known world and the islands on which the story will be set. I am having an absolute blast getting back into writing, and I can't wait to share this novella with you all! Thank you so much to Ian, to my Patreon patrons for your support, to those who have sent me funds to generally support the work I do, and thank you so much for watching! Cheers folks!