The ganguar is a quite peculiar creature. Its little
cylindrical body is held up by two long legs and a long tail. Although it can walk
slowly, it prefers to hop like a little kangaroo. In front of the legs grow
small, bony stumps, with long flagella. It is thought that these are feelers,
with which the ganguar senses its surroundings, perhaps picking up smells and
sounds. Most distinctive are however the fleshy dual-proboscises, which can both fully
retract into the body. The bottom one ends in the creature’s mouth, the top one
is an eyestalk with only a single, but well-developed eye.
These tiny animals, about the size of jerboas, are commonly found across all the shrublands of Mars. There they feed on small and young fractarians using their iguana-like teeth. Insect-sized onychognaths may also be eaten on occasion. Despite their dynamic mode of locomotion, ganguars have a low metabolism, close to the typical reptilian level, allowing them to subsist on little food. As in yrpoids and thecocerates, it is instead the low gravity of Mars which supports their upright stance and active jumping.
Ganguars are gregarious creatures, often travelling in loose groups. While they feed, their eyestalks look out for predators, of which they have many. When alerted, they will warn each other by repeatedly stomping with one foot on the ground, a behaviour amusingly reminiscent of rabbits. As they have no obvious ears, except maybe for the feelers, it is thought that the ganguars do not hear the sound of the stomping but instead actually react to the vibration in the ground caused by it. Once warned, the group hops away in an instant, though there are usually stragglers left behind which larger predators, such as rannus and bennus, can easily pick up. The fact that ganguars are cyclopes makes one think that they might have trouble with depth perception… which is exactly the case. Although not that big of a problem on the wide, flat plains of Mars, it is not unusual to encounter ganguars clumsily jumping against tall rocks, shrubs or even into ravines because they presumably misjudged their distance.
Although such evolutionary shortcomings can sometimes lead to death, they are usually compensated by the ganguars’ prolific reproduction. In the beginning of spring, many ganguars will meet with each other and participate in necking-competitions, where the length of the partner’s eyestalk is measured. The one with the shorter neck loses and is inseminated by the winner. The “mother” then digs a hole in the ground and lays in there a clutch of 30 – 50 leathery-shelled eggs, which are then covered by dirt again and abandoned. In a few weeks the young hatch capable of jumping and feeding on their own and quickly join nearby groups of adults. Although few of the hatchlings reach adult age, their sheer numbers are enough to keep the species going strong each generation.
Despite their wide distribution and large population allowing for a lot of easily obtainable data, our scientists have had quite the trouble fitting this creature anywhere in the Martian tree of life. Somewhat similar animals are known in the form of the utigog and the tila, but this was not enough to clarify wider relationships. The internal skeleton of these animals, called Craniopoda (for their central ganglion sits inside the mantle, controlling the two stalks at the base), consists of an internal test which surrounds the mantle, on whose outside the feelers, legs and tail are attached. The stalks are entirely boneless, except for the mouth, which is formed by free jaw bones akin to the beak of a cephalopod. Due to their guts making a distinctive U-turn (with the cloaca usually ending up on the left side of the body), an early, tentative hypothesis was that these were highly aberrant nothornithes, with the internal test perhaps having derived from the internal shell of the Periostraca, but the flaws with this idea were obvious. The tail in periostracans is made of exoskeletal tunicine rings, whereas in craniopods it has an endoskeletal support, much like the legs. Although retractable, the beak-like mouths of periostracans are attached to the rest of the body through an internal vertebral column, much like in turtles, not through pure muscles like in the snail-like stalks of the craniopods. Although some periostracans, chiefly pedicambulates, are polydont, their scolecodonts are in no way comparable to the dentition of the craniopods, whose jaws resemble more those of Earth’s lizards than anything. Lastly, periostracans have eyes derived from their shell, not fleshy eyestalks. With the reclassification of the Netchu it became clear that craniopods are not even within the same phylum as nothornithes, but instead form their own distinctive one, the Hemicalyxia. Their tests are homologous to that of the Netchu and their legs, as well as the tail (which itself is likely a modified leg) and feelers have likely the same origin as its vestigial bone-stumps.
Although craniopods are all small today and, except for the ganguar, quite rare, newest fossil finds from the Isidian of Mars indicate that these creatures once had quite a heyday in that distant, murky period of the planet. Surprisingly large craniopods once shared the planet with equally strange and now completely extinct phyla such as the ambulostellians and urocephalians (Sivgin 2345). They were consequently displaced by the first megafaunal onychognaths, the tagmasaurs and cancrisuchians. Those were in turn eventually displaced by the Periostraca, as the history of life on Mars seems to have been authored by one Ibn Khaldun. Between the Isidian and today, craniopod fossils are exceedingly rare and thus it appears that the ganguar’s current success is only a geologically recent phenomenon.
Photos and videos of the ganguar’s clumsiness,
combined with its small stature and goofy appearance, have made it quite a
popular critter on Earth, especially among children. With Gary the Ganguar there
is now even a beloved videogame figure based on the species for the
best-selling Atari Leopard. Children’s obsession with these aliens has even
caused one company, Azuma Corporation, to ask NASA if some could be retrieved
from Mars and brought to Earth to be sold as pets. This idea was thankfully
rejected, for obvious reasons. Not only would the biochemical incompatibility
have quickly caused problems, but Earth’s gravity would have also given these
animals a crushing strain which would have been nothing short of animal
cruelty. Unfortunately, this might not be enough to stop future endeavours by
private spacefaring corporations, as there still does not exist any legislature
which protects the wellbeing of extraterrestrial organisms. Their legal status as either animals or natural objects remains heavily debated and will likely continue to do so in order to further justify their exploitation and extermination.
References
- Bomhoff, Nils: A common, radially symmetric origin for the Hemicalyxia and Trichordata and the erection of the new superphylum Xenoradiata, in: Astropaleontology, 528, 2340, p. 85 – 101.
- Sivgin, T.K.: Life on a Dead Planet. The first 3 billion years of Evolution on Mars, Zürich 234
