Puraeus

Although Venus has no trees, even it has more arboreal organisms than Mars, most of them living in the floating jungles of the upper atmosphere. Martians meanwhile have not much to climb on except for rocks, boulders, mountains and maybe a few tall shrubs here and there. The degrading climate has stopped supporting the growth of tree-like organisms millions of years ago. The only exception is the region of the Hellas Basin, but even here the scale-trees and tube-trees grow only sparsely, making the region resemble an open savannah more than forest. As such there are not many organisms specially adapted to dwell on them.

One of the few savannah-dwellers that can actually be called arboreal is a relic from an earlier time. The puraeus is one of the last remaining flagrobrachians. These are one of the groups which make up the insect-like phylum Aspiderma, to which also belong the wadjets. The relationship is immediately apparent, with the six lens-eyes, large head-plates and even little external gills, which look like they could be the archaic precursors to wings. Yet this animal cannot fly, but instead slithers and hangs between the branches of the scale-trees like a serpent. Neither are flagrobrachians the ancestors of wadjets, they are their own group that, as fossils show, made their way independently out of the vanished Martian oceans onto land.

Their most distinguishing feature are their mandibles, which have been repurposed into a pair of raptorial arms from which sprout long, prehensile tendrils. The puraeus is an ambush-predator, which lies in wait hanging from trees, ensnaring any smaller creatures which might climb or fly by, such as nekhbets. As the puraeus can no longer utilize its mandibles to kill and chew its prey, its jawless mouth has evolved a syringe-like spur, hidden underneath the headshield. With this it injects venom into its prey, as well as a strong acid, which digests it from the inside and allows the predator to simply suck it dry, like a spider.

The venom is also useful as a defensive weapon, as the puraeus can fall prey to various flying creatures such as ballousaurs. It is usually not strong enough to kill the attacker, but based on the behaviour of those bitten, it appears to cause a lot of stinging pain. Of course, no astronaut has ever volunteered to test that hypothesis themselves.

Puraeus also nest in trees, usually in holes beneath the bark. There they also raise their young. Once two puraeus have mated, only the impregnated partner will care for the offspring, but does so quite dutifully until they are old enough to hunt themselves. Until then it will usually feed them with regurgitated juices.

Irsu

“And I will send the beast of the field among you, which shall rob you of your children, destroy your cattle and make you few in number; and your ways shall become desolate.”

-Leviticus 26:22

The Hellas Basin could be called the “most functioning” ecosystem on Mars, in that its vegetation cover allows for more or less fleshed out trophic levels at all heights. Unfortunately for everyone involved, that includes active predators. Of these, the Irsu is the most ferocious, the most deadly, non-venomous animal so far discovered on the planet. Its jaw alone is the largest among any Martian, its hardened, self-sharpening tooth-plates reaching up to the length and height of butchering knifes, able to bite through bone like butter.

This is a survivor of a past age, one where pedicambulates ruled the planet. And it does its best to not let that memory die. It alone rules over these desolate plains, always stalking through and ambushing from the fronds and spongine growths with great efficiency, its spotted pattern presumably helping it camouflage. It lays waste to both onychognath prey, whose chest-lungs it loves to tear open, and others of its own clade, whose internal shells its teeth cut through with ease. Other predators, such as sutekh hounds or the heremakhet, fear it and rarely fight over carcasses with it. Living solitarily, Irsu are not even safe amongst themselves outside of breeding season. In a stark contrast, they make for decent parents. Usually only laying one large egg, the chick is cared for greatly by its single parent until it is old enough to hunt by itself.

Among the favourite prey of Irsu are the great ushabtis and their relatives, their glass skeletons being easily broken by its teeth. These dumb animals being, by coincidence, quite humanoid, has led to some obvious and quite perilous problems for human space explorers. The Soviets were the first to explore the great basin and, infamously, these first cosmonaut pioneers were not given guns, as they did not initially expect this kind of life to be found here (at least this was the official explanation, some rumours state that they were not issued weaponry for budgetary reasons or due to fear of suicide or homicide within the team). Alas, all that his friends could find of poor Yuri was vomited-out flesh and one of his boots, his foot still inside. Being of a different biochemistry, the alien was presumably unable to completely digest the man. Though this still leaves the question open where the rest of his spacesuit (and skeleton) went. There is an urban legend among astronauts that parts of Yuri can still be found strewn across Mars. A glove there, a helmet-piece here, maybe a knucklebone somewhere right by the Great Face. Indeed, there are now rumours that the Chinese recently found a heavily corroded human mandible… at the opposite end of the basin from where he died. If true, either some scavenger has carried this bone very far or there are more casualties the other space agencies do not want to tell us about.

Back on Earth, the Irsu has become a popular choice for plush-toys. My grandson owns one, he calls him Ogilvy, after me.

Heremakhet

 

Shifting and crawling through the Hellas Savannah is an intriguing predator, the Heremakhet. About the size of a larger monitor lizard, it and its close relatives are unique among the onychognaths for being functional tetrapods. Only the front- and hindlimb-pair are used for walking, while the one in the middle has adapted for purely raptorial purposes. The Heremakhet has rather weak, toothless jaws, so it uses these scythe-like weapons to impale and kill its prey.

Counted among its usual victims are a variety of smaller critters, ranging from trichordates to other onychognaths. Eggs of nothornithes are also on the menu. When raiding nests, two or more heremakhet have sometimes been observed teaming up, one distracting the mother while the other one tries to feed on the eggs, betraying at least some degree of intelligence.

Carrion is of course also not ignored, but in the fights over carcasses the heremakhet are usually handicapped compared to their periostracan competitors. Irsu, a type of pedicambulate, are much larger and active predators that can rip heremakhet apart with a single bite. The closely related citar is meanwhile able to drag its prey up scale- and tube-trees like a leopard. The beak of the heremakhet is also not as efficient compared to the flesh-rendering scolecodonts of some nothornithes and vhagators. Yet still, heremakhet can sometimes overcome these odds by simply outnumbering their rivals and swarming the carcass sites.

Size of the heremakhet compared to an astronaut.

Anatomically, the heremakhet is also interesting for possessing somewhat rectigrade hindlegs while still having archaically splayed forelimbs. This is a condition also found in some extinct tagmasaurs. This is merely a case of convergent evolution, but could offer some hints about the biomechanics of those long-gone creatures.