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Glass? Don't you mean "glassflora"? I doubt it would eat glass shards...

Would duplicating its genome really cause massive instability and a high rate of mutations? The plains viscacha rat seems the closest analogue to this, and I haven't found any mention of "massive instability".

I figure duplicating tissues and organs as a whole could be very bad for it. When you say it has a "high rate of mutations", you mean "relative to the Neoshrew", right?

Fixed to glass flora. I was figuring it might just be called glass the way we sometimes just call crystal flora crystals.

I was mainly going with what was suggested to me for a transitional form to shrews with reduplicated body parts. Yes, we have been having a serious discussion about that possibility. Double the genome means double the mutations, and extra copies of everything means extra body parts in particular will appear at a higher rate. It certainly helps that there's precedent for a high body-morphing mutation rate already existing in carpozoans, with them losing body parts, fusing them, and completely shifting them all over their bodies pretty much left and right.

These things would be fuzzy mounds of cancer.

I like it. We don't see too many examples on here of species that have unintentionally developed negative traits that can't be easily gotten rid of so must be coped with. Like those Icefish that lost their hemoglobin and had to evolve traits to compensate or humans developing genetic diseases like sickle cell that also help survival, sometime evolution just goes "eh, good enough".