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Claysoar (Gladiobeccus aureumpectus)
Creator: Jarlaxle
Ancestor: Zykemet
Habitat: Dixon Chaparral, Dixon Veldt, Dorite Tropcial Savanna, Drake Veldt, North Ovi Tropical Scrub, North Talon Tropical Savanna, Orpington Tropical Savanna, Orpington Tropical Scrub, Orpington Veldt, Ovi Chaparral , Ovi Hot Desert, Ovi Tropical Savanna, Ovi Vledt , Ovi-DIxon Hot Desert, South Ovi Tropical Scrub, South Talon Tropical Savanna, Talon Hot Desert, Talon Tropical Scrub
Size: 40 cm Long
Support: Endoskeleton (Bone)
Diet: Scavenger
Respiration: Active (Lungs)
Thermoregulation: Heterotherm (Basking, Muscle-Generated Heat)
Reproduction: Sexual (male and female, live birth)

They claysoar has split from its ancestors. Extending its ancestral cartilaginous rods past the initial edge of the wing, they were able to break the membrane's shape into a slotted wing, reducing drag when catching warm thermals, and by darkening its wings into a near black it was able to increase the heat absorbed during flight. With these, it was able to soar across the ocean into Ovi, finding a land devoid of its Spardi at the time of arrival, it would have to rely on scavenging to survive. Taking advantage of its wings, it was able to fly long distances with minimal energy in the search for its next meal, in a way not too dissimilar to vultures of another time and place.

Unlike those vultures, the Claysoar can take full advantage of the carcass it found. While the very edge of the lateral mandible tears chunks of flesh, it can use the ventral mandible to counter the motion to tear flesh regardless of the weight of the carcass, adapting the front-most bottom teeth for that very task. When encountering bone or armor, the middle sections of the mandibles are specialized in cracking bone armor or exoskeleton, and the innermost section can grind the remains down over its open mouth, squeezing every last juicy drop of meat.

As a result of its feeding behavior, when it closes its mouth the ventral and dorsal jaws close over the ventral mandibles, creating the distinct appearance of a claymore, from which it gets its name and which it will use when threatened, swinging its mouth like a large broadsword to make its claim for the carcass. For many, the sight of its distinct coloration is enough of a warning sign, its golden chest visible in the sky long before it makes the landing.

The very same gaudy pigmentation doubles as a mating display. While most of the markings act as indicators of health, marking the edge shape of the wing, the curvature of the wing rods, and the shape of the backbone, and those are shared among males and females, the colorful head crest is exclusively male.

As they make their seasonal migration north to south to stay in the warm regions, they will find themselves sharing a much smaller space in Talon & Dixon, where they will inevitably encounter each other, fight and squabble for food and mates, though mostly using the health indicators to visually assess each other without violence. Towards the end of summer, they will pair up, flying together to the northern regions where they will build their nests and give live birth, taking turns to feed and guard the young, which will be fully independent by the end of spring.

Spardis have teeth on their tongue, actually exactly like vultures.

Insect wings came from ancestrally frilly structures and didn't take on a slotted shape when they started flying, and there's no evidence of pterosaurs or bats in similar ecological roles ever evolving slotted wings. From what I have been told when I have tried making slotted wing fauna in the past, this is because membranes, being made of wet living tissue, are too heavy for this sort of structure to develop and really work.

Off the bat, there's a couple things I find strange here.

I find the wing slotting to be a bit sketchy. It's likely already been discussed, but each of the little wing projections probably needs some kind of leading edge, and the whole thing needs to be stiff enough to not just flap around.

Also... don't spardis have more teeth than that, like in the spardophrey, which has multiple homodontous rows of teeth visible?

Finally, and this one's more minor since it's more of an art thing, but what happened with the eyes? The way it's drawn makes it look like the eyes would cross the middle of the skull, and the pupil is hard to make out (unless it's the entirety of that black oval area, in which case it has very big pupils).

EDIT: I mostly mentioned the eyeball size thing because the head seems relatively thin. The zykemet does have proportionally large eyes as well, and animals like tarsiers do exist. That said, it also sort of looks like it can't see in front of it, which might be an issue for flying (but then again this is a pure scavenger and not a hunter).

This post has been edited by Cube67: Feb 14 2023, 06:35 PM

Let's start with denition:

QUOTE (Disgustedorite @ Feb 15 2023, 01:35 AM)

Spardis have teeth on their tongue, actually exactly like vultures.

QUOTE (Cube67 @ Feb 15 2023, 01:42 AM)

Also... don't spardis have more teeth than that, like in the spardophrey, which has multiple homodontous rows of teeth visible?

(from the other sub):

QUOTE (Cube67 @ Feb 15 2023, 01:44 AM)

Like with the other spardi you recently posted, there doesn't seem to be enough teeth. (For the record, spardi teeth aren't enamelous either, that's why they're usually brown and dull or matte instead of white and shiny).

Is it tongues in addition to on the jaws, instead of on the jaws? multiple rows on the jaw and the tongue? How many teeth? What is supposed to be the correct number of teeth?

They don't really have a correct number of teeth. It's more like a full mouth dental battery crossed with a snail radula.

Something else I noticed, and thought I should take note of: the mandible morphology here, although cool, is pretty wildly different than the ancestor’s. I had sort of a plan going that would get them to wasp-like mandibles in a generation (specifically for a species that would just be called the Zykem and basically be a “falcon” to the zykemet’s “falconet”), since the zykemet only has one row of mandibular toothlike projections. Here, I see a rapid change to a much more complex arrangement, and I don’t know what the transition to this shape would even look like, and I just think it seems like a rapid jump.

The criticism I agree with:

1. Internal mouth redesign. I honestly didn't notice the multiple rows of teeth in any of these until you two brought it to my attention. The mouth of my other spardi is a higher priority but this mouth can be redesigned to fit as well and more easily so.

2. Eye redesign. The eyes are absolutely too large for the head shape and would intersect within the skull, I laughed at myself for not noticing it. And btw It's not meant to be all pupils like a tarsier, I had the idea that a black iris would prevent competing scavengers from being able to tell when they aren't seen and stop them from finding opportunities to approach the guarded carcass while it's eating. Conceptually it still makes sense to me but the more I look at it the more visually unappealing I find the results.

The criticism I disagree with:

1. The problems with slotted membranes. Don't we use slotted flaps and fowler flaps for airplanes to achieve the same effect on drag as slotted bird wings? With each being a lot heavier than a feather? And why would the weight of the slot prevent its shape from having the same effect over the airflow? Maybe one could argue that it isn't worth it because it increases the total weight of the wing, except that the slots reduce the weight relative to the length of the wing, so even that line of argument doesn't seem viable. As for why it only happened for birds, I can't answer that, other than to say I wouldn't like being the one to argue that only insects could ever fly 160m years ago, not only because it likely means I traveled back in time and got stuck and became so deranged I ended up arguing with species that can't speak English, but also because I would be wrong. A path not taken doesn't mean a path doesn't exist.

2. The rod lines supporting each slot are located just about where the quill shaft would be in equivalent feathers, so moving the rod to the leading edge of the slot wouldn't be necessary IMO.

3. The lateral mandibles. I know we are talking about the rather vague intuition of time skips, but if I was to envision the transitional form between Corpse Spardi mandibles and this, it would be the Zykemet serrated mandibles. Gradually increasing the length of the frontmost serrations to tear flash and increasing the middle curve into a better bone cracker while increasing the surface area for more serrations in the process. It should be possible to do both at the same time. IMO the transitional form wouldn't be one adaptation before the other but a reduced form of both, with a shorter edge and a smaller curve.


That said, the claysoar is unique among all my submissions for two very important reasons. It is the only one that has zero ecological interdependencies with anything else, and the exact same number of future plans. I kind of liked the torn-winged prototype version I use for the profile image, but that was too out there, and this one... It ain't all that. If you have plans for your lineage and feel this is stepping on them, I have no qualms about putting it to sleep (though I might salvage some of the concepts to use elsewhere).

TBF, I did kind of imagine you’d be adverse to changing the membrane shape. Not for any plausibility-related reasons, just because you’d already done so before with the wing-chewing design.

As can be seen from these images, the situation is a bit… different for airplanes. Also, something I noticed in both birds and planes that’s absent in this creature design is the presence of some sort of overlap or height difference between the flaps. I’m no fluid dynamicist or aerospace engineer, but maybe that has to do with something, since it seems to be a bit prominent in the diagrams I see about it (for planes, at least; I can’t find a cross-section of the aerodynamics of a vulture wing, but if I could that would really help).

Also, as for the stiffening required to make the wings shaped this way in the first place, I don’t think it’s impossible but I do think it would require more actinofibrils, possibly little ones branching off the big ones like feathers. I do think that spardi wings already started out moderately stiffer and more complex than a bat wing, though; perhaps it was like a sort of intermediate between bat and pterosaur membranes. I mention this because of the sort of bulging shape of the wing present in the corpse spardi, which would likely flap around uselessly too if it was too thin, floppy, and delicate (or if the organism was big enough). Then again, it was only five centimeters long, and organic material properties can be sort of size-dependent from what I can tell.

While airplane wings are made of a heavier material than spardi wings, they are also considerably stiffer and don't need to have blood running through them, thus they can be very thin and hollow. A spardi wing has to be thicker to maintain that same stiffness, and it has to be doubled up to actually use the slots, so it adds up to being proportionally much heavier.

Depends on the type, but usually airplane wings have a thick fusiform side profile which is used both to generate additional lift and for fuel storage which is rather heavy when full. And again the weight of the slot doesn't impact its flight profile and ...I'm getting déjà vu to arguing that centrifugal forces exist and 4 bar mechanisms work. I don't even like this submission I am not spending another month arguing over basic physics for it.

Kill it. Just kill it.