A bit of a last minute entry for @simon-roy’s refugium contest. I was pretty on the fence on if I should join but I decided why not! And it was a good excuse to try some new brush techniques.
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An excerpt from the Altamira Book of Wildlife
An illustration of a male Towering Snappler, so named for the snapping sounds accompanying their feeding. Snapplers are aberrant grapplers that have taken up high browsing niches. The same raptorial appendages of the family are also useful for grabbing and manipulating the branches of foliage, and so they fill a similar niche to many earthen high browsers such as elephants, chalicotheres, therizinosaurs, and sauropods. Towering Snapplers themselves average around 35-40 tons, which is a similar size range to some iconic Jurassic sauropods such as Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus. Snapplers sometimes come into conflict with some Pentapods over resources as they too can sometimes fill similar niches, but these rarely become full confrontations as the photosynthesis and bio-voltaics of Pentapods allows them to go longer between meals.
The raptorial arms manipulate and crush foliage and bark using their claws and grinding teeth that are similar to elephant teeth. Food is then shoved down their powerful beaks to be further processed in a large crop before fermenting in their gut.
Towering Snapplers typically live in herds mostly composed of females and young with a few males, and they communicate using signaling via their tail brush. Males have bright blue dewlaps, and since blue is a very expensive color in nature, brighter blues are a good sign of fitness. During breeding season only one dominant male may get breeding rights, and so males compete with each other. They flash their dewlaps at each other and raise their tail brushes high, and if that doesn’t decide a victor then they may engage in a “parallel march” like deer to gauge the size of their opponent. If either party still doesn’t back down then the last step is physically fighting with their raptorial appendages. This last step rarely happens, but it can escalate to the point of being fatal. Old experienced males are adorned with scars from previous battles. The male illustrated here has only just reached sexual maturity and lacks any scars.