Sol Lacerti - Turian Fauna - Mass Effect Fan Codex
Size and Characteristics
The Sol Lacerti is a large lizard ranging in a variety of colors, including tan, orange, green and gray. Their skin is rough and durable.
It takes 8 to 9 years for full maturity, and they may live up to 30.
Males have a range of meaty spine scutes in varying shades of orange similar to the stegosaurus from earth. A male can be 8 to 9 feet in length and weight about 200 lbs when full grown
Females grow to 6 feet. They have a bony ridge but not the decorative meaty scutes their male counterparts have.
Sol Lacerti have good vision; they can see objects as far away as 985 feet (300 m), They can run briefly up to 13 mph (20 kph) but prefer to hunt by stealth — waiting for hours until prey cross their path.
Diet: Sol Lacerti are cannibalistic carnivores. They are such fierce hunters they can eat very large prey including unwary Turians. They can eat 80 percent of their body weight in one feeding.
Offspring: They are generally solitary outside of mating season. Males maintain and defend a territory and patrol up to 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) per day. Females can reproduce through both sexual and asexual reproduction. Laying anywhere from 20 to 30 eggs in a clutch with no parental care. When the young hatch they must first cut through the shell of their egg and then dig themselves out of the nest before they run away, climbing trees to escape their mother and bigger Sol Lacerti. When born, babies are on average 12 inches long.
While eggs come out male or female they found that temperature can change those parameters. Eggs that are kept at a steady 25°C come out male.
Random Facts: While both are edible, it is the males that are the most sought after for the better presentation. After hours of cooking those spines are easily pulled away.
Great care is taken to incubate the eggs at just the right temperature to ensure the maximum male birth rate. Creating a huge gap between male and female price tags. The excess males are headed towards the meat market, making females a protected commodity.
While it is not rare to find the Sol Lacerti in the wild, the vast majority of them are Females due to average temperature in their natural habitat.
At one time in history, the male population of the Sol Lacerti were heavily hunted, the larger the male the better, both for game and traditional medicine focusing on virility.
As a Meal A Traditional Sol Lacerti meal is served with raw or steamed reedy vegetables and and aged fruit sauce. (Kind of like eating ribs, the male spine meat would be the choicest cut of the animals.)
By BerryShiara