Kaiju King the Flesh God

What mammal groups do you classify fanged beasts as?

There’s too many options with descriptions too long to fit on a 12 answer poll so you’ll have to comment your answer on this one, sorry.

People have a lot of opinions on the fanged beasts! I’m surprised nobody raised the idea of groups of them being afrotheres or xenarthrans, which is something I’ve seen before. Anyways it’s my turn to weigh in now.

Bullfango are… well, they’re pigs.

Blagonga, Congalala, Rajang, and Ajarakan I think are a group of cursorial old world monkeys with possible relation to Papionini (so mandrills, baboons, geladas, etc. Kecha Wacha I think is part of the group as well, but possibly descended from an earlier family that hadn’t fully left an arboreal lifestyle.

Bishaten and Garangolm I think also are in the cursorial monkey group but within their own little family as well, and are united by their armored heads, keratinous lips, and weird tail fingers. If you’ve followed me for a while then you know Bishaten’s anatomy makes me kinda mad, especially with his feathers. My best guess was that they’re fur clumps, but they have a central vein like an actual feather. Mammals cannot evolve feathers because we have alpha keratin while diapsids have beta keratin, so fundamentally they’re very different structures. So because of that I had to whip out a crack theory and say that the ancestor of bishitty and garang underwent a horizontal gene transfer event with a bird or bird monster. Possibly by endogenizing a virus that had itself endogenized various hox genes and the genes for feathers and beta keratin. So that explains the duo’s keratinous lips, dino hips, and bishit’s feathers (with garangolm having avian scales).

Gammoth I think is a primitive proboscidean that independently evolved a trunk due to its dentition, but I’ve seen people classify her as an ungulate which is also fair.

Canynes are canines.

Volvidon I think is an armadillo, mostly because I like armadillos.

Arzuros, Goss Harag, and Doshaguma I think are a family of armored bears. Goss and Dosh are likely each other’s closest relatives due to their extensive shagginess and cranial bosses. Bears don’t usually have flexible fingers like Goss though and so I’ve seen some people argue that it could be a giant sloth, and at one point I entertained the idea of it being an ape.

Lagombi is… idk. The beak and the fact that it is described as neither a bear or rabbit throws me for a loop.

I refuse to talk about Bombadgy.

Y’all are not ready for what gammoth’s skeleton looks like.

Fuckin

Horrendous

Bitch built like Mr incredible

I warned you

Here it is. The Gammoth skeleton. There is a slight difference between the skeleton here and in the vid. The legs are bigger, but the video was already finalized before I made the change so oh well. Thanks again to @krmoaten-blog for the refs. It’s amazing to know I’ve come so far with anatomical knowledge that I can illustrate a skeleton now.

An interesting thing to note about gammoth and popo are that the “tusks” aren’t actually teeth

Even if they were, they’re positioned too far back to be anything but molars.

This plus the normal set of incisors and canines on the bottom jaw means that if they’re truly Proboscideans then I’d have to look pretty far back to see what kind. Eventually I settled on Numidotheriidae, and that was the primary reference (along with some horse, bison, and modern elephant). Of course, this means gammoth evolved its trunk independently… but that’s also not unusual since Proboscideans evolved trunks independently twice already.

But then what are the tusks made of? Probably the same stuff as the crown and arm and leg gauntlets, which can be interpreted as osteoderms, but I interpreted them as being entirely keratin like a rhino horn. Proboscideans don’t have a very efficient digestive system (in fact modern elephants sometimes eat each other’s crap to squeeze out nutrients they didn’t get the first time) and so gammoth might save on calcium (and other metals if we’re accounting for my biomineralization theory) that can be better utilized in its bones and muscles by making its armor entirely keratin.

The weirdest part though is arguably the massive chest, janky spine, and its big gut it has in life, but I have a theory for this. I think it could be an adaptation for being able to fit more organ space in its torso, and thus have a longer digestive system. A longer digestive system means food spends more time fermenting and digesting, which also generates extra heat, and gammoth needs all the heat it can get in its polar habitats. The weird adaptation effectively kills two birds with one stone… at the cost of back problems.

Also between the hooves and lack of upper teeth aside from molars, it’s entirely fair to interpret gammoth as an ungulate.

Tigrex skull made using reference provided by @krmoaten-blog.

The reference was the new world species but I gave it the heterodont dentition of the old world species. I think whenever I do flying wyvern skulls now I’m going to use this as reference since it seems I didn’t put as many bones on past flying wyvern skulls I’ve done (although I can just handwave and say that the bones fused).

If you’ve seen my flying wyvern tree then you know I think of flying wyverns as a unique paravian family and a sister group to most bird wyverns. My proposed flying wyvern ancestor was either a burrowing omnipedal dromeosaur-like animal, or an omnipedal dromeosaur-like creature with styliforms that was sort of all terrain and could burrow and climb. The burrowing allowed it to survive the KT extinction and from there it diversified.

Tigrex itself, while not bearing a strong resemblance to this ancestral wyvern, can be thought of as a megafaunal reflection of its life style. An adaptive all terrain creature.

As for my thoughts on tigrex, I like it a lot. Tied with the magnamalo, glavenus, Deviljho, and Anjanath genre for my favorite monsters. Although I’d like it a lot more if it wasn’t shrink wrapped and its fight wasn’t annoying at times (especially in iceborne where you block a charge and it ends up on top of you and when it turns around to charge again it ends up hitting you despite your shield being up).

Featured in the newest video along with this gammoth age chart that was available for early viewing on my patreon

Again, thanks to @krmoaten-blog for all the references she gives me