Sand Goats Repro (Patreon)

I finally got around to fleshing out the reproductive system for scud vertebrates and I decided I wanted their reproductive business end to be the front (mating is a, uh, "kiss"). This has some limitations that Earth vertebrates don't have, namely that the eggs or live young have to be less than the width of the jaw to safely exit the parent's body. For the local placental mammal-alikes, this constraint favors a marsupial kind of setup where the young exits their mouth as a barely developed jelly bean and finishes most of its development in a pouch. A pouch on the neck is less of a trek for the baby, but it will require beefier shoulders than I have been drawing them with.

As for the sexes, scud vertebrates have a big variety of setups, and sequential hermaphroditism is pretty common. For sand goats, the eldest and/or most dominant female usually becomes the stag of the herd. The stag loses some of their shoulder bulk, and the opening of the pouch turns into part of their colorful mouth display (used for seduction and territorial showdowns).