Serina: Skuascraper (Patreon)

One of the most aberrant skulossus species is the forest-dwelling skuascraper, only weighing about five tonnes, but able to crane its head over thirty feet high to browse into the canopies of trees. This animal spends the summer months gorging itself in the nightforest, when the midnight sun fuels rapid plant growth able to sustain the countless migrants from southern lands. A neck longer than the rest of the body allows the skuascraper to browse much higher, with its natural reach exceeded when it rears up and hooks its front claws to a tree's trunk to reach nearly fifty feet up, browsing higher into the trees from the ground than any other forest denizen. Able to feed on vegetation with little competition, they grow fat and usually put on a few hundred kilograms over a few months, particularly in their bulbous tails, which can more than triple in volume, and in their long necks, which are not only used for reaching into the trees, but their primary defensive weapon.

Skuascrapers live in fission-fusion herds, forming larger and denser groupings in the winter and during the bi-annual migration to and from the nightforest in spring and fall, and disperse into much looser aggregations in the summer, as there are few predators in this environment large enough to threaten them. They overwinter in the open savannahs or marshlands further south, where the sun still illuminate the sky in the winter, but where much larger hunters dwell. The thirty-foot neck, reinforced with ossified ligaments, bony tuberculates, a layer of subdermal osteoderms, with an outer layer of pointy external scutes, and swung like a massive club, is a formidable defence when size alone cannot protect them, able to crush bone and flay muscle. Too slow to flee from any hunter, skuascrapers will put up a fearsome display of aggression in numbers when threatened, inflating large nasal crests and channeling booming calls through air channels inside their necks, which amplify their vocalizations tremendously.

Their reinforced necks are also used by males in fights for females. In late summer, as males have grown fat from feeding are able to extend some of their extra energy for reproduction (and the extra fat also helps protect them from injury). Most conflicts are resolved by their visual and vocal displays, but the sounds of the huge testosterone-fuelled males slamming into one another often echos through the nightforest during these several weeks. Although visibility is poor in the undergrowth, beneath the vast towering canopy of the trees-of-heaven, their powerful calls can travel for miles, and their infrasonic reverberations can be picked up by others through the ground, allowing individuals to communicate and locate one another even when foraging widely apart. Outside of this brief window of courtship, individuals are otherwise tolerant of one another, although, as in most skuorcs, there is little parental care, and their offspring shelter in the forest undergrowth for several years by themselves.

The skuascrapers are not born with their elongated necks, looking more normally proportioned and heavily armoured, feeding generally on low-growing vegetation, roots, and invertebrates in a swine-like fashion. Being much smaller and more generalist allows them to overwinter when most greenery dies back. Like most skulossi, the armour that covers them is heavier and more extensive while they're immature. Their tails do not gain the engorged appearance until they are subadults, when growth slows, as they do not build much fat as they increase in size. However, the spines are proportionately much larger, allowing them to swing their tails as weapons instead, although the tail's purpose in defence ceases as the neck gradually lengthens over years of growth, allowing the animal to feed higher into the tree tops. Skuascrapers begin to get too large to overwinter at around 8-11 years old, and begin to join adult herds as adolescents, although it usually takes another 3-5 years before they reach sexual maturity.