Greater Skuggernaut (juvenile) (Patreon)

The growth pattern of the skuggernauts mirrors that of the original skogre, with a longer legged terrestrial juvenile stage which evolves into a more aquatic and heavily armoured adult stage, although even more exaggerated with a further ten millions of years of evolution. As adults in the polar basin, no predator is large enough to threaten them, but the aquatic hunters are plenty large enough to prey upon the small infants, juveniles, and younger adolescents of the species, being born at only about twenty-five pounds. Thus, they remain further south, populating the shallower upperglades and night forest in loose associations.

Although born pudgy, they possess much greater limb length in comparison to their body size and are much more lightly built, able to move at great speed and agility through the undergrowth from stalking predators. The long spike-like claw, largely vestigial in adults, is a useful last resort weapon, capable of inflicting deep gashes into an unwary carnivore. As the skuggernaut grows, the armoured spikes begin to emerge and its gut begins to expand, preventing it from being able to run as quickly, but giving it greater physical protection, allowing them to venture into deeper water to forage. At the same time, its larger size makes it more difficult to find enough edible foliage and increasingly restricts its movement in the majority of the night forest, encouraging them to venture northward towards the polar basin and upperglades in the summer, where the endless bounty of aquatic vegetation sustains even the most immense herbivores.

The head of the juveniles is downturned for efficient grazing, and its beak is broader and has prominent serrations, for processing a wide range of even the toughest vegetation, even mowing down woody saplings to the roots. Adults, feeding on softer, aquatic vegetation at the surface, have a more level head posture and a narrower beak, with dulled serrations. The pupil shape of the young also changes; beginning as a more horizontal shape to help scan the horizon for predators, to a regular rounded shape as it turns into an adult, as it has virtually no predators to worry about by that point, and the ones it does sometimes get hunted by don't need to use ambush on such large, slow-moving herbivores.

The illustration shows a juvenile about 3 or 4 years old, already weighing close to one-thousand pounds. An adult can weigh over twenty-six times heavier and takes a full twenty years to reach, but they will be wandering the polar basin long before then, as even an adolescent 2/3rds the weight of a full-grown animal has little to fear from any of the biome's hunters. The blotchy green colouration of the young animals, an effective and necessary camouflage in the swampland and forest environment, becomes a far more vivid blueish-green as it matures, with the gular and nasal display colours also appearing close to sexual maturity, when they spend the rest of their lives alternating between the northern freshwater sea and the lush prairies and savannahs to the south in winter.