DOCODONTA

REIGITHERIIDAE (Moliarties)
    In RL, the northern continents are full of molehills, subsaharan Africa has the so-called golden moles, and Australia has marsupial moles. Madagascar has at least a digging tenrec. South America has nothing of that sort. Such animals simply never evolved there. This is a source of great puzzlement to those few people who ever think about these matters.

     Naturally, the situation is different in Spec. The South American countinent, especially across the flat pampas, is peppered with molehills. The first spexplorers theoriezed that real moles from North America had reached this far south.  The truth is not so simple, or perhaps it is simpler: Docodonts have survived in Spec's South America. This fact is very convenient for RL paleontologists, because so far the only reasonably complete docodont specimen comes from the Late Jurassic of Portugal. Like ancient Haldanodon, today's moliarties use mainly their forehead, which is covered by a thick horny pad, to dig in soft soils. Unlike true moles (which do live in Spec), moliarties sprawl, lay eggs, and, unique amoung extant mammals, retain the archaic double jaw joint, formed by bones that, in other mammals, support the tissues of the inner ear. Like many archaic mammals, male moliarties bear a poison spur on each ankle.

    Despite the fact that its tunnels are everywhere and its molehills are impossible to overlook, beautiful, metallic-orange 15cm-long copper moliarty is very seldom seen. It only leaves its tunnels when it absolutely has to, and such situations are extremely rare. The first biologists who tried to dig one up will never repeat the experience, for example, because a sting from a male's poison spurs is comparable to the nastiest snakebites.
   
    Nevertheless, unending curiosity on the part of many spexplorers has brought to light a few facts about this elusive creature.   Copper moliarty nests are always deeper than 3 m in the ground (protection against pseudosauropod stampedes) and contain 4-6 relatively large, sticky, soft-shelled eggs. Apparently the eggs are laid some time before the rainy season starts, so that the young hatch when there are most insect larvae in the ground, but nobody knows for sure.

 (fig. 1) Copper moliarty,   Antitalpa vulpecula (Southern South America)

    One spexplorer has reported seeing, from a distance, a copper moliarty coming out underwater of a river bank in the Pantanal do Rio Negro,
swimming elegantly with spread limbs and up-and-down undulations (much as these creatures are supposed to dig) and disappearing in the opposing riverbank, still underwater. Probably what he saw was another species, if not even something more like a platypus. Spec holds many more mysteries, and truth is commonly stranger than fiction.

  David Marjanovic

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