Sleepless nights are not uncommon among the members of our team. Unfamiliar and unnerving sounds in the distance do not make rest easy; pesky bloodsucking parasites can keep even the toughest soul up all night, and the ever warm and humid environment does us no favors either. But above all that, there is nothing more frightening than hearing an unfamiliar sound close to camp in the middle of the night.
In the bushes, next to the edge of our furthest tent, we could hear what sounded like a man relentlessly jabbing a shovel in the ground. There were multiple sets of feet audible, but none of them sounded too big, so we decided to investigate.
As we approached the bushes, I accidentally broke a twig. The sound of shoveling stopped and was replaced by sharp noise akin to metal rods being rustled together. It only lasted for about half a minute. Then, silence.
After a minute or so the shoveling continued.
We slowly crawled forward until we were only a few meters from where the sounds originated. Turning on our flashlights, we first saw a group of animals previously only known from trail-cameras: common shovelpaws (Palapefossor vulgaris). Shovelpaws are a small kind of primitive pseudopod that only come out at night to feed on plant matter. They walk on their front limbs and keep their hind limbs suspended in the air similar to the mantis stork, though they lack a third segment on their front limbs and are therefore probably not closely related. Instead, they have a single long and flat claw on their digging hind limbs, which have earned them their name.
They were accompanied by another creature, an animal we had not encountered before. It was far larger than the Shovelpaws, but still stood only about 30 centimeters tall. Its body was long and cylindrical, but quite rough around the edges with many protrusions and spikes lining its armor. Likewise, its feet were short and also equipped with spines and well developed toe-spikes, presumably also used for digging. Unlike the eyes of the Shovelpaws which reflected green in our flashlights, the eyes of this animal shone red, similar to those of crocodilians on Earth. Its most striking characteristic however, were the many striped quills located mostly on its tail, but also on its back and below the head.
When it noticed us, it raised its hindquarters and started rustling its tail quills together as a threat display, its metallic quality the same we heard before.
Ma He, our chief of security, who had come along for safety reasons, saw the animal first and called dibs on naming it, calling it citun (刺臀), stating it meant 'armoured porcupine' in Chinese. (He later confidentially revealed its true meaning to me - prickly butt)
The Citun (Batillomentum spinosus), at first mistaken for a basal dromaeopod, turned out to actually be a thelocaud, making it among the very few known Thelocauds in Dome 4. Besides its prickly legs, it also has a large, flat, chin-like protrusion on its mandible, which is also used when digging. We believe the sound this makes might be what alerted us in the middle of the night.
The fact that it has quills on both its soft tail and parts of its armor, indicates that these quills are derived from hairs and not scales. This could possibly mean that the citun is one of the closest relatives to the chionipods of Dome 5 (including ferntails and nivipods), although this theory needs more research to be confirmed.
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