Written by T.K. Sivgin, illustrated by DemonicManchot
At long last one of the teams managed to record one of the buggers that have been haunting us from the lower decks (though at a cost)! And my god is it hideous! It was encountered during an investigation into one of the black forests, sunning itself in the early morning hours on a dark log in the faint light of the red dwarf. While still in a low metabolic state, Team Lidenbrock approached the organism, trying to study it up close, but in the process must have agitated it. The organism began to attack at an alarming speed, chasing the team-members into a pitch-black tunnel, where, to their surprise, it could still sense them effortlessly. In an ambush, it pounced on a poor sod, who then had his hand bitten off and was severely poisoned by the animal’s venomous saliva. Though he ultimately survived, the permanent nerve damage caused by the toxin has left him paralyzed from the neck down.
The archhead (Nodopeton fosteri) as we call it, is a roughly wolf-sized animal. Despite its four-leggedness and somewhat reptilian disposition, it is neither a tetrapod nor a sarcopterygian. The structure of the limbs, head-joint and skeleton in general suggest that this is in fact a terrestrial placoderm, but of a wholly different kind than the antiarch bipods we are used to from Dome 4. Skin samples and remains of dead individuals have instead shown us that our suspicions were indeed correct and that the notorious sonar-haunters of the lower decks are distant relatives of the sabephs, possibly making them phyllolepids if our cladists are to be believed. Phyllolepida was a rather obscure clade of placoderms back in the Devonian. They were catfish-shaped bottom-dwellers with a flat head who probably preyed on smaller fish by ambushing from the sand like modern stargazers. More importantly, they had highly reduced, if not entirely absent eyes. This seems to have had dire consequences, because somewhen in the last 380 million years somewhere on the Rhynia, a group of these fish managed to go on land and produce this monstrosity. Like its ancestors, the archhead has no eyes. It also has no ears. Instead where such organs would be expected, the archhead has four nostrils and a single arch made of bone growing out of its skull, unlike anything seen on a vertebrate on Earth. The arch seem to be filled with liquid and regularly emanates an ultrasound ping, which only leaves open the possibility that it serves as an echolocation organ. A highly advanced one at that, as it is not comparable to the sonar organs of whales, bats or even really the melons of the sabephs. It might be homologous with the latter, but terrestrial life in what was perhaps total or near-total darkness for hundreds of millions of years has produced a bone-contraption that at best resembles the arches of a mammalian inner ear if it were externalized and expanded over most of the skull.
The rest of the head is elongated and the jaws beak-like. It seems adapted for catching smaller prey, perhaps by snatching and dragging them out of narrow holes and tunnels, The front-limbs end in fingerless stumps, similar to what is seen in the bipods, though they nonetheless have large claws likely meant for digging. Close to the log the animal was caught resting on, there was indeed a large hole burried into a mud-mount, which was probably the archhead’s burrow. Not much else can be said while watching the footage and listening to the account of the survivors. What is a bit concerning is that this is probably not the main phantom we have been looking for. The archhead is a cold-blooded animal, almost robotic in its movements, and its sonar pings at a rather leisurely rate. Many of the signals we have picked up however are very lively and rapid, more similar to what one would expect fron cetaceans or bats.
Looking at the video of the animal the underground team has sent us, I feel a sort of disturbance running down my spine. This is an eyeless creature with a skull almost handcrafted by Dali, adapted to life in a forest of black plants on the inside of an alien construct orbiting a red dwarf. And yet we are related. We are both vertebrates, separated in time and space but tied by blood. Had Earth orbited a different star than our G-type sun, might the archhead have been me?
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