Lyrona
"You know they're harmless, right?"
"Yeah I know, but they're still a little freaky."
"....You're a little freaky."
Treehangers
Usually found hanging by their tails in the jungles, lyrona are small, snake-like creatures with two arms near their head. Their arms end in four extremely sharp claws that they can use to pull themselves across the ground and grab objects, such as fruit. Their keen eyes pierce through the darkness, while its sensitive underbelly can detect tremors across the ground. While this makes them excellent trackers and provides them with a good amount of warning of predators, it also means that sudden noises and bright lights can frighten them. Lyrona are herbivorous and are not known to harm anyone unless provoked. They prefer to live in trees, but will settle for caves at times if there aren’t any suitable trees nearby. Like other reptiles, lyrona will bask in the sun when it can manage to break through the dense trees of the jungle, however it spends most of its time swinging across branches using its tail.Crawling, crawling
Lyrona are asexual and reproduce through parthenogenesis, meaning that they lay eggs and hatch them without any males around. They will always produce females and will never have twins, because while their genes are identical, their development forces gene expressions to change with each embryo. They don't live in familial groups of any kind, with mothers only staying with their offspring for the first few months of their lives before making them find their own homes. Lyrona are fully developed at about six months old, giving them a significant amount of time for them to find for themselves before they are capable of producing their own offspring. It isn't impossible for lyrona to stumble into a town in the middle of a jungle, however even if they do, they aren't hunted. They are merely corralled back out into the jungle for them to find their way home.
Lifespan
15 years
Average Weight
2 to 3 lbs
Average Length
Approx. 2 meters
What lovely critters! Interesting that they are asexual and don't require... hell, don't even have any males. What makes me wonder, though, how does the gene pool of the Lyrona stay healthy when the hatchlings are essentially copies of the parent? Or has that something to do with those gene expressions? Keep up the good work! :D
Well, sort of like a cell duplicating, there's nothing bad to get into their gene pool, the only reason that it even changes in the first place is to prevent twinning so you don't have two identical lyrona. It's partly defensive and partly just kinda neat!