Creature Feature

Draft of idea of creature which lives in a forest and hunts humans.
[also on http://silvereyedstarling.deviantart.com/]

They look like a cross between Monster Hunter's Gore Magala and Avatar's Viper Wolf.

Nova Regis, literally new king (of the jungle). Their feeding could be adapted from venom glands and hollow injecting fangs. The space in the head could be mainly their feeding organ which is formed as something like a single chambered heart. It opens to pull in blood or water, then contracts to expel the liquid into the stomach. A valve at each end prevents liquid from flowing the wrong way. If they breathe through a separate system like snakes or whales/dolphins do then they can feed and breathe freely. They might have one pumping chamber in the upper jaw and one in the lower which means that their lower jaw needs to be deeper, more like a hyena. It must not have the hollow under the chin which mammals tend to have, particularly horses. The jaw doesn't need to be particularly strong, if it was the fangs would break and the creature could starve. It has black algae in the scales which is fed by the sun to make sugar, but it doesn't get any minerals or protein from this so it needs to drink blood to get those. The sugar from the algae is what allows it to move around so quickly while all it consumes is blood and water. There is a real lizard (really truly in real life real) which has algae under the skin to produce sugar. It literally eats sunlight. A real life reptile photosynthesises. Ok, back to Nova Regis. Maybe in females the feeding organs, or at least some of it works in reverse to feed young. They wouldn't have milk because of them being reptilian in origin so the young would need to either be able to hunt from hatching or be fed. If they are pack animals then they would likely be fed, so the males can drink quickly and protect the females who take longer to feed with only half of the pumping capacity? No, take out the valve, possibly for both sexes. Maybe hatchlings are white, they would have some of the black algae dormant in their scales but it wouldn't have been able to grow shielded from sunlight inside the egg so it would show the white bone scales. Maybe each scale is sealed and a membrane against blood flow provides CO2 and collects sugar and oxygen. Maybe to feed and breathe they simply breathe through the mouth and drink only through the fangs. That would help with drinking water too, they only need the tips of their fangs in the water, not the whole muzzle, so if their jaw was like thylacine they could gape to breathe and dip just the fangs in the water. They would be more like Viper Wolves than anything else but scaled instead of black leather and with snake fangs instead of needle teeth. Young could be fed by bringing small prey to the den. That would leave piles of small bodies though, so they must support other predators who would know that they provide easy meals of meat but could easily overpower and kill if they wanted. Nova Regis can easily form a small pack to overpower any leopard or even tiger if they wanted to. The sugar from their black scales gives them the quick running energy to catch prey and the high protein diet fuels large brains. Their heads would be fairly small though to get in the scrum at feeding time. So maybe their brains are inside the body where it can grow large without a bone casing. They would need some brain to process sight and sound but the stem could do that. The main brain could be in the abdomen with its own rib cage, or maybe they don't have a cranium in the head. It slid down the spine and ended up next to the heart, which would also keep it well fed with oxygen straight from the lungs, or sugar straight from the algae via the heart. That would mean that they can have small narrow heads because they don't carry a chunk of delicate goo in a box balanced on the top of their head. Brain damage would be less likely to happen or cause problems like that anyway, if most of the base functions of sight, sound, and basic behaviours were in the stem it wouldn't need a big brain all of the time, but being cold blooded they would maybe want something which produces heat inside their body. That would cut down on a lot of power use and heat. They can imitate speech, part of the story shows one animal following them and repeating phrases used rarely enough to pinpoint. I hope it gets turned into a (short?) film some day. They still have a tongue, and to speak they need air going through the mouth, but maybe quiet because the sound is made behind the throat and funnelled forwards instead of propelled? If they breathe through the mouth still then they would be able to vocalise. Maybe they chatter in the the local language, but as mixed up phrases with clear emotions like when people are scared or angry, possibly shouted for it to reach the forest easily. They might copy stuff like 'are you trying to get us all killed?' And 'Now everyone will go hungry because of you'. Maybe at some point a young man had been working in the field and had done something wrong and been driven into the forest because the crops failed and the creatures kept telling him over and over that everyone would be hungry because of him. Speaking would be included in the story with a particular phrase mentioned 'You hear that?' Or local language for 'they're all around us'. I like the thylacine jaw idea with the fangs delicately dipped in a stream.