'While once undisputed apex predators in the Therocene, the shrarks have gradually become displaced by various predatory marine hamsters as time went on. This is not to say that the shrarks are a dying clade: on the contrary, they continue to flourish in a vast array of almost a hundred different species, none quite as big as the megaprawns of the Therocene seas, but much more diverse and trending on smaller and more agile hunters that dwell in reefs, open seas, and abyssal depths alike. The most widespread of them, the silver reefshrark (Argentocarcharocaris zigra), still grows to lengths of up to a meter long, and is armed with a saw-toothed rostrum and pincer-like fore-claws that mimic a set of jaws for seizing prey, which includes shrish, pescopods, skwoids, searrels and marine rattiles.
In response to this widespread predator's armaments, many marine rattiles in turn have developed varied defenses in order to defend themselves, such as being faster swimmers, developing offensive weapons or being well-armored. Perhaps the most heavily-defended of them is the geartooth seashingle (Odontochelonimys daiei), a specialized mockjelly-eater which, in addition to its namesake multi-cusped teeth that it uses to catch its soft, jelly-like prey, sports a pair of modified teeth on its lower jaw in males, which they use to joust over territory. The loss of mammary glands in rattiles and the secondary re-evolution of parental care in various lineages has then thrust the role of doting parent onto the male geartooths. When threatened by reefshrarks, young geartooths instinctively huddle underneath their father's underbelly, while he spins and rotates his body to always present his armored back in spite of whichever direction the reefshrark attacks: his carapace, made from multiple separate pieces of horn-like keratin, is not only durable and resistant to injury--but is also rounded in a flattened dome-like shape that is both hydrodynamic and difficult to gain a firm grasp on, with sharp bites harmlessly sliding off. In addition to defense, their tusk-like lower teeth can inflict serious wounds onto an attacker, able to pierce a reefshrark's tough chitinous exoskeleton.'
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