Pneumofelis and its kin

Pneumofelis is my Brother Solomon's creature in Mudland (it competed with Isaac's Archognath) and was also one of the first animals to colonize land. Solomon became amphibious at the very beginning of the Devonian period (or its Mudlandish equivalent, anyway) for the sole purpose of briefly being the dominant land carnivore (despite his being only 7 inches long), as their was no other organism on land to compete with him. As a result, his species rapidly diversified into numerous forms, many of which, ironically, grew to compete with him for role of apex predator.

1. This is Pneumofelis itself ("Pneumofelis" means "lunged cat". This animal had undeveloped lungs and was certainly not a cat, so I have no idea why Solomon chose this name). It was a cold-blooded, slow-moving, skin-breathing salamander-ish thing with a crest blatantly ripped off from James Cameron's Avatar and hilariously tiny legs. It has a ring of six fleshy tentacles around the mouth, which hide a powerful pair of sideways jaws underneath. It was an opportunist, mostly preying on things that died on Mudland's treacherous shores or attacking the larva or eggs of its contemporaries.

2. and 3. are larval forms of, respectively, Pneumofelis and its close cousin, Anticelysia (number 6).

4. The macropredatory Lunops. This animal is discussed under more detail at karkharokles.deviantart.com/ar…

5. The underlying cartilaginous skeleton of Lunops. (at this point in the game, none of Solomon's kin had developed true bones. He was the first to do so in the very next turn).
I love designing weird skeletons for things, and this one has a very cool structure. Remind me to draw a better, possibly labelled version sometime.

6. Anticelysia was an odd organism. It lived almost its entire life underground, using its sensitive nose to find carcasses on the surface, then burrowing up beneath them and dragging them down into a complex system of tunnels (it even once tried to steal a fresh kill directly from underneath a predator's nose by this technique). It was sort of like a mole, but, due in part to its inhabitation of extremely wet soils and in part to its lack of bones, it moved through the earth in a very fluid manner, almost like swimming.

7. Macrautaploida  was even more bizarre. This is a highly derived relative of Anticelysia that regenerted into an aquatic organism, preying on tiny invertebrates in scummy freshwater pools. The same movements that allowed its ancestors to burrow have endowed Macrautaploida with a the ability to swim, and it has gone even further, almost completely losing its limbs to become a sort of tentacled eel.

Pneumofelis occurs on this page karkharokles.deviantart.com/ar… , and this gallery itself is explained more coherently here karkharokles.deviantart.com/ar…