Small herbivore · herbivore · diurnal
Dryosaurus
Dryosaurus has one defence and it is not a weapon. The animal is a small, long-legged, beakless-jawed browser with no horns, no armour, no tail club and no bite worth mentioning against anything that seriously wants to eat it. What it has instead is an evade — a hard lateral break at full speed that costs it almost no momentum and costs a pursuing predator nearly all of theirs. Everything Dryosaurus does is arranged around getting to use that move on ground where it works.
Contract
- Diet
- herbivore
- Activity
- diurnal
- Social
- herd
- Group
- 3–10
- Growth
- 10.0 h
- Overpack
- migration only
Home ground
Should not settle
How this life is scored
Weights are derived from what the animal is, never templated — which is why no two species on this roster score the same way.
Evolutionary state
Recomputed from every completed life on the server. This section moves on its own.
GENERATION 1 · 0 LIVES ON RECORD · 0/40 TOWARD NEXT · DIVERGENCE 0.000
Current population: indistinguishable from founding stock.
Growth
Hatch to adult is 10.0 h. Parental dependency is not counted as growth — an animal that survived alone skipped part of its species' life, and the ontogeny term is what notices.
hatchling
1.5 h
1.5 h parental
burrow-bound; never far from cover
juvenile
2.5 h
0.5 h parental
subadult
3.0 h
adult
3.0 h
Signature abilities
Extracted from the shipped binary. A profile may not describe a move the game does not have.
Profile clauses
- Survival is the whole profile: this animal wins by being alive, and longevity dominates its ascendancy score.
- Evade is the signature verb — a Dryosaurus that trades bites instead of dodging is playing the wrong animal.
- Burrows are core habitat; denning behaviour is in profile and should be rewarded rather than read as inactivity.
Reference material
That constraint makes them the roster's most legible readers of terrain. A Dryosaurus grazing in the open is not relaxed; it is standing somewhere it has already worked out an exit from. They favour the seam between forest and clearing, where the canopy is close enough to break a line of sight in two strides but the understorey is open enough not to trip a running animal. Push a Dryosaurus into dense thicket and you have taken its evade away. Push it into true open plain and you have taken away the cover it evades toward. Both are how they die.
They live in loose aggregations rather than true herds — six to twelve animals spread across a browse line, each watching a different arc. There is no leader and no coordinated defence, because there is nothing to coordinate: when the alarm goes up the group does not close ranks, it detonates. Individuals scatter along pre-learned lines, which is why a predator that flushes a Dryosaurus group usually ends the encounter with nothing. The strategy only fails when something has already closed the exits.
Juveniles are the ones that make the mistakes, and their mistake is almost always the same one: they run in a straight line. The evade is a learned application of an instinctive move, and a young Dryosaurus that has not yet been chased properly will burn its stamina on speed instead of spending it on angles. Adults that survived that phase browse noticeably closer to cover than the ones that have not, and the population's mean distance-to-cover is a direct readout of how hard it has been hunted lately.
For the ecosystem, Dryosaurus is the calibration animal. It is what a mid-sized predator practises on and what a young apex learns to fail against. A server where Dryosaurus are easy to catch is a server where the predators have gotten faster or the cover has burned; a server where nobody can catch one is a server where the herbivores are winning. The number of them is less informative than how much work they cost.