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Mur-rur Lions of Disco-654

When the Paragon dimension-hopping shuttle craft landed on what passed for planet Earth in the parallel world catalogued as Discovery-654, they found and began examining the bizarre floral life around their landing site and the geology of the unstable ground beneath them.   They sent out Crewmember #4, an artificial man named Diego, to race around the surrounding lands.   He theorized where he might find fauna on this planet, but it found him first.   What looked very similar to a lion from our world pounced on him from its hiding place in the tall grass-like plants. It of course immediately clamped it jaws on the robot's face and attempted to rend his aluminum outer shell with its hind claws to no avail, assuming robot's do not have fragile egos when they get thrown into the dirt.   Fortunately for Diego, the omnivorous specie's hunger was closely tied to its sense of smell, and the smell of aluminum, regardless of the dimension from which the aluminum came, was not on the menu.   Fortunately for the human members of the crew, the otherworldly scent of their otherwise very edible flesh was similarly unpalatable, (although if the beast had been starving, it may certainly have decided differently).   So they thought.   Later expeditions to Disco-654 would learn how to communicate intelligently with the lion-like ambush-predators. They called themselves the Mur-rur.   Though they had developed near-human intelligence, the nearly constantly shifting ground of their world (as well as their lack of opposable thumbs) gave them little opportunity to develop tools, written records, nor any appreciable technology.   They did however have an extensive oral history and poems recording all collected Mur-rur knowledge, including a complicated error-checking system in which historians checked for any discrepancies in their recollection of any of the historical and scientific poems by comparing with each other and using a pair of Checksums, one which counted the number of words in a poem, and one which counted the number of syllables. If an historian found their recollection of a story did not match the memorized number of words that should have been in the story, they would consult other historians (preferably two who had not learned the story directly from the same teacher, per their tradition) and memorize the story again using the version which matched the checksums.   Young Mur-rur are born hairless but develop a full coat in days, including in the case of male ones, a thick and luxurious mane.   Mur-rur have a deep sense of responsibility for keeping their ever-changing environment in balance. And keeping down the number of Mur-row Parasites populating the planet, (their natural enemy due to the lack of "sense of balance" found in the Mur-row).
Incidentally, the word "they" has been commonly used to refer to a single person of unspecified gender since Shakespeare's time. I learned that on https://www.thesaurus.com/e/grammar/they-is-a-singular-pronoun/   The more you know...

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