Salamander

Large, semi-intelligent species known for affinity with fire. Have natural abilities that interact directly with the plane of fire, most typically the ability to breath fire. While humans tend to use fingers to section off dimensional tears, salamanders use their trio of prehensile, tentacle-like tongues to define a plane, from which fire spills forth. Salamander tongue is a rare delicacy in the midlands, and is traditionally considered to make one closer to fire. While very true in a macro sense over the course of generations, the individual benefit of consuming salamander tongue is marginal at best.
Most of the energy that a salamander consumes actually comes from magical means. They spend a lot of time lounging in the sun, drawing from the constant inferno in the plane of fire. Other than that, their diet primarily consists of lesser fire spirits- motes of barely living magical energy that pop up in the midlands, generally indistinguishable from slightly stronger rays of light or hotter burning flames to humans. They do occasionally consume animals such as spiderwolves and sheep, but these are supplementary food sources for most variants of salamander.
While they spend much of their time lazily sunbathing, Salamanders are fast. Their sticky foot pads allow them to scamper up cliffsides and down chasms to reach their prey.
Many salamanders coat themselves in a thick, oily fluid. While it does not burn in ordinary fires, a high enough temperature can ignite it, coating the salamander in flames. Salamanders tend to do this at regular intervals in order to clean potential parasites, or when under duress to protect themselves.

Hunting

Salamanders are huge- larger than most dinosaurs found in the Webthicket. Yet the midlanders successfully hunted them, while the dinosaurs remain such a prevalent environmental hazard that no foreign culture even bothers to fully conquer it (the Webthicket's historically a being mostly-independent vassal state to whatever great power exists in the region). Why is this? It comes down to defense mechanism. Salamanders are glass cannons- they're fast, and they have incredibly powerful fire attacks. However, past that, they have little armor beyond bulk. While they can theoretically do quite a bit of damage through physical means, it's unintuitive towards them: they almost always default towards fire attacks, even when said attack has no visible effect (sort of the equivalent of repeatedly firing a gun at a target which proves to be immune). As a result, they actually do very little damage to Fire-aligned individuals. Once one person discovered the tongue consumption method- perhaps through a sick, wounded, or even recently deceased salamander, it snowballed from there.
Obviously, salamanders still aren't defenseless against those aligned to fire: their prehensile tongues are more than strong enough to ragdoll people. The old tribes which hunted them typically made use of a borderline-sacrificial vanguard which would hold the brunt of their attention with javelins and such while other groups could close in.
Meanwhile, the Webthicket's megafauna have scaly armor capable of turning aside steel. They've got no such critical weakness that grows more easily exploitable with each one of them killed.