Toraton

Toratons are an giganitic species of tortoises indigenous to north-central Nioa and parts of Hakoa and Iroa. They are the largest herbivores on the Nioan continent and appear to have been magically modified during the Early Mithril Erain order to survive the grueling conditions of the Marrow Desert. This was likely the result of Temekanian bio-engineering, who used toratons as a cold-blooded beast of burden that shared the megafauna traits of domesticated Hakoan elephants. Today, toratons have adapted to life in the Marrow Desert without their Temekanian masters and are an important part of Marrow kobold culture.

Basic Information

Anatomy

As a gigantic species, toratons are required to have an altered biology to their ancestral cousins. Unlike common species of tortoises, toratons support themselves with legs that lie directly beneath the base of their body instead of splayed out to the sides like most reptiles.
Early toratons appear to have lost their shell, with only vestigial bony structures remaining to help support the massive bulk of the giant creature. However, after they underwent arcane alterations, toratons re-evolved their ancestor's keratinous shells. However, unlike a tortoise's shell—which is used for defense against predators—a toraton's shell is hollow, with a flexible roof plastron running along its back and connecting to a second outer shell with large holes inside it. These hollow spaces increase the surface area of the animal and allows air to flow along the massive body of the toraton, helping it keep cool in the hot Marrow sun.
The toraton is a cold-blooded reptile, so it does not face the problem of overheating that would confront a similarly-sized mammal.

Genetics and Reproduction

Like tortoises, toratons lay eggs. Male toratons breed with females each at the end of each dry season, which allows females to stock up on nutrients before laying eggs at the end of the wet season. While most tortoises mate on top of each other, toratons do not because a female will not be able to support 120 tons on her back. They solve this problem by mating back to back. They back into each other, and face away from each other, during courtship and mating. Once the male and female are back to back, they both raise their tails to reveal their cloaca, and the two cloaca actually touch, and that is when sperm is transferred from one to the other.
Unlike most other testudines, toratons have parental bonds with their eggs and their young. Following the wet season, female and male toratons journey deep into the desert to lay their eggs. Female toratons then leave to raise the herd's young while male toratons take turns guarding the creches of eggs from predators. Toraton eggs take up to nine years to hatch, and so each year new eggs are added to the creche and new youngsters are escorted back to the herd by a rotation of devoted adult male toratons.
Young toratons emerge from eggs so tough that the mother helps them out by cracking the shell with her beak. Before they graduate to eating true greens, hatchling toratons will often eat feces from the adults in order to acquire the essential microflora to digest their low-quality herbivorous diet.

Growth Rate & Stages

Toratons eggs are a little less than a meter in length an when a toraton hatches, they too are only a meter or so long. Toratons grow slowly, making their long adolescent period fraught with danger. Most wild toratons reach sexual maturity around age thirty, by which time they have quadrupled their size and are now immune to most predators. Adult toratons reach their maximum size of seven or more metres at half a century old.

Ecology and Habitats

Nioan toratons spend most of their lives traveling across the great expanses of the Marrow Desert in search of food and water. They are specially adapted to survive in the hot, arid conditions of Nioa and can even cross its treacherous quicksand seas thanks to its high body density and wide feet.

Dietary Needs and Habits

While massive, toraton biology is expertly crafted to use as little energy as possible while searching for food. During the summer floods, toratons can eat twice their body weight in a single week, and have all of those calories converted into special fat that can sustain them for months. Much of a toraton's diet consists of river reeds, tough cacti and palm branches, which they can strip off in seconds with their hug beaks. However, between meals, toratons can survive without food or water for up to a month.

Biological Cycle

Much of the year, toratons are found in the Marrow Desert, where their matriarchs lead them from oasis to oasis in search of food and water. Just before the summer floods, males in the herd begin their mating rituals and breed with the females so as to have the best chance of producing healthy offspring. Then during the summer floods, Nioan toratons return to the Niru River Valley, to feed on the abundant plant life and stock up on moisture before returning to wandering the desert for the rest of the year.

Additional Information

Social Structure

Toraton herds number up to thirty individuals and are led by the oldest and wisest matriarch. The matriarch uses her long memory of the great Marrow Desert to lead the herds to oases and back to the Niru River before the beginning of the summer floods. When a herd grows too large, the second oldest female takes half the herd and splits away from the original group. Female toratons stay with their herd for the rest of their lives, while male toratons frequently go many months between seeing their herd. This is because male toratons rotate the duty of guarding a herd's egg creche between them, and only leave their post at the creche when the herd returns to have the females lay their eggs, or when another male comes to relieve them of their duties. Male toratons are lower on the social ladder than females and usually die much younger than the females, rarely making it past forty years old.

Domestication

Toratons were first domesticated during the Early Mithril Era by the Temekanian Empire. The Temekanians used toratons as giant beasts of burden in areas where water was scarce and temperatures were too great for mammalian megafauna like elephants. They appear in Old Temekanian glyphs and murals and are depicted helping with the construction of pyramids and megastructures that the Temekanians are so famous for.
After the Reckoning of Temekan, the toratons were left without mortal masters and went feral in the Marrow Desert. They managed to adapt to this new lifestyle outside the cities of Temekan and remained wild despite the best efforts of domestication by the Palladians and the Marrowmen. However, around the Middle Palladian Era, a few communities of desert kobolds managed to form a symbiotic relationship with several herds of toratons.
Unlike the Temekanians, who used the toratons in construction and heavy industry, the Marrow Desert's kobolds use the toratons as mobile villages, literally living inside and atop the hollow shells of the beasts. These toraton villages travel from one oasis to another and are centers of trade where ever they go. When a toraton village arrives at an oasis, some of the kobolds remain behind to guard the toraton, which is at its most vulnerable to predation from bulettes and purple worms at this time, while others in the village set out to scavenge for supplies and materials. Some kobold villages operate like raiders while others bring trade and industry to isolated desert communities.
The toratons themselves benefit quite a bit from this arrangement. Kobolds help keep parasites out of a toraton's hollows and grooves as well as give the toratons an offensive option against the few predators that do hunt them. This is because, though kobolds themselves are not much of a threat against bulettes or purple worms, they do act as delicious distractions and can employ creative pack tactics to defend the village, while a toraton's only recourse against a subterranean predator is slowly fleeing. Additionally, some toraton creches are now protected not by male toratons, but by loyal gangs of kobolds. This allows for male toratons to remain with the village herds, increasing the numbers of an animal that depends on "safety in numbers" to defend against its predators.

Uses, Products & Exploitation

Today, kobolds use toratons as mobile villages, living within and atop the hollows and grooves of their shells. Kobolds don't use toraton parts in any of their products seeing them as too large and too important to their culture to hunt or use for meat. Kobolds occasionally use the eggshells of toraton offspring in crafts and armor, but do not breed toratons expressly for that purpose. In fact, in kobold culture, the abandonment of a toraton egg or the loss of one is punishable by death or exile.

Geographic Origin and Distribution

The highly modified Nioan toratons are found in the Marrow Desert and Niru River Valleys of Nioa. Other species of toratons, including river toratons and swamp toratons can be found more humid environments of Hakoa and Iroa.

Perception and Sensory Capabilities

Toratons have reasonable hearing, sight, and smell but their best tool for detecting movement is their feet. Toratons have very sensitive pads on the undersides of their massive, tree-trunk legs which allows them to sense vibrations through the ground.

Civilization and Culture

History

A modern paleontologist looking back through the toraton's natural history would find an absolute mess of a fossil record. Within the span of a few thousand years, the toraton's closest ancestors appear to have undergone rapid growth, impossible through natural selection but without any strong evidence of domestication. Additionally, it would appear as though in gaining the massive size of the Sundered-Era toraton, the species first lost its hard shell and then re-evolved it in a new, hollow form. One explanation for this bizarre fossil record is that the toratons evolved from large, terrestrial tortoises similar to the Centrochelys sulcata or Carbonemys cofrinii and in the process lost their shells along with the loss of any natural predators. They then were genetically modified through arcane means to regrow their shells, not for defense, but for increased ventilation of their cores. This was likely done artificially by the Temekanians or some other highly advanced extinct civilization in order to maximize the amount of burdensome work a tamed toraton could accomplish. 
The Temekanian Empire does appear to have used toratons as beasts of burden as far back as the Early Mithril Era. They appear in Temekanian glyphic texts and temple reliefs as sturdy, reliable creatures that were used in the construction of the megastructures Old Temekan is famed for. In particular, they seem to have been used in the warmest regions of the Temekan Empire, while the mammalian megafauna of choice was the Hakoan elephant was used in the more temperate climes where they did not need to overheat.
With the Reckoning of Temekan, toratons were left without mortal guidance and left to run feral. They appear to have survived in the harsh conditions of the Marrow Desert by evolving unique ecological traditions, such as eating only during the wet season. During this period, several other mortal communities attempted to domesticate toratons once more. Though both the Marrowmen and the Palladian Empire had wrangled other gigantic creatures as beasts of burden, neither were able to find much success with the Marrow's population of toratons. In fact, it ended up being the far technologically-inferior kobold peoples of the Marrow that managed to form a sustained relationship with the toratons. This may be because, unlike the Marrowmen and Palladians, the kobolds of the Marrow acted less as domesticators and more as symbiotes, with the toratons massively benefiting from the mere presence of a kobold community. To this day, the small populations of toratons that exist in the Marrow Desert remain only in the care of the kobold clans.

Scientific Name

Centrochelys toratones gigantics

Origin/Ancestry

Nioan

Lifespan

>70 years

Average Height

7.6-7.2 metres

Average Weight

100-120 tons

Average Length

11.3-12.0 metres