The-Episiarch on DeviantArthttps://www.deviantart.com/the-episiarch/art/CuckRoo-182833564The-Episiarch

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CuckRoo

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This is something I made a while back, from a series of evolutionary thought experiments I call "Improbable Creatures". It was just a way to see how well I know my topic - evolutionary biology. The challenge was to come up with organisms that *could have* evolved but *have not* for one reason or another. As its name indicates, this species was partially inspired by cuckoo and cowbirds, but actually, from a purely functional level, it more closely resemble nicothoid copepods ([link]) which is a family of very unusual parasitic copepod which living in the brood pouch (call a marsupium) of other crustaceans. Nicothoids have a globular body which resembles the egg of the host which they feed on and they probably deserve their own drawing.

I thought of the CuckRoo as a brood parasitic marsupial; a dasyurid which sneaks up to a sleeping macropodid, give birth to relatively precocious babies which would crawl into the pouch, kill and/or devour the young and take over. Since drawing this "Improbable Creature" I found out about the Cuckoo Catfish (Synodontis multipunctatus) which has a broadly similar life history strategy and life-cycle to what I originally envisioned for the CuckRoo, only aquatic. [link]

Looks like evolution is far more inventive than I can ever be!
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PTParmenTOONS's avatar

I mispronounced it as CUCKroo (instead of KOOK-roo)