r/hardspecevo

I’ve added a very crude drawing (I’ve yet to actually go through the steps of evolving the species from my Cambrian) but basically, it’s like some form of mammalian arboreal snake thing. I’ve got about 2 ideas in the hole for how I could justify the use of both it’s limb pairs into arm-like things

A) the arms were used as something to grapple the prey they caught, maybe they mostly preyed on the aerial species of their endemic forests, so they’d use their arms to grab onto the branch so they wouldn’t fall off in an ensuing fight should they not immediately grapple the prey entirely, and the arms were used to actually grab the prey

B) They evolved to be durovores, and evolved the tail as to move around, while freeing up the limb pairs to work at breaking apart the bones and hardshells plant-things of their habitats as to eat the nutrients under their coatings (bone marrow for example, maybe the meat of shelled animals should they be small enough for such a thing to be viable enough)

In either case, I wanted to know if such a body plan would even be feasible for such an idea. I’m not entirely sure of the ergonomics of it, and whether running essentially 4 normal limbs, and a 5th limb that’s 80% of their mass is thermodynamically safe in an environment warmer than earth (I have the planet graphed out and it’s mostly about 6°F warmer globally compared to Earth should I have done my math correctly)

On top of this, I was thinking that it’d be similar to certain pillbugs in how they’d curl up into a ball w/ a shell of some form to protect from predators (likely keratin for an animal to be in any way sizable to larger sized snakes) though that one I’m a little iffy on. I truly just want to add in a sophantic species to my sci-fi project that deviate from the stereotypical humanoid bipedal tetrapod, w/o foresaking tetrapodal fauna, and knowing that such an idea could be plausible would really help me on my first ever scientifically accurate spec-evo project I’m planning on going this far on. I might even come back and offer updates if it all goes well lol!