Tikakatik (5e Creature)

Huge beast, unaligned

Armor Class 16 (natural armor)
Hit Points 203 (14d12 + 112)
Speed 30 ft. (40 ft. while underwater)

Skills Perception +4
Senses passive Perception 14
Languages —
Challenge 10 (5,900 XP)

Dense. The tikakatik always sinks in water. It ignores the extra movement cost for moving through water. The tikakatik cannot use the dash action while on land.

Hold Breath. The tikakatik can hold its breath for 1 hour.

Mud Strider. The tikakatik ignores difficult terrain imposed by swamp environments.

Wetland Camouflage. The tikakatik has advantage on Dexterity (Stealth) checks made in swamp terrain or while underwater.

During Kaimere's Tyrant Dynasty, tyrannosaurs were the dominant predators, with their offspring filling up the space of predators between typical mesopredators and their adults at the top. This place on the food web is known to Kaimeren naturalists as a "vassal predator," and while juvenile tyrannosaurs filled most of the niches, several other genera took the mantel as well at this time. Entelodonts were omnivores but still held the niche along with several ceratosaurs, including noasaurs^[1] and abelisaurs^[2], and eudromaeosaurs that were simialr in size and build to utahraptor. When the dynasty came crashing down during the Dynastic Extinction, each of these clades stepped up to the plate and each claimed a mantel. The entelodonts took to the prairies, as did abelisaurs along with the wetlands, and the dromaeosaurs the forests and each got massive. Their dominion over these lands was absolute until the robust monarch megaraptorans came to Kairul from Ni'khar, and while it was not the wiping of the slate it may seem, they did manage to force the resident predators into extinction or specialization. The latter is the path of the wetland abelisaurids, who are survived in modern times in Ziphonodon champsophagus, or as it is known in the Kairulan language shared by the Assembly, the Tikakatik: the "Crocodile Cannibal."
Crocodile Cannibal and More While abelisaurids did expand onto the prairie to give the bokodu substantial competition, some of the most abundant abelisaurids were in the wetlands where they found great diversity, from short jawed armored prey specialists to large headed species with cutting teeth for taking large game. Largest of the latter group is Ziphonodon, which has changed very little in the past 10 million years after attaining the conventional theropod maximum of 12 meters in length and 8-12 tons in size. The lack of change over such a long timeframe is also a sign of their success, as the tikakatik is the most abundant modern species of this genus to date and the apex predator of many Kairulen wetlands.
Their powerful legs are short to reduce drag as they jog through shallow water, and when in deeper water they sink thanks to dense bones and minimal pneumatization which allows them to run along the bottom, their fluked tail adding to thrust as they charge. Their teeth are long and heavily enameled, not only armed primary serrations but secondary serrations along the edges of their cutting surfaces. Unsurprising based on there teeth, Ziphonodon are specialists of megafauna, indeed taking crocodiles but also running down the semiaquatic rhinoceros and giant leptoceratopsids^[3] that the share the habitat with. While Titanophoneus cuts with forward and backward slicing bites, Ziphonodon cuts with the raw power of the second strongest bite of any dinosaur in Kaimere, only losing to kurajaku bulls due to their tremendous size. By far the largest prey on the menu of the tikakatik is the moose drake alkeceratops, a chasmosaurine^[4] ceratopsid of impressive size even among a clade known for huge, armored beasts. While their horns are designed to spar with other bulls of their kind, they are still plenty good enough weapons to skewer a tikakatik and the duels between these two heavyweights of their clades, each between 10 and 12 tons, harkons back to the rivalry between tyrannosaurus rex and triceratops of old.
Contested Kings of the Mud Unlike Known World noasaurs^[5] where females nearly double the mass of males, bull Ziphonodon are larger the substantially larger sex, due to the fact cows need to come on land to lay their eggs. Tikakatik bulls can move about on land but are unable to run due to their density and when on land much use ambush to hunt, something they can do given the lack of titanosaurs meaning the forests are much thicker than normal. While cows must go onto land to nest, they still nest in wetlands rather than fully dry land to stay close to their food sources. As such, they nest on islands that are high enough above the waterline that groundwater won't seep into their nests, but finding territory where such nesting opportunities coincide with large game is not an easy task. This makes cows the substantially more violent sex with regards to territorial defense, despite being substantially smaller than bulls. Bulls often travel so as to not deplete the prey of females, so a bull's territory must instead intersect with that of several cows and often has a patch of forested land included in it.
Megaraptorans of the genus Thanatobates arrived in Kairul 6 million years ago and, while not an absolute and swift turnover as it may seem, quickly established themselves as apex predators. However, they did not invade the wetlands, due to being lightly built and reliant on more solid ground, and so the tikakatik's habitat was largely unchanged and they enjoyed another 4 million years without contest for the niche of apex predator. This was not to last however as 2 million years ago came an invader from the west: Kurajaku. The enormous bulls carve deep channels through shear size alone and females draw males ever deeper into the marshes, making them the undisputed apex predators and meaning the tikakatik must avoid deeper rivers where the bulls reside. In modern times however, they have achieved a tenuous partitioning: females and young male kurajaku are more often competition as opposed to outright predators to Ziphonodon, and being similar in size means they do on not have as extreme a disparity in combat prowess. There is paritioning also in niche, with the more generalist kurajaku females preferring large fish and leaving the big game to the tikakatik. Young megaraptorans do remember their enemies however and bull kurajaku are known to explicitely hunt Ziphonodon with prejudice. Even so, the tikakatik is still documented in Kairul's wetlands with healthy enough populations not considered endangered and the crocodile cannibal holds on proud as the last of this lineage of anchient lords.