Ao-Onian Merman by WorldBuildersInc

Here you are, !!
In the shallower waters, large amounts of mounted algae grow, along with swimming forms. Crustaceans find this great to hide in, but difficult to form large populations from, and so there are few predatory scuttlebeasts. Instead another form of aquatic animal takes advantage of this habitat, and unlike them it is a vegetarian. Meet the mermen (Sirenocentaurus cyanicus), the resident marine herbivores of this climate. Like the enormocentaurs, they are highly derived centaurs, which have become specialised towards a position. Whereas the enormocentaurs became gigantic herbivores though, the mermen have developed into strange aquatic creatures. Terra Incognetia’s isolation from the other continents is profound and ancient, and so they have had many millions of years to evolve. The ancestors of enormocentaurs and mermen diverged from one another well over 70 million years ago, as the oldest fossils of both groups dated to 72 and 73 million years ago respectively. The common ancestor appears to have been semi-aquatic, to some extent, which may explain some of the centaur’s features such as their more hairless skin, webbing on the arms and barrel like lower body. While the enormocentaurs went back onto land, the ancestors of mermen went the other direction, and became fully marine creatures with a very unusual appearance. The back and middle pair of legs have developed into steering flippers for moving about when in water, with the back ones heavily reduced. The tail is fluked like that of a whale and allows decent underwater movement. The front limbs are the most interesting, as the arms are still fairly functionable, and possess large claws used to move and scratch at algae easily, like the claws of the aquatic ground sloths. The head is quite long as is the neck of the animal, and on the top of the head lies a crest similar in shape to a shark’s fin, about 50cm long and 60cm tall in males and 40cm long and 24cm tall in females. An adult merman measures about 8m long and weighs in the region of 3 tonnes or more. The colour of the beasts is a stony grey colour, though algae growing on them alter their tint significantly as well. They are much more solitary than the scuttlebeasts and only come into contact with one another during the mating season. The male’s claws are more than double the size of those on females, reaching up to 1m in length (compared to the 40cm of female claws), and their crests will turn a bright yellow during the mating season, allowing effective sexual display. They manage to both resemble sirenians, and be completely different to them at the same time.