The spikemouths’ eccentricity as a species went beyond their teeth: Unlike most sharpteeth, they almost never hunted other dinosaurs (though an occasional egg or hatchling was not completely out of the question). The chief staple of their diet was fish, which they speared with their unique projecting teeth. They also ate other aquatic creatures such as sand creepers and river pinchers (crayfish). Away from water, they hunted buzzers and crawlers, and small scaly and fuzzy animals as well. However, their bizarre dentition meant that they were best suited to catching slippery swimming prey.
And while they were retiring creatures that were even more disinclined to associate with other dinosaurs than most, spikemouths were a rare example of a species that was predominantly bilingual; most of them learned to speak and comprehend Leafeater from an early age in order to recognize their herbivorous neighbors’ calls of alarm if and when they sighted a more dangerous sharptooth (or worse, a bellydragger) that could threaten the spikemouths themselves. They also had a unique dialect of their own, which would come off as strange and distinctly accented to a sharptooth of any other species that might happen to hear it, but would be understandable to them. (That was another advantage of knowing Leafeater; since most sharpteeth didn’t understand it, a group of spikemouths could use it to alert one another and disclose the safest escape route without the predator comprehending.) The native habitat of the spikemouths was the jungles of the distant south, here they made their home alongside rivers and bodies of water that were rich in fish. They were more social than many sharpteeth, but spent relatively little time side-by side, instead keeping in touch with one another with shrill, eerie hissing and screeching cries. Few spikemouths ever traveled far from their jungle homelands, and any that did would be an unprecedented sight for all but the most well traveled of northern dinosaurs.
Yet even the spikemouths’ remote territories were feeling the effects of the environmental changes that had impacted so many other dinosaurs. The river whose banks this clan had called home for generations had completely dried up for the first time in living memory, and with it the fish that they relied on. The family had been faced with a difficult decision: leave the only home they had ever known in search of a new source of food, or wait and hope for the water to return as their jungle habitat withered around them. The Great Night Circle had barely had time to complete a cycle before they had made their choice. Since then the family had traveled hundreds of miles, never straying far from the river, following it upstream in the hopes that it would lead them to a new home. Along the way they foraged in the drying groves of vegetation along its banks, and scavenged the desiccated carcasses of whatever stranded aquatic creatures they found lying in the riverbed. On a few lucky occasions, they had found a depression in the riverbed deep enough to still hold a substantial quantity of water, and in it, a few fish. On those occasions they had stayed by the pool until they had fully depleted its fish population, knowing that returning to it was not an option. But it had been a long time since the spikemouths had had one of those lucky breaks. The arid region though which they were currently traveling offered little food, and the family’s journey was growing increasingly uncomfortable. And yet they marched onward, driven only by hope, desperation, and the fear of death in this forbidding new world.
