Spikemander
A small, bipedal, orange reptile with a back covered in bony spikes. Spikemanders used their intimidating spines to fend off predators--sometimes even ejecting them as medium speed, which proved to be strong enough to pierce any soft flesh at close range. They were capable of rolling up into a ball, wrapping their tails around themselves in a manner so that there is little to no way a predator could attack without piercing themselves on the spines.
Spikemanders’ main diet consisted of leaf litter invertebrates. They would spend nearly 16 hours a day foraging for grubs, beetles, worms, pseudoscorpions, spiders, and anything else hiding under the leafy blanket along forest floors. They required vast amounts of nutrients to grow and often replenished their spikes.
Unique to spikemanders was their method of birth. Unlike most reptiles, spikemander females would lay a single embryonic unit with a rubbery coating. After digging a hole in the ground, the embryo was placed within and fertilized by the male shortly after. The male covered the embryo once done, and the parents ccould now continue to hunt in the surrounding area. Kept warm and safe by the earth itself, the spikemander embryo grew in the ground, extending mycorrhizae-like roots to absorb nutrients from the soil almost like a plant. The parents in the meantime continued to guard the nesting site from above, preventing opportunistic creatures from freely digging up the growing embryo.
After roughly a week, the embryo was fully grown: the sac would burst, as a nearly fully grown spikemander’s spikes pushed their way through the lining. It would dig itself up and out of the earth, briefly meeting with its parents before departing to live its life on its own. The parents then moved on to a new area to raise another offspring.