Cindertooth

Photoshop
I'll probably come back and play with this one more at some point, but for now I'm finally happy with it!
This is the much delayed result of the creature-by-committee poll I did a while back, where I asked people to vote for three things to splice together into one critter. The winners were Squirrel, electric toaster, and elephant. I'll admit it was a stumper for a bit, but I eventually figured out a good design- and then promptly got too busy to actually finish it until tonight.

The cintertooth is one of the stranger creatures found on the tundra of post-thermohaline Europe. Decended from squirrels, they have moved from living in trees, to eating them. In these massive herbivores, a rodent's powerful bite has been augmented by a bizarre adaptation: their upper and lower incisors grow in a continuous spiral with a large metal deposit running through them. In addition to reinforcing their teeth, allowing even hardwood to be easily chewed away, each of these naturally produced heating coils is connected to a powerful electical organ. This allows a cindertooth to briefly heat its tusks to several hundred degrees. They primarily use this to burn deadwood into more digestable (for a cindertooth) charcoal, but they also make for a painful lesson to any young predator mistaking a lone cindertooth for an easy target. Most large predators in cindertooth country feature at least one striped brand as a reminder. Fortunately, cindertooth mating season takes place during the snowy winter, as dueling males have a tendancy to accidentally set fire to the local foliage.