Bulette

The bulette (pronounced boo-LET, byoo-LET, boo-LAY, or byoo-LAY ), also known as a landshark, was a particularly loathsome creature that lived in the Starwood area of the forest of Cormanthor. Feared and hated by most living creatures, bulettes were extremely dangerous, burrowing unseen beneath the soil before erupting up at an unexpected moment to seize their prey. Dwarves called the bulette a ghohlbrorn.

Description
Bulettes were sometimes supposed to be a bizarre cross between an armadillo and a snapping turtle, though there was little evidence to support this theory. Bulettes were heavily armored, however, like either creature, and had a powerful jaw mechanism for snapping up their unsuspecting prey. In many cases, a bulette will swallow its prey whole, consuming their victims clothing, weapons, and other equipment along with the creature itself, which the bulette can in fact digest successfully through the use of powerful stomach acid.

Bulettes were covered head to toe in armor. Around the head and rear, this armor was a blue-brown color, while in-between the hue might range from gray-blue to blue-green. Areas around the eyes were slightly darkened, with the eyes themselves being a yellow color with blue-green pupils. However, while bulettes can see in perfect darkness with these eyes they were not a bulette's primary method of sensory perception. Instead, bulettes typically hunt through the detection of vibrations in the ground, moving towards the source of the movement when their hunger is aroused.

Behavior
The male bulette's mating ritual was fairly complicated, involving the killing of deer and boars, these being placed in a wide circle. He then digs a shallow pit in the middle of the circle, and lines it with the bones of the animals he has killed. Over the course of about a week, the bulette slowly grinds the bones in the pit into a fine powder. He then digs underneath the pit and waits for the female.

The female usually comes along within a month after being attracted by the odor, at which point the bulettes mate. It takes only a day and a half for the female to lay around a dozen eggs, covered in spines, and by the next morning, they have hatched. During hatching, the female bulette makes a noise like an elephant. Once hatched, the newborn bulettes immediately attack the mother, in an attempt to kill her. She fights back, and although she usually kills a few of the young, she succumbs to their attacks more often than not.

For the 48 hours immediately after the hatching of the eggs, the powder in the mating pit was saturated with fluid from the eggs, making it into a very effective fertilizer.

Extra
A bulette was a fearsome magical beast whose originswereunknown but has become a dangerous predator. They burrow through the soft earth, listening for potential prey and then erupting from the ground to consume their living targets. As they have a distinctive fin that cuts through the ground as it approaches, these creatureswereoften referred to as "land-sharks."

A bulette's body was covered in thick, layered plates. Its head was bullet-shaped, similar to that of a shark, with a massive mouth filled with multiple rows of razor-sharp teeth.

Appearances

 * Adventures:
 * Bloodstone Pass
 * City of the Spider Queen
 * Computer Games:
 * Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon
 * Neverwinter Nights
 * Pools of Darkness
 * Treasures of the Savage Frontier
 * Novels:
 * Storm of the Dead