Stony Goat

Stony goats diverge from their common cousins via their rock-like horns and unique appetites. These meek creatures love to eat mineral ores, using teeth tougher than diamonds to grind down rocks and metals. The indigestible components, such as refined chunks of metal and precious stones, coagulate into a cud the goat regurgitates to further ruminate on. In emergency situations, stony goats can even drain nutrition from their cud. These properties might make stony goats excellent companions for miners and metalworkers; however, the beasts are quite rare and famously difficult to train.

Stony goats are jumpy creatures with a prey animal's wide field of view and a strong survival instinct. They also have a unique defense mechanism: when startled, stony goats temporarily petrify into solid stone, dissuading predators through inedibility. This combination of weak nerves and tremendous climbing ability often leads to travelers discovering what appears to be a lone statue of a goat in an otherwise unoccupied mountainous area.

Keen observers can discern a stony goat's recent diet via the mineral flakes that form in the goat's horns, such as light silver streaks indicating a meal of dawnsilver ore. Collectors often hunt stony goats and display horns with rare properties. If a stony goat destroys its cud for emergency nutrition, its horns appear as solid chunks of the minerals it consumed for about an hour before reverting to their rock-like norm.