Originally posted on deviantArt, November 2020.

OG Description:

Right. So.
What the frag is a Cybertronian Insectivore?

Long story short, they're the subterranean predator that half raised feral Orion Pax that I came up with literally just to figure out a better way to explain how a mech might have survived the Cybertronian wilderness at a young age with minimal life experience. An Insectivore's primary food source is the larval and adolescent stages of Insecticons, though they are big and strong enough to take on an Insecticon warrior in times of desperation, as represented by Season One Optimus Prime sketched in up there.
Insectivores are also blind, getting around through a combination of echolocation and scent, much like a mole, and anything smaller than them that doesn't either A) immediately attack them, or B) smell like a fellow Insectivore tends to wind up eaten, as they can and will consume anything they can get their powerful jaws around.
Young Orion Pax, barely older than a kindergartner, was lucky in that the Insectivore that found him after his original family were killed had recently lost its own sparkling, and adopted the young mech as a surrogate.

Of course, this is all headcanon based off of the concept of feral!Orion Pax from Prime, and ended up an experiment to figure out if I could design a robot beast that could maybe exist on Cybertron in the Aligned universe.

Still love this design. :D