ABCD I'd like to eat a tree

I'm fascinated by how the animators for TADC handle Caine's impossible anatomy so well. There's so much to balance and they've somehow engineered a solution for his expressions to hold during speech.

Was instantly inspired to draw my warriors version of this post by @insomniacrori ! (If you’re uncomfortable with the inspiration please let me know and I’ll delete this!)

I’m living for this ship omg also prototype of my cat!moon design

Tumblr don’t butcher the quality challenge (impossible) click for higher quality!

I forgot chatterfangs neck marking :,)

Mermaid Evolution

Mermaids are completely unrelated to humans, rather they are fish with adaptions in mimicry. The ancestor was a large, ancient fish that preyed on wayward sailors with disorienting shrieks.

As time went on, they rearranged their bodies and minds to more closely resemble humans. Their gills detached from their skull and created a resonating cavity that turned their shrieks to song. Their fins changed to resemble appendages, including splitting the base in two and creating a pouch that could be filled with water, resembling a human chest when displaying.

Be careful when sailing, and when you hear a song that sounds too beautiful for human lungs, it is. Alter your course, and pray it doesn’t follow.

Dragon Evolution || Creature Design || Worldbuilding

Anon: I’m not sure if you’ve touched on this before, but what are your thoughts on shoes for centaurs? Would they have classic horseshoes or would they wear booties that they can put on as needed? I adore all your posts, they give me so much inspiration!!

Ok I definitely have a few thoughts about shoeing centaurs!

In general I think centaurs definitely use horseshoes as we know them, but it's not nearly as common as how we shoe our own horses. Nailed on metal shoes are a pretty long term solution that require specialized maintenance, but they can't really be beat for protection and durability. So they're kinda like steel toed boots, mostly used by those with physically demanding jobs in rough terrain and punks. For shoe-inclined cultures like the merchants, sandals with hardened leather or wooden full foot soles are the preferred hoof-gear for the average taur as they can be easily customized and used to protect tender frogs or support healing cracks with medical shoes available to correct issues in addition to just looking so fashionable and most importantly- relatively easy to take off at the end of the day. Slippers are comfortable lightwear, leather sleeves that are maybe hardened on the bottom but only really good for tooling around town on cobbled streets, soft earth, or in a house or business. Mule shoes are called so because they make the hoof tall and narrow like a donkey's hoof and are pure fashion. Basically centaur clog heels, they require a precise custom fit to wear properly and usually greatly restrict mobility and so are a mark of high-society. Though the most extreme versions are worn at festivals by specially trained dancers, sometimes with sparking metal embedded in the bottom for extra flash. These are usually attached to nails in the hoof like metal shoes to try and keep broken legs to a minimum.

Riders in particular don't tend to wear any shoes at all, preferring to go barefoot to avoid the fuss and maintenance of any sort of footgear with their active lifestyles. Their culture in particular does not have much in the way of metallurgy and certainly not anything in the realm of infrastructure necessary to maintain regular shoeing. Pretty much the only shoes they wear are war shoes, with spikes on the bottom to really make infantry rethink getting close on the battlefield. But those are pretty rare, it's just not worth the expense and difficulty of ensuring you have a well-trained farrier on top of expensive iron in their culture. But of course there's always a few bigwigs willing to take the expense, particularly in the bigger herd-families who range further south near the Merchant city-states and have a passionate scion who can be encouraged to learn the practice and supported in their work!

The merchant culture on the other hand has the built in metal-heavy culture and infrastructure built in given their close relationship with dwarves so shoeing is a pretty common and easy practice.

Oh god, now I'm thinking of amputees and how those would work

Horses are SUPER fragile, or maybe more like delicately balanced.. but particularly their crazy spindle-legs which centaurs get to deal with! But a big part of why hurt legs are a death sentence for horses has less to do with “It kills them” and more to do with quality of life, which a centaur can get around! A horse with a broken leg doesn’t understand it can’t put ANY weight on that leg for an extended period and will attempt to go about their daily life and act normally, which basically guarantees re-injuring the bad leg and a high chance of injuring the other 3 legs as they try to cope with the change in balance and weight distribution. It all leads to a really poor quality of life with almost no chance of truly healing properly. The story of all they did trying to save Barbaro the racehorse is a long sad story that illustrates a lot of the issues even with modern veterinary medicine with trying to deal with a broken leg in horses.

Thankfully with centaurs, They understand the need for healing, are able to manage their own quality of life and have the gear to support themselves in the time it takes for the injury to heal!

Also perfectly good for long term use in the case of aging, amputation, or general disability! Which is common with the front legs and lower backs of centaurs given the unusual stresses caused by their body-plans. They were created with thicker and more robust front legs to cope with the permanent added weight of the torso instead of a horse head, but injury and disability in that area is still very common!

however!! these amazing wheelchairs would really do the trick! god they look good!!

Okay so. Let’s begin by the weight of the human part of a centaur.

A quick research gave me access to a list of different human body parts relative to total weights on this site. Summing it up, I found that for a 150 lbs (68 kgs) human the torso + head + arms is about 110 lbs (50 kgs).

That was the easy part.

I looked up the same things for horses but only found guides to weigh your horse, and a scientific paper that may have the answer, but it’s behind a paywall and I’m not coughing up 15€ to maybe get the answer I need.

Then I remembered I have a Facebook friend who’s passionate about horses, and has access to a lot of scientific literature. I asked her. I presented the question as something pretty weird, as I don’t know if people other than I are interested by strange scientific inquiries.

She loved it.

So here is the data :

- If we take in account the center of gravity of a horse, behind the shoulders, we know that its position varies a lot based on the position of the head + neck block (the higher the head gets, the more the gravity center moves towards the rump), so – laws of physics – the head + neck block is an important part of the weigh of the horse, with a leverage effect.

- Also, the position of the center of gravity tells us that 50 % of the horse’s weigh is before that point : head, neck, shoulders, front legs. Even when comparing a strong torso + arms and a slender neck, it means that for a 1,000 lbs (450 kgs) horse the “front block” is about 500 lbs (225 kgs).

This doesn’t give us the weigh of the neck + head block, but it tells us that with the shoulders and front legs (that a centaur keeps) it’s nearly five times the weigh of the human part. And I doubt the front legs of a horse weigh that heavy (to give a vague idea, both legs of a 150 lbs human weigh about 52 lbs – 23 kgs).

Another thing about centaur anatomy (from the same trusted source) : in a centaur, the torso is (most of the time) held straight, so the center of gravity is closer to the rump than for a horse and the distribution of the weigh on the four legs is probably more even (for a horse about two thirds of the weigh is borne by the front legs). However back pathologies like kissing spines could happen more often, since equine anatomy means that horses need to lower their neck to limit the risk of back wounds.