When the Tholians first appeared in TOS: The Tholian Web (1968), they looked like this:
This is what the Tholian prop looked like:
With only a face to work with, Star Trek artists had different ideas on what the Tholians looked like.
In Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual (1977), Doug Drexler and Anthony Fredrickson dodge the issue by only drawing the head. However, "the Tholian soldier appears to have no appendages":
In The Worlds of the Federation (1989), Don Ivan Punchatz and Lora Johnson interpreted Tholians as limbless floating crystals:
In the TNG comic War and Madness (1995), artists Gordon Purcell, Terry Pallot, and Rick Taylor gave us hilariously humanoid Tholians:
The Roleplaying Game "Aliens" sourcebook (2003) described Tholians as having "eight limbs, spaced radially around the trapezohedral body":
The Tholians returned in ENT: In a Mirror, Darkly (2005), giving us the two arms and six legs look that we know today:
But that leaves one important question unanswered... Why do Tholians make silk if they don't wear clothes?
