Discover Top Posts Tagged with #shoulder placement

Y can't I just put my dragon's wings right above the shoulder? Couldn't the shoulder muscles deal with flying? I don't think putting wings behind the arms is a good idea bc the front half would hand down? Can I put the wings in front of the shoulder?

well u *can* do anything you feel like. this is just an advice blog (focusing mainly on anatomy/biology b/c that’s what our specialties gravitate towards), and as a creator, u can take or leave our advice as u please! the world is yours to design!

but if u specifically want to go for biological accuracy, then yeah, wings directly above the front limbs would generally be a no-go.

I’m just gonna copy-paste a section that focuses specifically on this topic from my much longer post abt vertebrate wings, so hopefully this clears up any questions u’ve got abt it:

Many fantastical flying creatures are hexapodal, with at least one set of wings along with four other limbs. This poses an interesting dilemma for artists, as there are no real-life animals with this sort of setup: how do you anchor the wings to the body?

The key to answering this is to keep in mind a critical note about wings that I hope I’ve made distinctly clear in my rambling in all previous sections– wings are intricate, fully-fledged limbs. Not only that, but the fact that they’re locomotive limbs means that they must be anchored VERY solidly to the body (since, y’know, they’re throwing around the mass of the whole body from the points where they’re anchored). Wings CANNOT be treated like pasted-on decorations, if you want them to function correctly.

This in mind, my most important tip here is to absolutely NOT anchor the wing shoulders DIRECTLY ON TOP of the front limb shoulders.

For one, the wings will ALWAYS need quite a lot of chest/shoulder muscular connections. Wing shoulders need a LOT of muscle (relatively speaking) to power flight, particularly on the downstroke, so those shoulder muscles connecting down onto the chest need plenty of open room to anchor to the body. Plus, these muscles generally stretch a fair way down the chest cavity in order to help hold/stabilize the chest cavity in-flight (I’ll discuss this a bit more in the following Overall Integration section, but flying bodies are generally stiff and compact for optimum flight design). And this need for muscular space is without even considering whether a particular design requires a keel or not!

Also note the needs of shoulder movement, depending on the design. Bat flight is highly versatile in part because of their rolling shoulders and general high range of shoulder flexibility. If bats couldn’t flex their shoulders to the same range due to there being a whole other set of limbs in the way (or even having to share a clavicle setup with another pair of limbs), they wouldn’t have near the same range of versatility. While this would likely be less of a problem for bird (and potentially pterosaur) flight due to the fused clavicles and subsequently less-versatile flight, I still think this would pose some issues for flight in general, if the wings had to function around a whole other set of limbs.

Setting aside the problems the wings themselves would face, the wing muscles would also interfere with the front limbs, in this hypothetical setup! If the front limbs were anchored properly to the base chest cavity (as they would absolutely need to be if they were to be used for anything involving locomotion, like walking/running), the wing muscles/bones stretching over/around these limbs would interfere with their range of motion, and likely their overall locomotive power as well. Now I could potentially see the front limbs perhaps detaching from the base chest cavity over time, and instead anchoring on top of the wing chest muscles (a little far-fetched still, but not impossible). However, without a strong anchor to the core body, these limbs would have very little strength (certainly not enough to hold up the body, in-motion or not) or range of shoulder motion, if any at all. thus, if anything, these limbs would likely be used for display or very light object manipulation at most. Think teeny T-rex arms, and you’ll get the picture (and even then, T. rex arms are still anchored to the chest cavity and have significant scapulae, soo..).

There’s no reason that wing musculature would warp itself around a set of limbs when the wings would simply not function correctly if there was another set of limbs in the way. And if the front limbs were evolutionarily ‘important’ enough to keep in the first place, there’s no reason that the front limbs would be forced to function nestled within fully-realized wing musculature (which, I must reiterate, would likely not be fully-realized in the first place if there were other limbs in the way).

Now, for quite a while I held onto the theory that wings could ONLY be anchored behind the front limbs rather than in front. I still believe that anchoring the wings behind the front limbs is the anatomically ‘safest’ way to go, especially for artists new to anatomy and creature design, but I’ve recently changed my opinion on the plausibility of wings in front or arms due to exactly one(1) piece of anatomical artwork-- Drferox (collaborating with Shinydinosaurkingdom’s excellent artistic skills~) designed this Pegasus whose front limbs are actually behind the wings, and it actually works!! This may not seem exciting to anyone else, but I’ve literally NEVER seen this idea executed in a way that convinced me it was anatomically plausible, so I’m a little flustered. (if you’d like to see more of Shinydinosaurkingdom’s art and read up on Drferox’s explantion for their design decisions, I’d HIGHLY suggest checking out the link and digging into their blogs!)

Anyways, I’d like to note to other artists here that the ‘front’ limbs on this Pegasus have been shrunk down and pushed quite a-ways back from the front of the body, to the point that they’re useless for locomotion. This gives the chest muscles of the wings the proper room needed to stretch down onto the keel, and for the wings to rotate comfortably. If you want your dragon to be quadrupedal, I still hold that the best way this could work is with the wings behind the front limbs (unless you want your creature to have a sorta ‘insectoid’/virus-lookin stance, which actually sounds kinda sick). However, if you like the idea of a bipedal hexapod, then this approach with the front limbs behind the wings seems an excellent idea!

Of course, this is all under the assumption that the wings have fully evolved perfectly into the hexapodal body plan. Evolution does not happen overnight, and it’s perfectly plausible that a set of “pre-wings” would not yet be properly based behind (or in front!) of the front limb shoulders in a certain species’ ancestry. This idea is best described in Swirlix’s discussion of potential hexapodal evolution from the lobe-finned coelacanth. But note, again, that this is a step along the way to powered flight, not the fully-realized structure for powered flight.

~end quote~

though one bit I do want to clarify, that I don’t think this section covered-- exactly how far back are you imagining the shoulders of the wings, when the wings are behind the front limbs? in most scenarios, it seems plausible to have the wing shoulders just a bit behind the front limbs-- with enough room for the wing shoulders to rolls forwards, of course, but not necessarily feet behind the front limbs, y’know? in this case, there’s not much of the front of the body to be left hanging in the first place, especially if the ribcage is stiff enough to hold steady and handle flight forces. this especially becomes a non-issue, in my mind, if the propatagium (leading-edge membrane) attaches up over the front limb shoulders, thus providing active lift to that area of the body

-Mod Spiral

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