Dinosaur and Animal Research

[jolem]

I was thinking about how in some TFs and some pictures there are some pretty accurate and non-accurate type of TFs especially if one is becoming a normal animal. I know TF is fiction and all but I think having the correct anatomy for some of the creatures like the pterosaurs for example, is great for learning about a few things that one might not never knew or bother to look up. Like I would never have known what digitigrade is have I not been running into this alot in other TF stories and pics. I think if you're going to do a full animal TF of a particular species, especially one that you don't know much about, you should do a little research about it before writing or drawing. TV Tropes was the one that got me thinking about it, here's the info all right there if you don't want to go to the site. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PteroSoarer
I'm thinking that this could be a good start from there before moving it away.

In prehistory, everything's better with dinosaurs.
This isn't quite as true about other extinct groups, but the public doesn't really hate them. They don't love them either. In fact, the other extinct groups are usually ignored. When they aren't ignored, most enthusiasts are inclined to wish that they were, because when they aren't ignored and are actually depicted in the media, it is too often a totally inaccurate depiction. Such is the sad case with pterosaurs, the Mezozoic flying reptiles*

often known as "pterodactyls" in homage to the first discovered species.
Mistaking pterosaurs for dinosaurs is understandable, if inaccurate. What is really egregious is how they are portrayed in media. The popular image of dinosaurs has changed dramatically in recent decades to fit the new scientific discoveries, but the popular image of pterosaurs has not changed much since the 1970's. Whereas feathered raptors and other anatomically correct dinosaurs are slowly becoming more abundant in the media, and obviously have become omnipresent in documentaries, most pterosaurs seen in media are carbon copies of reconstructions of several decades ago: leathery winged, naked and scaly skinned flyers that are essentially giant vultures or seagulls, as opposed to the diverse lineage of warm-blooded, pycnofiber-covered*

reptilians that had the most sophisticated wings of all time, and that were rivals to modern birds and bats in aerodynamic capabilities.
If you see a pterosaur represented in any piece of fiction, the odds are good that it will have at least one of the following common stereotypical traits. The list is derived from this website and this website, the latter one being a website set up specifically by pterosaur enthusiasts, but here the two lists are combined. The more wildly inaccurate a pterosaur depiction is, the more likely it will tick every box on the list.
• One: Confusing the names "pterosaur" and "pterodactyl" as if they were synonyms. "Pterosaur" means every Mesozoic flying reptile that had a common ancestor with the dinosaurs without actually being their descendants. "Pterodactyl" is either a description of a subgroup of pterosaurs or a genus name for a particular pterosaur, Pterodactylus. To put this into perspective, this would be worse than calling every primate you met a "gorilla".
• Two: Designing the pterosaurs with bat-like wings rather than anatomically-correct pterosaur ones. This ranges from having leathery wings made of nothing but skin to having the whole wing membrane being supported by all the fingers. In reality, pterosaur wings were made of tougher, more complicated materials and were supported by one finger. They should also attach at the ankle or at the lower leg, not at the hip, and they should be rounded and smooth, not pointed or angular.
• Three: Essentially, Pterosaurs Are Dinosaurs. Pterosaurs were a sister group to the dinosaurs, being more closely related to each other than to modern crocodiles.
• Four: Mix-and-Match Critters. Two pterosaur species will be combined into one hybridised design. This is a particularly good sign that the creators just didn't care, considering how easy it would be to sort out.
• Five: Bigger Is Better. The pterosaurs on show will be truly gigantic, far larger than the fossil record can justify. There is some Truth in Television for this belief, as creatures like Quetzalcoatlus currently hold the record for the largest wingspans ever known. However, this is at best 12 metres, and is based on scanty evidence. In fiction, beasts with much larger wingspans are exaggerations. This is all the more obvious when the species being shown didn't even approach that size.
• Six: Toothy Bird trope applied to pterosaurs. Specifically, this is when a pterosaur (like the iconic pteranodon) is shown having teeth, sometimes a horrifying set of gnashers, instead of a toothless beak. Occasionally this can be reversed when a normally toothy pterosaur (like Rhamphorhynchus) looks like it had a run-in with an angry dentist.
• Seven: Pterosaurs in fiction will grab objects with their feet and hoist them into the air, presumably to be carried away and eaten. Pterosaur feet were designed for quadrupedal walking on the ground, or for climbing vertical objects or branch systems depending on the species *

. No known pterosaur had prehensile feet with opposable digits, which makes any depiction of pterosaurs picking humans up with their feet inaccurate.
• Eight: Misplaced Wildlife or Anachronism Stew, unless it is crucial to the plot (for instance, a Lost World that contains a Sole Survivor species is discovered and the plot rests on that premise).
• Nine: Small Taxonomy Pools, perhaps because the creators wanted to avoid the Viewers Are Geniuses trope, because they simply hadn't heard of them, or because they just didn't bother to do their homework. Pteranodon is easily the most recognisable of all pterosaurs in popular culture, with Dimorphodon, Pterodactylus and Rhamphorhynchus coming a close second. Quetzalcoatlus may get a mention, but the chances of meeting any other pterosaur species in fiction is virtually nil.
• Ten: Missing fur. Pterosaurs are almost always depicted as scaly, despite the growing evidence that most, if not all, of them had fur of a sort.
• Eleven: Pterosaurs will have an inexplicable desire to attack or kill humans on sight. This one may be justified if the pterosaur in question is a Papa Wolf or a Mama Bear defending its nest, or has some other biologically plausible behaviour, but usually it's as if the pterosaurs have looked up the Humans Are Bastards page in advance.
• Twelve: Expect any fictional pterosaur that lands on the ground to be hopelessly lost. Real pterosaurs were more than capable of walking on firm ground - some of them were scarily competent at it.

Now add up the ticks, and if you've got a full twelve, congratulations. You have taken this trope Up to Eleven!

We should bring out rare facts that a particular animal's anatomy has and what part that many artists and writers actually overlook or got wrong most of the time.

[Amahain]

Admittedly, if I were ever to do a story involving a pterosaur TF, I'd still probably go with the inaccurate but badass looking one. Still, good to know.

We should bring out rare facts that a particular animal's anatomy has and what part that many artists and writers actually overlook or got wrong most of the time.

- Snake tails are actually quite short compared to the rest of their body. An anatomically accurate snake TF should involve a lot of torso stretching. Also, the whole legs-fusing-together thing doesn't reflect what's going on anatomically; snakes have tiny spurs which are actually vestigial limbs.

- Scorpion pincers are homologous to the mandibles of other arachnids. So if you're doing a spider TF where the mandibles pop out of the mouth, a scorpion TF should have the claws coming out of the mouth as well, just to be consistent. Then again, arachnid mandibles may be modified legs, so there's another angle to go for.

- Stingers in bees and wasps are modified ovipositors (the organ that female insects use to deposit eggs). For this reason, I think this is a more or less logical way to go when drawing or describing a TF into a stinging insect (there is no perfect way, though - it's hard to find many anatomical homologies between vertebrates and invertebrates).

- Bats have mammary glands under their armpits (I ignore this fact in my bat TF stories).

- Although this is a rare mistake, it's worth mentioning simply because I've seen it once or twice and it really bugged me. Tails do not come out of the ass; they are an extension of the spine.

[Sutibaru]

This reminds me of my old "The Anatomy of Transformation" book concept I had a while back.

[gladewalker]

That would accurately qualify as an "oh shit" moment.

[Crash Ichimonji]

I guess I should add some things I've noticed in TF's over the years.

-Thumbs and fusing of fingers: When a person TF's to an animal that has paws or claws while lacking a thumb of some sort (in other words, non-primate), there's always some fusing of a finger or two. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Jitensha and the work she does (and proud to have purchased all the stuff she's done on the Process Productions site), but the scene in the first 'My Pet Girlfriend' with Sam's middle and index fingers fusing so she had only four digits on her paws made me a little sad inside. While cats and dogs lack a thumb or a fully-five-digit paw, they do have dew-claws (well, many breeds do anyways). It would have been more accurate to have the fingers and thumb shrink with the hand elongating and the thumb slowly receding back to the wrist as the small nub of a claw. Even if the cat species Sam TF'd into doesn't naturally have dew-claws, then the paw-TF sequence should have just done the same but eventually having the thumb/dew claw sucking into the wrist until it was gone completely. The same can be said for dinosaur TF's, particularly raptors.

The raptor hooked toe-claw is (correct me if I'm wrong), the index toe of what would have been five original claws on the feet in the ancestral thecodonts' hind feet. Dinosaurs walked on their three middle toes (index, middle, and ring toes by human comparison) with the 'big toe' being something of a dew claw too. So in the few dinosaur TF's I've managed to see, the hind feet are usually done erroneously through fusing of some sort. Hands are the same way. Most dinosaur 'hands' were shortened forelimbs with the 'pinky' and 'thumb' claws not present because once again the hands formed from five-fingered claws that merely needed the three inner claws (which begs the question of which claw from those three was lost for the Tyrannosaurids' hands). Again, the TF is often a fusion of digits and not a shrinking of 'vestigial' digits.

Whale Tails and Mermaids: Like it was mentioned earlier with snake TF's involving the legs fusing, cetaceans and mythical mermaid TF's suffer the same inaccuracy. Now, I've seen an Orca Anthro TF where the girl's hnd legs became flippers and essentially her body from the waist down was an Orca's body from the neck down. Mermaids I would think would be the same way in a TF where the legs 'devolved' in a sense and just became smaller and punier until they sunk into the waist region while the tail sprouted as an elongating mass of bone and muscle from the hips and buttocks. When I see those mermaid Barbie toys like the ones my sister used to play with, I couldn't help but just blink at them, because they always had a skirt for the mermaid tail wrap around the legs, but as evident in Disney's 'The Little Mermaid' we can see that merfolk's tailed paddle up and down in a motion that legs really can't mimic.

Okay, nerd-rage done.

[LostHopeOfDusk]

We should really have an sticky that linked this type of treads, ya know?

[Crash Ichimonji]

Originally Posted by Amahain

- Although this is a rare mistake, it's worth mentioning simply because I've seen it once or twice and it really bugged me. Tails do not come out of the ass; they are an extension of the spine.

That reminds me of the male TF scene in the old X-Men cartoon series. Basically Sauron's pterosaur-like form was the result of absorbing life energy from fellow mutants instead of normal humans, and so one scene where he was trying to live as a human in the modern world had him draining life-force from random strangers to survive. Unfortunately, one of his victims turned out to be Wolverine and instantly he returned to his pterosaur form, but in the TF his tail actually sprouted from the small of his back and not where the tailbone would have been. Really irked me as a kid.

[Drachen]

Originally Posted by Crash Ichimonji

That reminds me of the male TF scene in the old X-Men cartoon series. Basically Sauron's pterosaur-like form was the result of absorbing life energy from fellow mutants instead of normal humans, and so one scene where he was trying to live as a human in the modern world had him draining life-force from random strangers to survive. Unfortunately, one of his victims turned out to be Wolverine and instantly he returned to his pterosaur form, but in the TF his tail actually sprouted from the small of his back and not where the tailbone would have been. Really irked me as a kid.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm having a hard time seeing how the tail part is the most jarringly unrealistic part of that scenario.

I also don't see how fingers fusing is any more realistic or plausible than fingers growing or shrinking to be reabsorbed by the body. Yes, a cow's hooves are digits 3 and 4 compared to a human's thumb = 1, index = 2, middle = 3, ring = 4, pinky = 5. The cow's digits 2 and 5 are truncated due to genes being turned on and off during development. I suppose absorption of digits 1, 2 and 5 in a human -> cow TF would be more "correct" from a developmental standpoint, but adults can't re-absorb bone any more easily than they can fuse it (think bird wings). They're both pretty silly from a realistic anatomical or scientific angle, because real anatomy doesn't transform like that... I tend to think that finger fusion is a lot more visceral, horrifying, and in some ways more aesthetically pleasing than just finger shrinkage and absorption.

I'd prefer art and erotica to be good art and erotica over being strictly correct from a developmental view.

Tyrannosaurs lost digit 4.

[Crash Ichimonji]

Well, I personally favor transformations to look like a montage of evolutionary changing (to put it best) with growing/diminishing of body parts as they morph to the new forms as opposed to fusing of digits. But, meh, that's me. It's like how some of us have pet-peeves with things like catgirls with human AND feline ears. Or poof-TF's.

I mean, it's fantasy/scifi in the end, so I suppose there's no right or wrong way to go about it. I mean, technically, to TF into very different forms you'd need to pack on some series nutrients and fat (among other things) to have the base materials and energy to undergo the rapid metamorphosis in the usual seconds or minutes we see it depicted in. Same thing with shrinking and growth: thermodynamics kinda throws a big-ass wrench into it all if you get technical, I suppose.

Oh, and Sauron's tail growth stood out for me because even as a kid I knew that tails didn't sprout from one's butt nor the middle of the back. I mean, yeah, it's X-Men, but it was a detail that just threw me off wondering "Wait, he has a tail bone AND a tail that's separate??"