Why are wings terribly drawn on 6-limbed creatures?

If you look at a drawing of a dragon, pegasus, griffon, angel etc., the wings often just dangle, with barely any or no muscles connecting them to the body. The pectorals in particular are usually completely absent, meaning that there's no way to move the wings up or down.

Obviously, these creatures would be scientifically incapable of flight regardless of how their anatomy was depicted (wing muscles would also get in the way of the muscles for the forelimbs but that could be solved by having the wing joints further back), but it's still the most glaring anatomical problem in fantasy art.

Edited by pathunknown on Nov 13th 2022 at 7:43:48 PM

To attempt to answer the question in the title, I would guess that it's one or more of three things, varying case-by-case:

1) Lack of knowledge: I don't know how many artists have the relevant anatomical knowledge, especially without references of such body-plans.

2) Such body-plans are somewhat awkward: The space that flight muscles would usually occupy are, I imagine, generally already occupied by the forward non-wing limbs. As a result, things might be a little cramped when attempting to slot in flight muscles.

3) Lack of interest: I suspect that most people, artist and audience, neither know nor especially care how the flight muscles work, as long as it "looks right enough". The point is to have an amazing flying creature, rather than a carefully-designed viable animal. Thus there's little incentive to expend time and effort on so designing.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Nov 13th 2022 at 10:18:19 PM

There is also the matter that concepts like Dragons originate in an era where biology quite isn't common knowledge (or paleotology for that matter. I'm pretty sure Dragons arose from people discovering fossils and now knowing exactly what they were). A medieval peasant is unlikely to know how birds work enough to consider flying six limbed reptiles aren't possible. The same would apply to a relatively well off author.

>2) Such body-plans are somewhat awkward: The space that flight muscles would usually occupy are, I imagine, generally already occupied by the forward non-wing limbs. As a result, things might be a little cramped when attempting to slot in flight muscles.

I would add in a number 4: adding a ton of muscle to move the wings will likely make the animal look even bulkier and less capable of flight than is already the case. Dragons are often big, especially the european 6-limbed kind, and it already stretches belief that they can fly in the first place.

Trying to make it more realistic can lead to it looking less realistic overall.

This is actually a good point, indeed: sometimes an artist may choose verisimilitude over realism, when the two clash.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Nov 13th 2022 at 11:23:30 AM

In addition to looking bulkier, a six-limbed flyer basically needs a torso extension to attach the wings to, but for balance reasons it would have to be in the middle. Which comes across somewhat like having a centaur with the human and horse forelimbs switched (not quite like this), like a bat whose head has been replaced with the front half of a gecko. The Gaping Dragon is the closest example I can think of and it exaggerates how abnormal it looks by having too many limbs still in the wrong places.

...there's a reason the 'wyvern' body structure looks the most natural.

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Nov 13th 2022 at 10:06:09 AM

I mean you can just google "anatomically correct dragon" and get hundreds of hits. But most just look weird.

[1]◊

[2]◊

[3]

[4]

The extra muscle on the wing limbs just creates really weird growths on their back that look like badly photoshopped arms. It looks *wrong*.

EDIT:

actually, just compare it to something like this [5]◊ or this [6]◊, which is anatomically incorrect but somehow *looks* more correct.

Edited by devak on Nov 14th 2022 at 6:47:56 PM

I have to ask if Winged Humanoids have a similar anatomy issue.

I think so, yes—and for pretty much the same reasons: they already have arms at the location at which one might expect their wings to be located, and arm-muscles where one might expect them to have wing-muscles.

(Although they also have the question of flight meshing with an upright stance.)

Winged Humanoids sometimes have 4 limbs instead of 6, though. That is, wings attached to the arms like in bats, birds and pterosaurs.

(Of course, they are usually depicted as mammals even though they'd need dinosaur-like air sacs to get their weights down to capable-of-flying-light)

Those are both good points, in all fairness.

I bring it up because classic depictions of such have the winds on the back in contrast with dragons where they are more between the arms and legs (though still pointed backward). And also becuase they tend to come in two flavors. Bird-like angle wings and Insectoid fairy wings, that prolly has their own nuances.

x6 Those four designs actually look really cool.

The other weird thing is that even if the wyvern body type is more realistic, when on the ground their bodies are often shown parallel with the ground instead of upright like birds. The wings are shown to act as forelegs when on the ground, but they don't look strong enough to hold the front of the body up. It makes sense that a creature with a horizontally oriented body would have four legs.

Of course, if it was possible for dragons to be "anatomically correct", small dragons would probably exist in real life. The "foreleg vs. wing" paradox is likely why that's not possible. So I don't see any point in trying to look realistic if it's impossible. Fantasy in its purest sense is anti-realistic.

Edited by shiro_okami on Nov 16th 2022 at 10:25:58 AM

I mean, structurally speaking those are pretty much the same thing: the back of an upright biped is (largely) between their arms and legs, and is the same structure (more or less) as the back of a horizontal tetrapod.

Indeed, I do believe that I've seen wings placed on the between arms and legs on the back of bipedal characters.

I've very much seen bipeds with dragon-/bat-like wings, and tetrapods with bird or insect wings, I do believe.

I imagine that bird and insect wings are more common on bipeds, just because the common winged bipeds are associated with those and the common winged tetrapods are associated with dragon/bat wings, but it's hardly a universal thing, I do feel.

In all fairness, there is precedent for this: both modern bats and prehistoric pterosaurs move(d) in such a manner when on the ground, if I'm not much mistaken.

One could make an argument that the pterosaurs were the realisation of this... :P

Well, no—as both bats and pterosaurs show, such a body-plan can develop, and indeed develop from a tetrapod body-plan, if I have it correct.

Well, dragons do exist in real life - pterosaurs are by size and shape the Real Life equivalent of dragons. And gliding lizards and bats are smaller present-day equivalents.

As for why no big dragons exist today ... now, that's an interesting question. I think it's because while there may be a place for such animals in the ecosystem, for such an animal to arise today the much smaller birds would have to evolve first to such sizes that they'd face competition of mammals. Basically, mammals block this pathway of evolution. Mammals themselves can never evolve to dragons because they don't have air sacs and would thus become too heavy to fly. Quetzalcoatlus had air sacs everywhere - even in its wings - and only barely maintained the ability to fly.

If I have it correct, I've seen it suggested that the atmosphere was a bit thicker and more oxygen-rich in the days of the pterosaurs, allowing for larger flighted creatures.

My understanding is that differences in atmospheric composition probably didn't make a difference one way or another ... for pterosaurs. Insects did profit from higher oxygen concentrations during the Carboniferous, but that's long before pterosaurs. I believe this is a good citation.

Here's a paper about air sacs in dinosaurs.

Edited by SeptimusHeap on Nov 17th 2022 at 4:15:26 PM

Ah, you're quite right—it looks like that was an outdated and now-dismissed theory. Nevermind that, then, and thank you for the correction! ^_^

>Those four designs actually look really cool.

I would like to draw attention to the way the wing-arms look weirdly mirrored to their upper arms and generally feel like they are almost badly photoshopped.

Like i don't deny they look cool, but if you look a bit more at the details it quickly looks wrong.

Edited by devak on Nov 17th 2022 at 6:34:01 PM

You are misunderstanding me. As per the thread title, when I say "dragon", I am specifically referring to a six-limbed creature. Bats and pterosaurs have four legs. They may be analogous to wyverns, but not (six-limbed) dragons.

When I say "'foreleg vs. wing' paradox", I'm referring to dragons having two pairs of front limbs. Bats and pterosaurs only have one pair of front limbs, the wings. I don't know of any vertebrate animal that has six limbs with two of those pairs right on top of each other.

Let's just agree to disagree.

Edited by shiro_okami on Nov 17th 2022 at 7:23:01 AM

There aren't any. The first bony fish to crawl onto the beach was a tetrapod, and naturally so are all its descendants.

Ah, yes, in that case I was misreading you.

I think that this was because your previous paragraph discussed the "wyvern" body-type for dragons, and expressed doubt as to the strength of the wings to act as forelimbs. I then thought that your following paragraph continued on the same topic.

Fair enough—six-limbed dragons are indeed another matter, and I don't think that we have seen their like on Earth!

Theoretically, a six-limbed vertebrate could exist. It just happens to be that arthropods are way better at gaining and losing legs evolutionarily because they're much more modular than fish. They also developed flight apparently by growing additional limbs.

This opens up the possibility for invertebrate dragons (obviously a vaguely unpleasant prospect, but a theoretically possible one) or a lobe-finned fish with additional fins (certainly plausible, some fish do get weird with fin counts, though for previously mentioned reasons it's rarer than arthropods changing leg counts) got lucky enough to have six legs when it stood up and ran onto land to go eat a spider or something.

Then again, dragons are fictional and look cool so who cares if they have enough muscle to use their wings as anything more than decoration when they've got other pressing problems, such as being generally solitary creatures who wouldn't have much reason to evolve intelligence considering they're apex predators with large ranges who wouldn't have much need for deception, and the wings already being largely decorative without magic and weighing approximately four hundred pounds while being forty feet long. (less than 200 kilograms while being twelvish meters for metric users who can't be bothered to convert), which is the density of the large pterosaurs. (except it's actually slightly lower because pterosaurs probably didn't have as much body size as dragons would.)

When a normal human dedicated competitive weightlifter could bench-press a fully grown dragon and a world champion could bench-press two at once, they do seem a lot less impressive. Wondering about real dragons does run into the problem that a real-life dragon capable of flight would be an incredibly ridiculous creature, property-wise.

Now, if the wings are some kind of courtship/threat display or for temperature regulation, that could be an interesting take on them.

I'm reminded of a short story that applied the modern definition of the word "worm" to its use for dragons—but retaining, please note, the traditional scale and flight of dragons...

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Nov 18th 2022 at 12:31:34 PM

Invertebrates can have scales. I think the problem with, say, insect-like dragons is that their oxygen exchange system might not cope with dragon-sized bodies.