I think rats have four toes at the ends of their feet, but one on the inner edge just heel-ward that sticks out at an angle - analagous to the first digit on our feet.

If I were to draw feet in any detail (or if I knew how to draw, really), I think plantigrade feet would be like rat feet or human feet (somewhere in between) in this way, and digitigrade feet would have four toes on the ground and one further back, hanging out in the breeze as it were.

I know dogs don't walk on their heels, but I think they do have a pad back there, as they do on their wrists. So I figure a creature that walks plantigrade probably would have heel pads, a creature that walks digitigrade would have only vestigial ones, or none, like dogs do.

So digitigrade animals can have vestigial pads... hmm. Thanks.

The rat's fifth toe you talk about, is it a dewclaw? It sounds like a dewclaw on dogs. It's on the inside of the leg, so it makes me think it's like a thumb.

By the way, I was thinking that for avian characters, I would make it so this fifth digit, as it goes in a different direction than the other toes, is the one that allows them to grab onto perches and stuff. What do you say? Or it's like a primate's foot, which itself is a lot like a hand. (question is, how many "fingers".. since it's an avian, it doesn't have to be 5, it could be less..)

The rats' fifth toe is a dewclaw, I think. They don't use it as a thumb, though - for all that they look so much like human hands, the forefeet grasp things by clasping together on either side, or by curling into a cup.

Bird feet... I don't know. I'm not the person to ask as I am going to be terribly obsessive about it. I used to work in a lab where we used birds as our test subjects, one of the happier times in my life. Not that I like messing about with the insides of birds, but it combined science, SCIENCE!, and my love of caring for and existing alongside living things. (I can haz biophilia?)

A lot of birds, maybe all of them, have four rather than five digits. Most or all oscines (perching birds) have feet with three up front and one in back. The middle one in front and the back one are quite long and there's an odd arrangement of tendons that keeps the claw tightly shut when it's bearing weight, unless the bird specifically tries to relax it. They can't really walk; the best they can do is hop, and they seem to much prefer flying.

Funny thing is, with birds, their more rostral limbs are nearly useless when manipulating objects, while their caudal limbs are better, which neatly reverses the way we do it. Anyway, the hind-claw is functionally equivalent to a thumb, I'd say, for birds with this three-and-one arrangement.

Parrots, woodpeckers, and a few others have a two and two arrangement, a lot of waterbirds have three up front and none in back, I think ostriches have only two in front and none in back... there are a bunch of different foot types.

Okay, I got derailed. What was I thinking of...

...

I forgot, but this is awesome:

http://10000birds.com/parrot-bio-ge.....-evolution.htm

:D
You've been very helpful. Thank you.

You're welcome.

I screwed something up - the birds that perch are passerines or passeriforms, oscines are a subset of passerines that learn to sing by imitation.

I'm fond of zebra finches :B

Sing by imitation. What do you mean by imitation?

They don't hatch knowing how to sing, so they have to listen to their parents' singing, and then imitate. So every bird's song is unique.

Another thing you didn't bring up is unguligrade feet. I bring it up because I too have found myself a bit anal when it comes to anthro anatomy. What most people fail to realize is that hooved ungulates have quite differently shaped feet compared to other mammals.

A term I just found on the internet is "plantar surface". It refers to the surface of the foot/leg structure an organism has in contact with ground while walking.

Plantigrade is obviously from toe all the way to heel. Humans and primates aren't the only ones plantigrade; bears, kangaroos, even most rodents are actually plantigrade as well when standing or walking slowly (think of how a squirrel sits).

Digitigrade is probably the most common like you've eluded to. The plantar surface for digitigrade is the toes and foot pads. As for the relative human equivalent, it would be what most people describe as "walking on tip-toes", even though that naming convention is not entirely correct.

Unguligrade assumes the creature has hooves or a hoof-like structure. The plantar surface in this case is only the toes. It is extremely difficult for a human to stand on their toes like this for any length of time (think ballerinas). Ungulates are able to do it effortlessly because their more rigid hooves provide balance and stability.

Most ungulates have only one or two hooves. These would analogous on the human hand to the middle and ring fingers. Some have dew claws and others have none. The ones that do have them don't have one but two. These would be analogous to the index and pinky fingers. No ungulates I know have five digits on any foot. So you can understand how I think it's an interesting task to represent a bipedal ungulate anthro's hand. I see a lot of people who have horse anthros give their character a five-fingered hand, and to me that just seems wrong. My impala character Mela on the other hand only has his two big toes, but impala have an underlying bone structure of four digits I believe, just no dew claws. So on his hand I gave him two fingers and then two thumb-like digits because I feel that dew claws are more analogous to a human thumb.

I actually think it's a lot of fun to think about.

I actually did not really think any animals besides humans were plantigrade. (well, and bears, as I've learned so recently) Thanks for the info.

Anyway yes I see that "stepping on your toes" is not literally stepping on your toes, but hooved animals are doing just that. For instance: deer dewclaws, I've considered, seem to me to have grown from under where the "balls of the foot" would be.

Hands. My deer have five-fingers like humans. Horses on the other hand (did I just write "on the other hand") for horses I've all but decided on four fingers for them, even a story point to go along with it - that since they have four fingers, they are one finger inferior to humans, thus are supposedly put on this earth to serve man. The religious basis to their second-class status. Donkeys (and maybe mules) as I planned, would have five fingers despite sharing the horses' place - I felt the irony behind that is in itself something reminiscent of real-world society.

As for the "other" ungulates such as camels, I don't understand them. Actually, when it comes to horses, deer, goats, etc, there's something I don't understand. Some of them have one whole hoof (horses) while others are divided down the middle. (deer) But what's more complicated is that some of them might have a split hoof that's still one hoof, but I'm not sure if that actually exists of if I only see it in artwork. Nonetheless I'd have to take note of each hooved species and what kind of hoof they have, and what makes that difficult is that, for many of these, I can't tell what kind of animal it is without checking. (sheep? goat? antelope? bull or cow? etc) I also find it particular that unicorns have a split hoof unlike horses. What the...

"plantar surface". I don't think I knew that term. But that was definitely a heavy consideration when I was deciding how to draw deer. At first I wasn't sure if their dewclaws touched the ground, plus I noted that deer hooves aren't necessarily flat, maybe slightly convex. As such, when on a hard floor, my deer touches the floor at four points per leg, rather than the whole thing.

Oh and just how do ballerinas stand on their toes anyway. Must be in the footwear I guess.

I just decided to keep the anatomy consistent with my character: four digit bones, thus four fairly symmetric fingers. Most antelope and cervines have four digit bones with relative differences in how "pronounced" the dew claws are. Horses only have one digit bone and camels have two. How to translate that into a hand is pretty much anyone's guess. From an anatomical standpoint I think going from one digit to five doesn't make much logical sense.

Split hooves are two separate digits. Unicorns are often depicted with split hooves because the original version of a unicorn was far more goat-like chimera. Goats of course have split hoooves.

On second thought maybe I should do something more untraditional with their hands after all (for horse anthros) or observe what you're doing with them. I decided on four fingers for them anyway, but in a sense the main idea being that they aren't normal hands. For all other species I felt that fewer than 5 fingers would be weird. (it strikes me as more alien rather than animal) But for horses I feel differently, so I can go nuts, they don't necessarily have to be a clone of human hands minus a finger.