I prefer platigrade, it's a look thing with me.

The look thing is a compleeeetely different can of worms. I think that both digi and planti can look very cool on anthros depending on how well it's done, and it's not like I don't ever draw digi just for the sake of the 'look'. This is just me admitting that it doesn't make much sense XD

Great point ^^

Thanks!

Now we need one about red pandas not having pawpads x3

YES INDEED WE DO.

Ahahaha, I'm not even IN med school yet. This is just undergrad level anatomy.

That said, I'm a firm believer in the idea that everyone should take an anatomy class, ideally with a cadaver lab, even if it isn't for credit/grades, just for the sake of appreciating our collective complexity. :)

YES, I KNOW MUCH OF THIS 'COOL SCIENCE' YOU SPEAK OF

NUH-UH, THE NEXT MR. WIZARD!

I heartily disagree with this, mostly because I'd be WAY too busy vomiting to learn anything.

I wonder does muscle part mean that digitigrade ones have flat butt..

Even some humans ignore benefits of plantigrade's locking knee and walk around on extremely high heels or walk on toes constantly (I do sometimes, but only in close compartments, where I should maneuver fast around many obstacles)

Heh, there is another misconception with digitigrades and art\avatars, when people make tibia too long or digit part too small.. those parts wont bear weight

When thinking a bit about how animals would actually "evolve" (probably not entirely naturally) into furries, one idea I thought of for the legs involved them becoming effectively much plantigrade with the locking knees and everything, with the ankle acting as a sort of second knee. But obviously I don't know as much about anatomy as you, so maybe that's physically impossible or something.

Now for another post about skull and brain size!

I'm a big fan of digi legs. But I still love this anyway~

Nah, I walk that way indoors, which is almost constantly, and do not do that outside only because shoes was not made to support digit walk. It's just the matter of training, for me it's more tiring to stand on my heels, they start to hurt really fast. Besides, actual animals still don't have that lock point and fine with this. And if you have enough experience walking both ways, you know that that stupid straight legs really hurt your spine while walking because of the lack of amortization, and a reason why humans effectively can't run at all in comparison. Did you heard of that legless professional runner?

The one that's on trial for murder, you mean? c.c Yes, I've heard of him. His blades are not, in my opinion, mechanically classifiable as either digitigrade or plantigrade in style. They're something else.

First: yes, it's possible to train to walk like that, but the only person I've ever known who was more comfortable walking on his toes than on his feet had a deformed achilles tendon causing there to be too much tension on his calcaneus (the heel bone). The tension caused him a lot of heel and muscle pain when he tried to walk flat-footed. It was repaired surgically and afterwards he was much more comfortable on his feet. Besides that, most animals don't evolve a trait that requires training to be used practically. Humans can train themselves to walk that way, yet we are not in fact digitigrade! Because plantigrade is EASIER for bipeds, and requires little to no training.

(Your point about back problems in bipeds is interesting; as far as I've been taught, it's a result of the weight of the upper body being balanced on a single point where the spine joins the pelvis. So I'm not sure that leg style would affect it. I don't know what you mean by amortization in this context, that's a banking term? But regardless, we unfortunately can't test it, since no large human-like digitigrade bipeds exist.)

Second: real animals. I addressed this partially in the infographic. Animals have their weight spread over four legs; they spend a lot less time standing than we do; in the case of smaller animals, the cubic nature of mass vs the square nature of muscle strength comes in to play (ie as an animal gets smaller the cross section of its muscles only decreases via square root where its mass decreases via cube root, leading to the scenario where a three inch tall human could jump twice its own height easily).

As far as running, yeah, humans can't run for shit and it is because of our plantigrade legs. But that was an evolutionary tradeoff we made for WALKING endurance when we were pressured to leave the trees and, later, to become nomadic. We can't run fast, but we can walk FOREVER, because of the fact that we don't have to hold our own weight against gravity.

By amortization I meant softening, sorry my english ^^ You just can't possibly crush all your weight at once on your poor spine if you have no straight incompressible line of bones. It makes every step softer.

As for that runner, I did not know that, but that does not matter, he was just an example that human legs are utterly useless.

If his blades actually provided a mechanical advantage over human legs, they would not have let him compete. That was studied extensively before they decided to let him run.

And honestly, I see what you're trying to say, but a) our vertebral column IS curved, not straight, and each vertebra is cushioned by a pad of cartilage so there is actually some compressability, b) even if it being more curved would be a better design, you can't just force our existing spine to curve more than it's supposed to without courting serious back problems (disc misalignment comes to mind) and c) leg posture doesn't have a lot to do with spine posture; if you're also hunching while you're walking on the balls of your feet, that's a separate structural choice. And not a wholly advisable one, IMO.

BTW, I'm actually not trying to be argumentative for its own sake; I'm just honestly a little concerned about what you might be doing to your back :( It might feel better now but in 30, 40, 50 years? I don't know, I'm not a doctor yet, but you might want to talk to yours about it.

If I recall correctly it's not that clear and he was banned from several competitions for that exact reason. But the sole fact that it has to be discussed proves my point.

And I don't know what you mean about hunching, I walk straight like everyone else. I meant legs and shock distribution in your body. When your legs are straight and locked in knees they are perfect impact distributers, but when they are not, force of impact disperse in your muscles and there are less for your spine to suffer.

Think about it, how would you hit somebody you want to hurt? With straight hand that's how.

There is evidence that humans were slowly evolving to be digitigrade based off how humans run compared to non-homonid apes. As we land on the toes while running rather than on the heels.
Also, most bipeds (being avian) are digitigrade, and there are some birds that have a semi upright posture such as the white-bellied caique.

I come across this and notice that nobody has made a point of birds such as ostriches and cassowaries. They absolutely qualify as digitigrade and also certainly make use of that same joint locking. In any case, anyone having studied and practiced any form of martial art and the associated principles of motion could tell you that you DON'T lock your joints in any such scenario and, I being practiced in such things, certainly have noticed my overall manner of movement and gait to be notably different from most folks I see around me, though most people just amble around without thinking much about their gait anyway. Joint locking is only really useful when standing still, and then only to a certain degree, once in motion, inertia and the ability to shift ones weight fluidly seem to matter far more than stability.

I'll give you birds, however: birds have hollow bones, so really they have a lot less weight to carry around.

As for the rest... you might well be right, but I'm not really talking about whether digitigrade makes sense for martial arts or athletics, but whether it makes sense for standing and endurance walking. Which is what MOST people spend most of their time doing (when they aren't sitting, of course). When you (hypothetical 'you', not you specifically; you've already observed that most people walk differently than you do) take a step forward, you usually do so with a straight knee, to receive the weight as you move forward onto it. And standing is typically straight knee as well.

Of course running and fighting and such are a different story, but I'd argue it's easier for a plantigrade biped to go bent-kneed for short bursts of activity than it is for a digitigrade to manage long term walking/standing. It's about versatility more than anything. You yourself as a good example of this; you're plantigrade, but you don't stay lock-kneed when it's not advantageous, and it sounds like you've altered your everyday gait as well, which shows the adaptability of the plantigrade build. A digitigrade biped would not be able to adapt in the other direction.

That certainly makes a kind of sense. Another thought that came to me lately related to this is what if there were some kind of compensating elastic biomechnism, such as the rubber band you see almost universally in digitigrade stilts? From awareness of my own movements, I can already say just how much of a role tendon elasticity plays in a lot of things, so it seems that this kind of thing could be used to mitigate the problems in both standing and walking for a digitigrade character. Of course I have to come back to birds, particularly the flying kind, to mention that an elastic biomechnism is responsible for the curling and loosening of their feet rather than muscles directly, it's how they maintain such a tight grip on branches to hold on even in a storm without getting tired.

Yes, see, that's the kind of stuff I love! Divergent evolution isn't something people play with much - most anthro characters are basically human bodies with animal features jammed on, and in that context, digi makes little sense. But addition of new features like what you're describing changes everything. And it's even better because it has precedent in birds.

Which, btw, I was not aware of. One more reason to love birds! :>

Absolutely, birds are fascinating. But really you touched on something rather notable here, the seemingly excessive obsession within the furry fandom with keeping close to the human form. The very thing that fascinates me with the genre is the idea of things only being barely humanoid, animal, but still "human" in a cognitive sense, and even with that only in the higher level functions. It's a wonderful thing to imagine and part of the focus of a comic idea I've been tossing around in my head for a while, with some themes of violence, power, and the inhumanity of man thrown in for good measure.

It definitely sounds like an interesting idea for a comic!

That said, I don't hold anything against anyone for liking the anthro blend point wherever they like it--I wouldn't call it an excessive obsession, cause people like what they like! Most of my work tends to be on that end of things, after all. I just happily acknowledge that there's a ton of other potential ways to go at it that are all equally valid and full of cool possibilities- my only issue is when people start saying you're doing it wrong just because you're not doing things how they like it, you know? There's SO MANY ways to blend the human and animal (mostly because there's really not any true distinction between the two) and all of those benefit from exploration. :D

In a biological sense there may not be a meaningful distinction between man and animal, but in a cognitive and archetypical one, there certainly is. There are implications that tend to be carried with different moldings of form as well as how that form is presented. What I call an obsession is really a sideways derision of what I see as a rather unwholesome and mundane attitude that seems to pervade much of the furry fandom and media produced from it. Don't get me wrong, I see it, the furry fandom, as being something with enormous potential, it just seems to get itself caught on certain frivolities. Funny how this went from discussion of anatomy to metaphysics and philosophy of a subculture. If you think it would be more appropriate, we could take further conversation on this to notes rather than the public view of comments.

Ostriches do not have hollow bones. They are also the heaviest bird, and they are digitigrade. Also the t-rex was digitigrade. Heavy bipeds can be digitigrade.

What I personally like to to with anthros who are naturally digitigrade is have them stand/walk like a plantigrade animal, but often switch to a "semi-digitigrade" sort of stance when preforming more athletic activities like running. Some of them like to walk around on their toes more than others, but normally they would walk around like humans.

The proper term is "faculative digitigrade".

I mean, the leg doesn't have to be that thin, right? After all, the leg could be mainly composed of type IIa fibers, or be a combination of type I and type II fibers.

Doubt you're still on here, but for anyone who may stumble upon this, I'd like to bring up the point that plantigrade come with the major disadvantage of having a higher potential of back problems later on in life.

Another problem comes with running, especially for the ones who don't know how to run correctly. If you constantly plant for feet wrong, you can put allot of strain on your joints and back. Even more so with continuous use.

Hey so uh... what do dinosaurs like raptors do to compensate for the weaknesses you mentioned?

From a biological perspective, the joints of humans and other primates are better adapted for endurance standing. If anthropomorphic animals (‘furries’) were real and lived in a human-like environment, natural selection might eventually favor plantigrade-like joints for efficiency.

Digigrade forever!