Sunday, October 27, 2019

The Wait panel 4

The comic at my site, and at deviantart.

Wings! Which may actually be a bit more functional than I originally assumed, because I'd overlooked that the hand doesn't twist at the wrist but at the elbow, so the remiges (flight feathers) should mostly point in the same direction after all? They're still different from proper raptor wings, though.

Theropod forelimbs have palms facing each other, and even pointing a bit up and forward instead of back and down like on Jurassic Park/World theropods, whose anatomy is still mostly based on science from the early 1990's, and I guess the flawed hybridclones that all JP/W raptors are to some extent just have deformed forelimbs with a different range of motion (never mind Indo, whose forelimb anatomy is more primate than dinosaur). Skye can turn her hands to have her palms at least mostly face each other, but it's not their natural rest position, and still wouldn't be quite the same position as what hands specialized to be wings are in. Her wings are also more angular, due to some missing soft tissue like skin flaps at the joints.

When the wing is folded, the remige feathers of birds and deinonychosaurs ("raptors") overlap with the secondaries (flight feathers on the arm) always coming on top of the primaries (flight feathers on the second finger) on the outside of the wing, and the other way around on the inside of the wing, due to how the wrist is positioned, to allow the wing to properly catch air under it.

Skye's individual wing feathers overlap the same as a proper raptor's would (outer edge of the feather visible on the outside of the wing, inner edge on the inside), but the primaries and secondaries probably flip-flop over each other (which in the long run will cause a lot of wear to the feathers at the middle of the wing and make the wings less efficient until her next moult, but for now they're new) and more often than not are in the opposite order compared to a proper raptor wing. She also can't fold them as closed as a Mesozoic raptor would have been able to (not quite as much as a present-day bird can, but raptor wrists could bend more like a bird's than other theropods' wrists would have been able to).

In addition to her wings, her tail fan is also throwing her off until she gets used to it, since her tail is more prehensile than her feathered ancestors' would have been, and it's not her kind of tail the feather fan evolved to suit. She's also a very late bloomer when it comes to growing her plumage, so she's already had time to get used to not having these features.

She's learning to make it work, but it won't ever work as well as it could. For now, hunting lessons for her are watching how it's done, and practicing pounces on prey already killed or weakened enough that it's safe for her to learn the motions and adjust them so that her new accessories help instead of hinder her.

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