drferox:

The next long awaited post in the Fantasy Biology series, finally looking at the popular pegasus thanks to popular opinion on my Patreon.

Long time followers of this blog have been waiting for this one for a while. You all seem very keen for my take on how to make a six-limbed creature work, get airborne, and ideally be ridden.

There is a lot to talk about with these flying horses. In the interest of narrowing the topic, I’m only going to discuss pegasus with bird wings, not with bat/dragon wings or any other magical flying horses. 

Key features of a pegasus:

• Horse body
• Bird wings
• Can fly
• Ridden by heroes

The biggest difficulty with making a pegasus ‘work’ is that you have two different types of forelimbs, that both use very different shoulder joints to function. A horse shoulder moves forward to back when running….

But a bird shoulder moves up and down with some rotation when flapping…

Keep reading