When it comes to anthropomorphic animals, designs tend to go in one of these directions:
- Embrace animal design and differences in anatomy
- Mostly human design with animal aesthetic
What I'm trying to envision is a world where furries evolved closer to the human design, but not completely.
What I would like to discuss is, how do you think bats would have developed, particularly their wings?
The "easiest" implementation is give them back wings. But that doesn't make sense evolutionarily. Bat wings are formed from their arms and "hands". Having an extra set of limbs emerge that replicates their "arm wings" they lost seems unlikely.
Ok, so how about leaving the wings on their arms? Sure. But now I want to toss another problem in this world. Hands gave us the ability to manipulate our environment and make tools. I feel that would have been a necessary step towards human-like intelligence.
Let's say their phalanges shrunk to be more finger like. This along with being human-sized should make their wings useless, right? Even if they kept long phalanges like they do now, would they still be able to have true flight?
If I assume the ability to fly is highly diminished, then the conclusion I'm making is that bats would prefer to maximize the ability to use their hands. In this world, bats would surgically remove the wing skin between their fingers to give them proper hands. Some may even remove all of it (and some fringe would keep it) allowing their arms to fit in standard clothing.
So, what do you think? Does this design make sense for this type of world? How would you design a bat?
I haven't thought about it too much yet since I don't have any bat characters, but one idea I've had was to give them something similar of Pterosaur-style wing-hand structures, except with the fourth and fifth digits being used for the wing instead of just the fifth - so kinda in-between actual bats and Pterosaurs in that regard. Anthro bats would also tend to be on the small size and have extremely large wingspans for their size. They wouldn't be able to actively gain significant amounts of altitude but they'd be able to glide and possibly even produce thrust via flapping for short periods, though this would resemble the slow, deliberate flaps usually seen with dragons, not the fast flaps of a normal bat.
I wish I could figure out the physics of scaling a bat to a (smol) 5'. I'm curious if one would even be able to achieve lift jumping from the roof of a 2 story building or would they have to go base jumping.
Honestly, wing area and mass are a lot more important here. Quetzalcoatlus northropi was around the size of a Cessna 172.