So I was thinking a lot about dragon hands for something that I’ll hopefully go into tomorrow, and the old “walking on a flat, manipulative hand isn’t very comfortable” quandary came to mind.
Then I wondered: what if the dragon walked on its toes, like some many mammals do? The elephant (admittedly something of an extreme example, but bear with me) walks on a pad of spongy tissue; what if the pad were a bit smaller, or the toes longer? It would help make sense, considering the fact that a dragon is probably the largest terrestrial animal, as well as just resting the weight on the bones of the wrists, or in some cases, the fingers, which makes me wince a little considering it, though admittedly, I’m no biomechanist.
So I spent a lot of time looking at illustrations of bones in an old Zoobook andmy Cyclopedia Anatomicae, and came up with this:
Although I ended up cribbing a lot from the elephant, making up bones, as well as the shadows on them, was a bit more than I was really prepared to handle. I also tried to get some human-hand flexibility in there too- the whole purpose of this exercise was not to recreate a paw, but to make something approaching an anatomically-correct claw. I’m not sure if I succeeded or am even moving in the right direction, but at least it was something to take my mind off the rest of the day.
