Wouldn't that all be up to you? It's a fictional critter. There's precedent in biology for multiple stomachs if that helps - maybe the human part digests things and the horse part handles cellulose? It must still suck chewing grass with human teeth, so maybe they have bigger molars and stronger jaws? A horse needs big lungs to gallop, and they also have bigger heads and mouths to take in more air - maybe the human part has a giant gawping mouth to compensate for all of this? And what if, instead of a stomach, there's a horse brain inside the human torso, and they talk?
Vanilla DF has molemarians, who are intended to be naked mole rat centaurs (their body plan is even labeled as centaur_hand_foot). They use the four-legged part as the lower body and the humanoid part as the upper body.
Well hardest part is the fact that all LOWERBODY parts would wear pants.
So if the horse upper and horse lower are LOWERBODY (assuming the human upper is the HEAD and UPPERBODY) the horse part can wear two pairs of pants.
not to forget for legs which are hooves, which are STANCE and STANCE can wear boots
so if Centaurs are supposed to be a wild creature this is fine. But if they form tribes, or an entity. Then they would be awkwardly wearing gear (that is baring the fact you didn't make custom gear that would make sense that is aka just used vanilla)
However I'm not sure how bisecting a bisection works (cutting a lowerbody off a lowerbody) would it kill the creature or since there is a lowerbody still connecting to a upperbody it's fine.
I'd imagine vital organs would be in the horse part. but major artieries will still run through the upperbody to supply the brain blood, nutrients, and oxygen.
But the suggestion of larger molars more flat teeth like herbivores would make sense. leaving their organs more equine
The main issue with centaurs realistically is that if you just add a human torso onto a horse body we get a problem in that the total weight of the front parts ends up exceeding that of the back parts so the creature either bowls over or spends it's entire time bowling backwards in order to correct the weight balance.
I don't get that. Humans can stand upright on 2 legs, I don't see why adding a horse-behind would cause them to fall forward.
It would make sense for the heart and lungs to be closer to the brain. If this wasn't necessary we would see animals with their heart in their tails. I would probably put them in the 'gut' of the human part and have the ribs extend there as well. Just so that it is in a nice core location.
Problem lies in the fact that a Centaur is far bigger than a man in sheer size. A human sized heart and a pair of lungs ain't gonna be able to supplement the entire body with proper blood/oxygen circulation.
They'd need to have a pretty massive set of vital organs to do that and a human torso ain't gonna cut it. They'd need to be inside the horse part of their body.
Multiple heartsIf multiple hearts/lungs or other organs were needed we would see this exhibited in larger creatures. Neither Horses nor blue whales have more than one heart. Notably Giraffes only have one heart as well, so I do not feel that Centaurs should have multiple hearts.
I don't get that. Humans can stand upright on 2 legs, I don't see why adding a horse-behind would cause them to fall forward.
Humans can stand upright on two legs because humans are balanced. If you replace the head of a horse with a human torso along the lines of depictions of centaurs we end up falling forward because the weight *of* the front part is added onto that of the front parts of the horse (effectively) which are already balanced against that of the back parts.
Or think of both sets of legs as weights in a scales. The legs themselves are already balanced against each-other because of bilateral symmetry (hence it's popularity in nature), but if we have four legs we have to balance the back legs against the front legs. Add a centaur torso however and a whole load of extra weight is now added onto the front legs, tipping the scales so they are unbalanced in a forward heavy manner.
This is why, despite all the advantages of having better vision, all the quadrapeds all have heads which angle forward (including horses). They also have an downwards arch in their back, which allows their bottoms to balance out their heads near enough, preventing the problem I described. Centaurs on the other hand have a serious balance problem because their bottoms are not large enough to balance out their human torso.
It would make sense for the heart and lungs to be closer to the brain. If this wasn't necessary we would see animals with their heart in their tails. I would probably put them in the 'gut' of the human part and have the ribs extend there as well. Just so that it is in a nice core location. The digestive track would wind all the way through but God knows how or what they would eat. Grass? Would the human part just bend over like a horses head? Are they omnivorous? Then why have a digestive track as long as a horse?
My head hurts. Just put in saytrs instead.
Thinking about that bit, I didn't major in anatomy (though I really wish I did, I find that far more interesting than computers these days) would multiple hearts and/or sets of lungs be able to properly function together in a larger animal?I'm doing the medical thing right now, and as far as I know there's no reason why they would not be able to work together. Might be horribly inefficient, and evolutionary implausible, but... that's normal.
I imagine if you're born unbalanced, you learn how to balance it. Like at some point in the very early years of your life you crawled
so saying "There is just 60ish lbs more on the front it will fall over" makes zero sense. Maybe if it was a machine but even then the engineer can simply program "How about you lower the center of gravity at the back and place the front legs out a bit more"
Until trail and error it will balance (much like a child learning to walk and balance)
There are also people that do insane tricks with bikes, you just learn how to balance.
The reason smaller creatures like insects can have multiple hearts is because they don't have a very efficient circulatory system to begin with. They are basically just sacks full of blood and the heart is basically a pulsating muscle that "stirs" the blood so that oxygen gets around the body. For an insect, having more hearts to stir the blood could be helpful. That's very different from a vertebrate circulatory system, where the heart forces the blood at high speeds through closed vessels. For a vertebrate to have multiple hearts they would have to be in sync with each other to keep the blood moving quickly. There isn't really much point when a stronger single heart would work just as well and give the body fewer points of failure.
I think if a centaur was a natural creature (and not a magically fused human and horse) there wouldn't be any reason for it to have redundant organs - giraffes have a head that is far higher above their heart and stomach than a centaur's would be (assuming the heart was in the lower body), but they don't need redundant organs (although they do have an unusually large heart), so why would a centaur need them?
Alternatively, the heart could be in the upper torso, making it easier to pump blood to the head. The torso could be filled up with a larger heart and lungs that extend to where a human's stomach would be, and the stomach/intestines could be in the "horse" part.
Also worth mentioning: Horses actually have an extra circulatory "assist" in their feet, called a "frog" - as the horse runs it squeezes the blood out of its legs and helps it to move around. (We sort of have a similar thing, actually, which is why it is more uncomfortable to stand in place for long periods of time than it is to walk). This has nothing to do with the size though; it is to help horses and humans run for long distances.
I would also guess from its body plan that it was either a predator or a browser, possibly both, but not a grazer. It would be hard for a centaur to bend down far enough to eat grass, but hands are nice for picking fruits or killing things. Hooves are good for running and since they can use weapons they don't need claws.
I imagine if you're born unbalanced, you learn how to balance it. Like at some point in the very early years of your life you crawled
so saying "There is just 60ish lbs more on the front it will fall over" makes zero sense. Maybe if it was a machine but even then the engineer can simply program "How about you lower the center of gravity at the back and place the front legs out a bit more"
Until trail and error it will balance (much like a child learning to walk and balance)
There are also people that do insane tricks with bikes, you just learn how to balance.
The problem is that the centaur has to move and move fast or there really is no point in being a centaur at all.
If you never move then you can get by fine, the problem is that moving requires you put the whole weight of your body on the front legs, lift your back legs off the ground, put them back onto the ground in front of where you were, lift your front legs off the ground and put them down again. If a creature is front-heavy we end up with a situation where it finds it cannot place it's back legs back on the ground and hence it ends up bowling over. It cannot learn to do anything except try to shuffle forward using only it's front legs, dragging it's useless back legs along with it.
The solution to the centaur problem is to ensure that nothing aside from the brain and mouth, the muscles needed to operate the above and some bones are found in the horse part. Have a very long oesophagus and wind pipe that goes into a stomach/lungs that are in the center of the horse part; the reason is that we want to increase the weight of the centre considerably compared to either the back or front parts. Place the creatures heart on the back of the horse part, just below the human part so that we can pump blood to the centaur's brain, this does result in a major weakspot which everyone who does not like centaurs will exploit; the blood must be pumped through massive arteries into the human part or else that large human-sized brain will not function, hence if anyone cuts the area at the back where the human and horse part joins we have a dead centaur.
I feel the need to clarify that the molemarian body plan is HAND_FOOT_CENTAUR_NECK
What is that thing
Also, I feel like this thread is a pretty good explanation for why nature tends not to select for centuar types in the first place
If you never move then you can get by fine, the problem is that moving requires you put the whole weight of your body on the front legs, lift your back legs off the ground, put them back onto the ground in front of where you were, lift your front legs off the ground and put them down again. If a creature is front-heavy we end up with a situation where it finds it cannot place it's back legs back on the ground and hence it ends up bowling over. It cannot learn to do anything except try to shuffle forward using only it's front legs, dragging it's useless back legs along with it.
Now this makes sense, and I can agree with it. However the challenge now is the windpipe/esophagus, As in most vertebrates this is predominately on the very front of the neck, until it reaches the collarbone/rib cage. Even the stomach is at the very end/bottom of the rib cage, which is 'assuming' this was to ensure other tissues didn't expand/contract to pinch/close this important transport of consumption and air (spit balling with no research as to why this is the case the majority of the time).
We could assume that everything important follows the spine (in the human bit) like major arteries, and esophagus. Potentially the connection point of human and horse has a pelvic/tailbone like structure to help prevent any bending in that area so the tube can progress safely to the lungs and stomach without too much trouble if the human part jackknifed in a direction.
Would the weight distribution impair a centaur in DF, anyway? I haven't been modding for very long, but from what I've seen, it looks like you'd be able to slap together any odd assortment of limbs and ligaments with 0 consequences to your resulting monstrosity (provided you edited your raws right).
This bit makes very little sense to me. How exactly does a human torso (±60kg?) placed right over the front legs, overcome the leverage of a horse body (±450kg) with a centre of mass around the centre of the two pairs of legs? I doubt it would affect balance much at all given that a horse's head and neck is placed further forward and not actually that light either.
Running horses also do not have both pairs of hooves on the ground at any given point. The rear legs push off while the frost legs are raised, and vica versa. At most the centaur would need slightly stronger muscles for its front legs.
Let's also look at some other fast-running quadruped in nature, especially carnivores like cheetahs or windhounds. If you look at these from the side you'll notice that the rear end is much thinner than the front end, which also carries the forward-pointing head and neck. They seem to have no issues with running fast.
I do agree with the part about the organ distribution. Human torsos are a whole lot smaller than a horse's, there is no way going half-half is going to result in a Plausible Centaur (which is of course very important). Possibly you could get away with filling the entire torso with lungs, if only to not have the torso just be a really weirdly shaped neck with arms.
Yes running horses do not have both pairs of hooves on the ground at any point. That is the problem with centaurs, they are fine as long as they do not move, moving means they have to constantly rebalance their weight, the greater the weight imbalance the harder it becomes to do this and the more it penalises their speed. Eventually we get to the point where when the centaur will simply bowl over whenever it places it's weight on it's front legs.
The issue here is not the relative weight of a horse body VS a human torso, this is because the horse body is balanced so that the halves can be easily rebalanced; so it is the combination of the front half of the horse part WITH the weight of the human part which is the problem. The horse neck (and every other quadruped neck) is slanted at a slightly diagonal angle when moving, this is so the weight is directed towards the centre of the creature. Centaurs could potentially do this, place their human part at a diagonal forward angle when moving, the problem is the weight of the arms and internal organs would in a simple splice as it were cause an unbearable amount of stress on the joining point.
The need to balance out weight is why we have so many odd proportions in quadrupeds, if you place lots of your internal organs in your back parts you have to add extra bulk to the front part in order to balance out your back parts. Horse however have bulky backparts and scrawny front parts to help balance out their rather large necks which are not aligned giraffe style in such a fashion that they align directly with the centre of the creature. They need these necks because they are grazers, cats or dogs are predators who only need short necks, causing the need to reduce the relative weight of the back parts instead of the front parts.