I have a question about centaur babies.

[BerthaKit]

Would the human section be all floppy and helpless like a whole human baby, while the horsey but be able to walk around like a horse baby? Or would both half’s be either humanly floppy and under developed or Horsily matured?

and how would mama centaur birth something that shape?

Ooh thank you!

@BerthaKit, can you hear the clippitty clop of tiny little centaur baby hooves? That's because we're hot trotting it over to Classics with this thread now, after many nominations from all your fellow centaur fans.

Classics really is the appropriate home for this subject, of course!

Absolutely, @ErrolTheDragon

These are lovely.
I just saw the post about mountain fauns which would be like goat centaurs. And then I thought about pygmy goats and now I really would like a pygmy centaur. Those tiny horses with a tiny human torso bit.
I can say this without impunity because I am tiny myself.

Imagine a shire centaur next to one of those teacup-centaurs!

I’ll Ask my boys to draw some 😃

This is great news! Neiiighhhhhhh!

A classic!!!! Hurrah! I’ve been here for 100 years or so and never achieved a classic

My favourites are the cyclops and the ant-eater elephant

I think you are troubled unnecessarily. A normal human gestation is 9 months. A normal horse gestation is about 12 months.

A centaur will be at least 12 months but more realistically longer as its growing something more complicated.

So it's more likely to be born as a bottom part foal (a bit wobbly but once it's collected itself can stand up and run off) and a top part firmed up baby/toddler.

The state animals are born in is referable to their environment - as in horses, giraffes and elephants can get up and go because if they cant they will be attacked and die.

Humans and bird can afford to be a bit more floppy because they are protected by homes and nests.

A centaur lives in the mountains and has wild animal and human enemies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaur#/media/File:Centaur_mosaic_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

so it will need to be fully formed to be able to get up and go at birth.

So the baby bit will need to gestate longer and not be floppy.

Love this @SirQuintusAureliusMaximus

It's whatever you have Ingested I would say

Very good explanation @SirQuintusAureliusMaximus

The main reason humans have evolved to give birth at a fairly "floppy" stage of development is because of the combination of a relatively large brain size and relatively small hips in the gestating mothers. Basically babies have to be born at that development stage or their heads will get too big to fit through an adult human female pelvis, which has the shape it does does due to us having evolved to walk and run upright which requires a narrower hip structure - if we had stuck to walking on all-fours our hups could have evolved to be wider.

In the body structure of a centaur this isn't an issue - the human head is narrower than the foal body anyway, and the adult female centaur will have hips plenty wide enough to accommodate a toddler-sized head in the birth canal at a size that a human woman wouldn't survive fiving birth to.

Hm... I'd imagine then that centaur babies would emerge very pissed off at having been confined in utero for several months at a stage when the human part wants to be observing and starting to interact with the world. I shouldn't have thought it was good for language acquisition.

The equine abdominal cavity would provide good acoustics for auditory learning, so the baby centaur could learn through sound. Their vision might be underdeveloped though, as horse skin is less translucent than human skin.

There is a web comic showing a menataur and mermaid's kids. One is fully human looking while the other is half bull, half fish.

Unforgettable thread, I hope it keeps going!
These questions have to be asked

There is a web comic showing a menataur and mermaid's kids. One is fully human looking while the other is half bull, half fish.

That's interesting. Makes me think of Mendelian genetics.

Maybe the human bit is recessive, like blonde hair

So if you have one parent with true brown hair (BB cap B= Brown) and one parent with blonde hair recessive (bb), odds are all four children will have brown hair with a recessive blonde gene as they take one "B" from each parent - so all will be Bb.

but if you have one parent with brown hair who has blonde as a recessive gene, two out of four will be blonde as they will be Bb Bb, bb, bb

Like this kind of diagram https://images.slideplayer.com/17/5335560/slides/slide_13.jpg

So if you assume that the human bit is recessive and the animal bit dominant

if you have a Minotaur (half bull (B -dominant) half human (h- recessive) and a Mermaid (half fish F- dominant and half human), and they have children

four children would be
BF (Bull Fish); Bh (Bull Human); Fh (Fish Human) and hh (fully human).

This is wonderful!

But (sorry) I always assumed that the human bit of the mermaid had developed gills, so can’t breathe out of water. And the bull head of the minotaur certainly means lungs for breathing on land. So how do they go about that.

Imagine a minitaur wooing a centaur!
One bull-horse, one fully human, and one each mini-minotaur and centaur.
What a family 🤩

But (sorry) I always assumed that the human bit of the mermaid had developed gills, so can’t breathe out of water. And the bull head of the minotaur certainly means lungs for breathing on land. So how do they go about that.

Well as a newly and self appointed expert on the inter-breeding of mythical creatures, I can tell you that obviously (ha!) it would depend upon how the genetical outcome manifested itself and who the parents were

• So if the bottom half of a merperson is a fish, then it can't walk out of water anyway so doesn't need to breath out of water. It's likely that after years of pure bread mer-breeding, the human part has lost or will lose the ability to breath out of water as its unncessary - of course, unless you have some kind of siren singing shit going on.

On the other hand if you have a merperson that is half fish but has the human half from some other mythical creature - like a centaur, it is almost certainly going to be able to both breath in a gill way and a lung way.

So a bull fish would probably be able to breath both ways, although if the bottom bit was fish, the lungs maybe superfluous but think of dolphins I suppose. I say bull fish = lungs and gill breathing.

Imagine a minitaur wooing a centaur!
One bull-horse, one fully human, and one each mini-minotaur and centaur.
What a family

It's just probability though isn't it. Like a human couple who want a girl and a boy, have six boys and keep trying for a girl - even though the notional probability is 50:50.
Mr Minotaur and Ms Centaur could end up with six humans and be desperately trying for a minotaur.

Mr Minotaur and Ms Centaur could end up with six humans and be desperately trying for a minotaur.

Imagine the disappointment. Not ONE mythical child, though ample opportunity for surprises further along the family tree. 😃

I don't believe a mermaid could be half fish. The spine would bend the wrong way and the blood wouldn't be compatible. I think it's far more likely they'd be half dolphin/porpoise/seal or other aquatic mammal. It's not as if sailors in Days Of Yore were biologists, after all.

So breathing would be like them, with taking really big breaths and the ability to hold them for a long time.

I'm sure you're right, their tails are horizontal not vertical. Definitely fully mammalian.

I'm not so sure. It's a persuasive theory but on the other hand older drawings of merpersons tend to have scales and fishy fins.

http://pinktentacle.com/2009/12/19th-century-mermaid-illustrations/

Plus some fish do swim on a horizontal plane - re your spine point.

We need to get back to the centaurs - we are de-railing the thread.