Taur Anatomy pt 1.

EDIT: I've adapted the image a little bit due to discussions in the comments and elsewhere, the main difference is that both torsos are slightly shorter, getting rid of excess room and mass.

I've been doing some thinking on one of my long time obsesions, taurs. I like them for their quirky anatomy, there is nothing quite like them in nature, the sheer amount of thought that can be put into them is astounding and you don't even have to go very far outside of the bounds of the mundane. Sure, some suspension of disbelief is required but we are still talking about fairly regular mammilian biology here.

One of the main principles I'm going off here is that I will be avoiding duplicating internal organs as much as possible. There are some very good reasons why all mammals have one heart and why it is located where it is. First off I wanted my taurs to be brainey, about as intelligent as a regular human. With that established I now have an organ I will not be compromising in the design, the brain. All other organs in the design will have to yeald to allow the brain to function at approximately human levels.

Because my taur has a large high performance brain I know that it will need alot of oxigen, thus I know that I want to place the lungs as close to it as possible, putting them in the upper body ribcage. Because the lungs don't function very well without alot of bloodflow and the heart doesn't function very well without alot of oxigen that organ joins them.

Now that I have put he heart and lungs in the upper torso ( which I shall refer to as the torso from now on ) that leaves the lower torso ( the barrel ) with a large amount of extra space in the ribcage because as I said before, I wasn't going to duplicate organs. This is especailly neciscary in the case of the circulatory system, getting two hearts on one circulatory system synced up is difficult and if they become desynchronized the entire system becomes very inefficient. Because of this I don't have to put any of the digestive organs in the torso and can put larger equivalents in the barrel in stead. This is very handy because once again I have multiple organs that I cannot split up. The digestive tract ( Stomach, panchreas, gall bladder, small intestine, large intestine ) and to a lesser extent, the liver operate best as a package. Thus in my design the digestive tract remains approximately where it is, shifting a little forward with the stomach tucked closer to the ribcage ( having the stomach inside the ribcage would be a very bad thing because it would not allow it to expand sufficiently when the taur eats ) with the liver sitting happily protected within the ribcage, still close enough for the vein running from the intestines to the liver to not be obstructed yet still giving the digestive tract more room. I have decided to sandwich the spleen in front of the liver within the barrel ribcage, giving it more protection than it previously had and freeing up room for the digestive tract.

Because of the relatively large size of the offspring taurs would likely only give birth to one or two infants per pregnancy. Thus allowing human style mammaries on the torso to suffice, mammaries would not occur on the barrel.

One area I want to pay attention to is the torso 'stomach' area. This is where the upper body connects with the lower and it is quite important and quite vulnerable. In my designs it has a large amount of sinews and muscle in order to keep the two body parts together when the taur actually decides to pull something with it's hands or lift a heavy object. There's nothing like your lower body coming off to ruin your day. Secondly the spine would have necklike vertibrae, allowing for a very large freedom of movement of the torso. These vertibrae can be easily reached and if damaged it would render the taur instantly quadraplegic. In addition a massive Aorta runs from the large heart carrying oxiginated blood under high pressure into the barrel, if this gets ruptured the taur would bleed to death in a matter of seconds. Less importantly a long Esophagus runs through this area carrying food down into the stomach.

A handy side effect of the torso waist muscles is that they allow the larger lungs to expand much further downwards because there are now digestive organs to get in the way, allowing the taur to take much deeper breathes than a human would, providing it with the extra oxigen it's larger body needs.

I'd like to add one last note on proportions. Because the upper body holds the heart and lungs it also has to be quite large compared to the lower body, larger than most designs I have seen so far. My best guess is that a taur with an upper body of the same proportions as a 180 cm, 80 kg person, would weigh approximately 120 kg and be about 150cm tall.

Many thanks to for his large amount of input on my taur designs and for coming up with alot of the principles my design is built around. Input is greatly encouraged. I'm curious to hear what you think of my designs, what you think I did wrong and why.