Creatures feed themselves to the centaur out of a fear so deep it becomes selfless respect. John Varly in Demon thirty years ago had a throwaway line about the quirky issues posed by the right-angle spine of the centaur design that has always stuck with me.
I saw a funny tumblr screenshot recently debating whether or not having sex with a centaur was beastiality and it made me laugh because it was very silly and clever but it turns out googling those key words was a bad choice. The results were not at all what I was looking for. A Centaur has a man-stomach and a horse-stomach. And of course both want breakfast.
So first of all he has porridge and pavenders and kidneys and bacon and omelette and cold ham and toast and marmalade and coffee and beer. And after that he tends to the horse part of himself by grazing for an hour or so and finishing up with a hot mash, some oats, and a bag of sugar. That's why it's such a serious thing to ask a Centaur to stay for the weekend. A very serious thing indeed. The Silver Chair After the umpteenth reading of the Narnia books, I remember having some VERY serious discussions with my cousin about the anatomy of a creature that could eat like this.
We never really managed to come up with a good answer, so this is awesome food for thought. I always just think "double ribcages", so is that double hearts and lungs too? Not just where, buy why? Centaurs are just shoggoths with great self-control.
The reason why no one knows how centaurs eat? Maybe centaurs eat blades of grass with hamburgers on top. Robert Graves wrote a rambling essay entitled Centaur's Food , to be found in his collection Food For Centaurs , which is largely about mushrooms, which may be of interest if you're into that sort of thing.
Horses can sleep lying down. So could centaurs. Centaurs could eat that way too, and could also farm their own grain and grass, since they have arms. Centaur babies could be born more advanced than human ones. I think you pretty much have to see them as created by magic or by scifi experimenting, they wouldn't evolve that way naturally. But the other stuff you can theorize workarounds for. The same is true of traditional fantasy dragons — the ones with both wings and forelimbs, anyway.
If you look at a giraffe skeleton I think you can see how the anatomy might work: the centaur basically has a neck like a giraffe, but with an extra set of scapulae shoulder bones extending up along the cervical vertebrae. The arms are articulated off those scapulae, so what looks like a centaur's chest is really a very long and grossly thickened neck.
This explains how they can bend down: it's a much more flexible arrangement than our chest. I don't suppose they would need anything like a duplicated stomach, but instead have one that accommodates the omnivorous diet described by the Greeks.
They'd eat quite a lot but only in proportion to their mass, say around as much as three adult humans. The extra limbs could be explained by something like a heritable polymelia. The only real problem for me is the combination of hooves down low and fingers at front. I don't think there's any evolutionary path that could lead to it. Just as a note, in the show The Magicians, there's a magical world called Fillory where Centaurs exist and they poop pretty freely, but they're very talented healers so their human servants come and clean their poop quickly whenever they go, the servants gets advanced treatments as an exchange.
I had always assumed that centaurs ate people. I'm sure I read that somewhere. My model of a centaur is that it's human down to what is effectively a combination human pelvis and horse's shoulder, except for the spine, which transitions from the lowest or 2nd lowest human lumbar L4 or L5 vertebra to one of the last equine cervical vertebra C6 or C7.
For the bowel, the human sigmoid transitions straight into the end of an equine oesophagus. There is a common circulatory system with two sets of hearts and lungs.
The only thing I can't work out is how the horse's windpipe feeds up to the human mouth, and whether it's just an extension of the human trachea or if it splits off at the pharynx. Just don't expect to have Centaur herds the size of grass grazer herds. Deer are known to hunt down and consume bird's nests for the eggs or hatchlings.
Show 3 more comments. Once you earn more rep you will be able to comment on any post. Let us know if you have questions. It makes claims about the anatomy of a mythological creature, without citing source or context.
Off the top of my head, I can think of at least three different settings with centaurs in them, none of which are described precisely the same. As an aside, requesting people change their votes is not likely to garner you the response you want - in fact, I've seen the exact opposite happen.
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Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Linked Related Hot Network Questions. Question feed. Worldbuilding Stack Exchange works best with JavaScript enabled. However, horses have incredible digestive systems that help them have the ability to drink enough to keep themselves going on their regular diet. Horses are what is known as a non-ruminant herbivore. Herbivores have a diet that consists solely of plants.
Non-ruminant means that horses have one stomach that works similarly to humans. Though they do not have multiple compartments in their stomachs as ruminant animals do, they have two sections that digest their food separately.
Humans do not even have this level of complexity. Since the food a centaur ingests will hit the simple, single human stomach first, it has to be nourished. None of these are compatible with what it takes to subsist on a grass diet, which horses use their long and flexible lips to grip. As for grass, oats, or hay, horses have very distinct teeth used for processing their food. Their front incisors are designed to bite the food.
Their use their long tongue to then move the food to the back cheek teeth for the grinding down of the forage food they eat. For that reason, Centaurs are depicted as omnivores, eating meat and veggies, even starches. They also are typically pictured imbibing on wine and other popular liquor in Ancient Greece. It makes complete sense that centaurs would have a human diet as their personalities and everything about them other than the actual body is so implicitly human.
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