bones grow on skeleton trees

skeleton trees... that's not a bad idea for a shirt design. to the photoshop, boy wonder!

You raise some interesting questions. I have nothing to offer, but good luck!

but seriously, think of baby birds. they are born (or hatched) without feathers. i would imagine that a person growing wings would look at the growths early on and think, " why do i have fingers growing out of my back? " you may want to consult a skelatal chart for both humans and birds.

It would be incredibly painful, IMHO.



And with that nugget of opinion gold, I bid you all adieu.

Stan Lee called...

Painful, but probably dull aches, not sharp pains.

Grow featherless.

birds have hollow bones. her wings would have to have hollow bones.

yeah, also I think all of her bones have to be hollow right? so that she will be able to fly. either that or the wings will have to be really really huge.

Watch X-Men III ! It shows Archangel sprouting his little lumps and freaking out. It's more about the psychological impact than the growning pains.

it would hurt like a bitch

it would probably feel as if the person had huge bone spurs, which i'm told do indeed hurt like a bitch

At the risk of turning this blog way off topic into 80's territory. She'd probably expereince "growing pains" which is what happens sometimes to teens in puberty years when their bones grow and the tendons and stuff haven't quite caught up. I didn't really experience that, but find someone who did and they may be able to describe how it felt.



A bird's wings are made out of the same bones that make up the "pentadactyl limb" which is an evolutionary feature found in some form in pretty much all land vertebrates. The same bones thatmake up a human's hand etc have been reduced in a bird as part of the wings. They grow in the egg as a human's bone's grow in the womb.



It would be a much different experience growing a new bone or limb than having one you were born with just get bigger as you grow.



I'd look into how a lizard can replace its tail if it falls off.



I think the bones would protrude first, a flap of skin would have to come down too to make the surface of the wing, then feathers would grow onto it, but the feathers could start appearing early, before the wings had fully grown, just so they're less gross. It's a story after all.

this is how bones grow

Mate - you can make it as quick and painful/less as you like! It's your story, you're the boss! Convince the reader through your narrative. Anything is possible!!!

I soooo read this as "how do boners grow?"



sorry, jebs!

YEAH! Remember that seen in Night Watchers wher that chick changed from an owl to a person??!?!?!



That's how it would be.

I had "growing pains" in my legs when I was younger. It was a dull, achy pain for me which is why I suggested that.



You might want to read the Maximum Ride series, or the other series about Bird people by James Patterson.

I read it correctly but was going to make a boner joke. If you're going for like...real physics those wings are going to have to be HUGE as well as the bones being hollow as others have mentioned for flight to even be possible for a creature the size of a human.

Quetzalcoatlus weighed a max of 100kg and its wingspan was 18 meters.

I don't know if the wings have to be huge... I mean, how does a bumble bee fly around? Their wings are relatively tiny compared to their body.

The larger the creature gets, the more gravity affects their bodies and the disproportionately larger wings they must have to escape these effects.

It's the same principle as to why an ant can lift something 50x its own weight but anything much larger can't at all. Interesting side note, if an ant was the size of a human, it's exoskeleton would collapse under its own weight. I'm getting way too nerdy for this blog now.

Does that mean huge airplanes have a larger wing to body ratio than smaller jet planes?

valorandvellum on Jun 21 '08 at 11:04pm

I mean, how does a bumble bee fly around?



Isn't that a motivational slogan? "According to the laws of aerodynamics a bumblebee can't fly" or something. It makes us belive we can achieve the impossible.

also even if teh bones are hollow the muscles in her chest, back and shoulders would be huge and grossly disproportionate to teh rest of her

V&V: The mechanisms of flight in airplanes is much different than those in animals. Animal wings have to pump up and down. Airplanes provide thrust and their wings provide lift due to their aerodynamic design. So if you strapped a jet engine to your butt and had stiff metal wings then I suppose they would not have to be so big. =)

I see... so maybe she could have small wings and bad gas.

She could also glide places like a flying squirrel, perhaps. I think then the wings would not need to be so big, because they are not providing lift, but simply slowing a fall.

LOL!

Oh my gosh...Stan Lee would have nothing on that.