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Centaur Anatomy!

You ever wanted to know how the entire complex centaur body system works? How two hearts, two lungs and that have a good function together? How do they eat, and how can something that's half a horse eat meat? How does their sceleton look?
We'll try to answer. If you have additional information, let us know. :)

Oh, and before you ask, ''us'' are [Zab] and [Linderel].


The skeleton and muscles.

The sceleton of a centaur is like a skeleton from a horses body that is combined with the skeleton of a humans upper body through the spine at the horses withers and the humans lower back. This means that it has two ribcages and six external limbs (the legs and the hands) plus the tail. Both ribcages have eighteen ribs whereof only the first six or seven actually connects in the middle. While the arms are conected to the rest of the skeleton with keybones, the whithers are only connected to the same with muscles and tensors.
Except from bones the centaurs body also concist of muscles and tensors that gives them the ability to move. The muscles of the horse part of the body has mainly muscles that's adapted to be trained for work that will going on for a long time, as example running slowly a few kilometres, while the muscles in the human body are trained for doing short but intense work, like shooting arrows with a bow for a few minutes at a time.
In order to be able to keep the human like part of the body up straght, there is a tensor, called Ligamentum Noche that's attached from the spine in place with the horses withers and up to the spine where the ribcage ends and further up to the axis and the head. On a horse this tensor would go straight from the withers to axis.
There is no muscles in the lower part of the legs, which is the reason they are so thin and gracile. Instead the muscles are placed above the knees, or carpus on the frontlegs, and have tensors going down to move the hooves and fetlocks.



The issue with two lungs and two hearts

As you have probably guessed, the centaur have double of quite many inner organs, as lungs, hearts and livers.
My theory in this is that if we start with the lungs, the air comes down trachea, the throat, and down first to the human lungs, but mainly passes through there and what oxygen that's not immediatly taken up by those lungs continues to the bigger ones in the horse body, where it's better taken care of. This causes the centaur to double breathe, which isn't visible when they breathe, but just means that their two pairs of lungs works almost independent from each other. If something would happen to one of the pairs, the others would take over completely.
The same thing goes when they eat. The food reach the human stomach first, and this takes care of meat and spices, etc. that the horsebody can't stand. The nutrition from this comes out to the entire body tho. The leftovers and vegetables, fruits and grass continues to the horses threechambered stomach where the carbohydrates and sugars are taken care of while the rest once again continues, this time to the colon. This is where most of the nutrition and fibres are taken up by the body before it dumps everything it doesn't need.
The water goes through both stomachs almost without getting affected or cleaned, untill it comes to the small inestines. This makes centaurs, like horses, more vulnerable for toxics in the water they drink.
The both hearts are connected to each other via the bloodsystem but as the lungs the work independent from each others. The upper heart works mainly to maintain the brain with oxygen while the bigger heart maintains the rest of the body, whith help from the four hooves that through the hoof mechanism helps pumping the blood when the centaur walks or runs. Since the both hearts share the same blood, a bloodloss is still as dangerous for centaurs as other beings. If the human heart are damaged or weak, they can still survive even if the preassure on the other heart of course gets heavier. But if the bigger horse heart stops, the preassure on the other heart will be too much.




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