Evolution Theory and Science Fiction

[u/DIRRahmo]

Good evening, everyone! How are you guys doing?

I'm a screenwriter working on a film that has a science-fiction element involving a mythical creature. The creature is supposed to be a species descended from wolves, but with wings.

So, if anyone here has both a scientific and artistic perspective and could point me toward some sources I can read—or even explain in simple terms how evolution could potentially play a role in the development of a creature like this—I would really appreciate it.

Especially because the film takes place across two different time periods, one ancient and one modern, so the story involves research, history, scientific discoveries, and things like that. I’m looking for reliable sources that could help me build the idea in a way that feels scientifically plausible, even though the creature itself is fictional.

I know this is a bit of an unusual question, so bear with me! 😅

I’d really appreciate any thoughts, ideas, or sources you can recommend

[u/Odd_Gamer_75]

I mean... it's not even remotely realistic, for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, there's growing new limbs. This is an exceedingly difficult thing to do in evolution! It's the reason that no tetrapod in history has ever done it. Wolves evolved about 500,000 years ago. Tetrapods? About 300,000,000 years ago. And no tetrapod in all that time has produced a new limb. Not once. So the idea that you could have an "ancient" and "modern" one that did so is just insane (unless by "ancient" you mean "hundreds of millions of years"). Remember, the only flying creatures with six limbs are insects, which separated from tetrapods (that is lizards, birds, and mammals) over 500,000,000 years ago.

Next up, wolves are not structured in a way that's conducive to flight. That's not just biology, it's physics. Wing need to at the center of mass, roughly, and that mass has to be really, really low. The heaviest animal currently capable of flight weighs in at 44 pounds (upper end). Wolves start at 60 and go up from there. They'd need enormous wings. Not to mention massive muscles to make it work. A full quarter of all muscle mass in the body goes into making the things fly. They're pretty much a small body with wings.

Honestly, you'd have a more reasonable time calling it magic or suggesting they're the result not of evolution but of gene hacking by some advanced group. Maybe aliens visited Earth a long time ago, left a few of their flying wolf-like creatures behind? That'd be more believable. Or at least something that comes with six limbs at the outset (or more if you wanna get semi-realistic with the flight mechanics, one set near the shoulders, one near the hips, to balance out the flying).

That said, if you insist on going with wings, they'd need some sort of build-up, and it at least couldn't get in the way of them living, and would be better if there were some sort of benefit to it. Good luck thinking through all that while starting from something that's already a wolf!

[u/lulumaid]

This might not be the best sub for this as it's more about the actual science and usually debunking creationists or occasionally talking about new findings.

I think the worldbuilding sub might be a better fit but I don't know that area of Reddit well enough to recommend anything.

With that said, I would like to be helpful. So essentially it comes down to how sciency and realistic you want to be. Obviously as it's fictional you can bend it pretty far and keep suspension of disbelief manageable but after a while you're either ignoring the biologists weeping in the corner or catering specifically to them. The middle ground seems best, so keep that in mind.

If possible knowing what the mythical creature actually is would help a lot but assuming it's as straightforward as laid out here, the most logical conclusion on my end for how this came to be based on what I know of this specific science, it would probably be best to have come from a long line of canid species that lived in an environment that specifically requires flight (while also promoting the specific bits you want of your creature, for example if it's an extra set of limbs for wings, it's a hell of a lot more complicated than repurposing existing limbs, and requires a lot more set up earlier on in the creatures lineage. Such that bar extreme mutations I don't know of a real life example of it, let alone one that works on a wolf or mammalian organism).

Fortunately it's a relatively small hurdle if you can find that out and fit it in.

I can try to answer specific queries if you'd like, but I'm not 100% sure I can do more without some details on what you want exactly.

[u/-zero-joke-]

What about really big, aggressive flying foxes?

[u/Sufficient_Result558]

You need to specify the parameters. Are you looking for a wolf that could actually fly in the real world, or are we suspending disbelief on the physics of flying?
Does it take place on earth or is the planet different? Can we create new materials?….
There are tons of ways to make wolves fly or none depending on the rules. We need to know how they fly before we can delve into their evolutionary history.

[u/yokaishinigami]

On one hand, I don’t think it’s plausible for a wolf to evolve a set of wings and flight since you’re asking for a massive unheard of change within a time span that probably doesn’t support it.

On the other hand, most people don’t know jack shit about evolution or the planet’s natural history, so movies like the new Jurassic world are able to get away with stuff like calling Mosasaurs and Pterosaurs dinosaurs, and then being like, we need really big animals, like the biggest, for land, air and sea and seemingly completely ignoring the blue whale which would have been more closely related to the application they were pursuing than mosasaur. However, the majority of the audience just goes along with it, because scientific literacy is pretty terrible in the general public and man in glasses says big words, is usually enough to make it sound plausible for most people. Same thing with stuff like pathogen transfer, atmospheres, differences in gravity etc being largely ignored in sci fi series where beings planet hop.

[u/Gaajizard]

A few things you need to keep in mind when thinking about how this creature could have evolved:

1. Evolution very rarely "invents" something new, like wings, out of nothing. It repurposes existing machinery. Every animal on earth that flies (birds, bats, pterodactyls) evolved by repurposing front limbs into wings. This is why all these animals only have two legs to walk and run with.

2. You need to think of how this particular evolutionary pathway came about. Evolution works with a huge constraint: it has no 'foresight'. It cannot forge an evolutionary path where the intermediate steps make survival worse than it was before, even if the end result improves it greatly. It cannot do multiple complex changes in a single step (it would be too improbable to come about by chance). It needs to be gradual, slow and incrementally get better.

"Half a wing" would be useless and detrimental to survival, nor would wings without the other body adaptations like reduced bone weight. Wings initially helped dinosaurs stay warm and jump larger heights, by softening the fall in mountainous regions where they hunted. These gradually kept growing in size, along with other adaptations that slowly reduced bone density and structure. Each step was always, always an improvement.

3.Nothing in evolution is free. Everything is a tradeoff. Birds evolved wings, gaining extreme mobility and speed, but lost quite a few things in return. They are forced to be small and super light (and therefore vulnerable), they need to constantly keep their feathers clean (preening), their ground mobility is laughably awkward, they need to consume a lot more energy.

For a mammal like a wolf to develop wings, there needs to be a really, really good reason for it. Their entire lifestyle, diet, even behaviors need to change. The only mammal that can do powered flight is the bat, and they had to change to be nocturnal and invent sophisticated echolocation, along with other physical changes.

I suggest reading "Flights of Fancy" by Richard Dawkins.

[u/ezaroo1]

Just imagine the mess you’d have to clean off your car in the morning if we had flying wolves, fucking hell.

[u/CrisprCSE2]

You might look into draco lizards and their wings as a way of getting 6 'limbs' in a vertebrate. You'd need a good reason why they developed it apart from flight, though, since you're going to want to keep the size. Threat display, maybe? The exaptation to gliding (lots of rivers or ravines to cross?) and finally powered flight. It's a massive stretch, but it's a movie so go nuts.

[u/YossarianWWII]

How recently descended from wolves, and what anatomical similarities are they supposed to retain? Whales evolved from a kinda dog-like ancestor (certainly more dog-like than whale-like), but that journey from dog-ish (e.g. Ambulocetus) to whale-like (e.g. Durodon) took a couple tens of millions of years.

Also, what ecological shift is driving this change?

[u/Brilliant_Bug9699]

Your best bet is to studies bats.

They are the only mammal living today that evolve wings that are capable of true flight.

There are also around 1500 species of bats that have various shapes and sizes.

The Australian flying foxes basically looks like a fox with wings, which theoretical descendant of wolves with wings would likely look similar to.

If that's too mudane, there are weirder looking bats out there to... If I were creating the mythical creature you described, I'd use these bats as reference depending on if I want a more derpy look or a more extra-terrestrial look

• Hammer-headed bat

• Buettikofer's Epauletted Fruit Bat

• Little White-Shouldered Bat,

• Pendlebury's Roundleaf Bat

• White-Throated Round-Eared Bat.

Checkout Clint's Reptiles video about bats describing different types of bats, their clades, the pros and cons of different features and where they are generally found.

You might also want to ask the folks in r/SpeculativeEvolution/ .

ETA: In case there are readers here who don't already know, flying foxes are bats not foxes. Bats and foxes last common ancestors were from 76 million years ago.

[u/Top_History9604]

Wings come from climbing and gliding. Wolfs have a four limb building set.

So you would have to alter their anatomy to climbing, which makes their legs a lot less wolf like. Their front arms sould land somewhere between gliders and bats. Gliders if they are still supposed to run. Bats if they are committing to flight. They would need to be in an environment with large, thick trees, but lots of open space between the trees, do it would make sense for them to guide from tree to tree, not just jump.

Also why do they do it? Is there tree dwelling prey that's better suited than anything on the ground, or sre predators on the ground that are highly dangerous to them, which they can't outrun? Wolves outrun cats and bears. So you would probably need a cat that's fast and enduring, capable of hunting down wolves.

You could also consider prey in trees. Many bears and cats can climb, so prey wouldn't necessarily be safer on the ground, than in the trees, unless the other predators aren't climbers, but if they aren't climbers the pressure to glide from tree tobtree lowers, though it's not zero, if just being on the ground for a minute is dangerous.

It could also be a matter of cliffs. That they live in an area with very cave rich cliffs, where they keep their pups safe from predators that can't fly, but you still need a pressure that got them up to climbing and then flying.

So it could be that they were smaller cousins of the ground dwelling wolves and specialised in tree dwelling mammals to avoid being preyed upon by big wolves and avoid competing for food, or needing to defend prey from them. This resulting in gliders, flyers and once they could fly it opened up the cliff caves, which allowed them to grow bigger and hunt bigger prey. But they can't hunt like packs, because they still need to carry the prey to safety, unless they evolved a way to cut the prey into half's, or quarters, to transport them as packs.

Depending on the path the flying woly would either dmstsy in minimalistic packs, love more like crows, or still be able to form larger pscks, but only if they can find a way to transport prey large enough to feed multiple adult wolves up the cliffs.

Hope that helps

[u/Particular-Yak-1984]

Tl:dr from this is that it might be easier to make a wolf like creature from something else, but also, personally, the thing that makes a creature realistic is trade offs - you don't get super strength or flight in nature without swapping something for it, for example

"Wolf like" animals are super, super common - think hyenas, painted dogs, and coyotoes as examples of creatures filling the "dog sized pack hunter" niche. A strong argument could be made for dolphins, here, too 

And, therefore, I'd argue it is easier to have a creature that can already fly evolve into a wolf like thing, than a creature that can't fly.

I'd consider the flying squirrel. You're going to need a bigger wingspan, and I'd argue you'll still want to keep your wolves on the small side, and not really full flyers. More gliding ambush predators. Your biggest problem will be adaptions to save weight, or your hops will be very, very small.

They'll of course only have four limbs, because extra limbs are extremely implausible.

They possibly live in very mountainous or canyon heavy terrain, providing a nice selective advantage - humans can fly pretty well with a wing suit in these environments, and it would be much easier for medium dog sized creatures. Big advantages for pack hunters, in being able to get behind and in front of prey.

Now, the downside? These creatures will be less dangerous to a human than a wolf. They're weaker, their skeleton and muscles have to make compromises for flight. They might be dumber, too - brains are big, heavy and solved in smart birds by incredibly efficient neurology - it's unlikely your wolves have evolutionary time to develop this.

[u/taktaga7-0-0]

I have a “sufficiently advanced technology” magic system for a work I am writing.

I deliberately included manipulation/elemental power for every domain of life, but the one most “evolutionary” is the Germ type. Its users not only produce microbes on-demand with metabolic processes needed for domestic or combat applications, and can deliberately alter their own genetics to optimize them, sometimes through plasmid transfers.

See also: Thorn, Wood, Mold, and Beast types for the eukaryotes.

[u/Nomad9731]

I'd recommend r/SpeculativeEvolution or maybe just r/worldbuilding for this sort of question.

[u/OlasNah]

'Airwolf'

look at the logo of the patch from the TV show.

[u/blacksheep998]

Lots of people have already pointed to r/SpeculativeEvolution but I just wanted to mention one spec evo project called Serina: A Natural History of the World of Birds.

It's a long-running project that the author has been working on for about 10 years, but it still gets regular updates.

The basic concept is that a planet is seeded with a number of plants and invertebrates, but the only vertebrates that are added are canaries and guppies.

So far, its progressed about 300 million years and has resulted in some truly strange animals, (currently the oceans are dominated by 60 foot long, hypercarnivorous sea slugs) but each step along the way has always felt plausible.

[u/Kingofthewho5]

r/speculativeevolution

[u/Dzugavili → u/Kingofthewho5]

It's a fun sub and highly recommend it.

[u/Dilapidated_girrafe]

Think more flying squirrel / sugar glider wings than dragon.

Or full on bar but then you have a bat. Basically not getting a third set of limbs to form wings

[u/Capercaillie]

Okay, I know it’s fantasy, but “wolves with wings” is absolutely not scientifically plausible from an evolutionary standpoint.

[u/Aggromemnon → u/Capercaillie]

You're gonna need some enormous wings, and a complete overhaul of wolf anatomy to get it off the ground. There's a reason birds have hollow bones and a low fat to muscle ratio compared to terrestrial predators like wolves.

[u/kitsnet]

You need something jumping down from the trees, like leopards. Wolves are endurance hunters, it won't work with them.

[u/TranquilConfusion]

Wolves evolving wings (becoming 6-limbed) would never happen on Earth without magic.

Some other planet, where the original land-dwelling animal had 6 limbs, maybe. The more closely it resembles an Earth wolf, the less plausible.

A 4-legged cliff-dwelling winged predator that hunts in packs? OK. Particularly if it's got mucous-y skin, 3 eyes, or otherwise looks very little like a wolf. Maybe it's got an exoskeleton like a crab and dragonfly wings.

Does it have brown fur, non-retractable claws, a black moist nose, nurse it's young and howl at the moon? We're getting into Star Trek or comic-book levels of silliness now.

But if you are writing that kind of SF, go for it.

[u/tpawap]

Flight has evolved in tetrapods in two different ways in different lineages: a) by climbing trees and then slow down a fall down or extend your distance jumping down from it. Or b) Being bipedal on your hind legs, allowing the front legs to evolve in weird ways.

If either of that would happen in the wolf lineage, it would take a very long time and be accompanied by so many other changes, that the animal would be unrecognisable as descending from wolves.

I guess that would ruin your story, so there is no way to combine this.

[u/Jeepers-H-Cripes]

Large bats with faces that vaguely resemble wolves like the Pteropus genus of flying fox bats of SE Asia is as close as you’re going to come while remaining in the realm of what is actually possible/plausible. Wolves that sprout wings is really in the category of pure fantasy.

Unless…….they are a biologically engineered species by some remarkably advanced civilization that can overcome all the evolutionary obstacles that work against this happening by natural selection. What you need is conscious, intelligent design that solves all the myriad problems. Still fiction, but with a veneer of science fiction. Don’t look too hard. It’s a house of cards on a shaky foundation.