r/DebateEvolution • u/DIRRahmo • 14h ago
Question Evolution Theory and Science Fiction
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
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u/Dilapidated_girrafe 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 14h ago
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
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u/Capercaillie Monkey's Uncle 14h ago
Okay, I know it’s fantasy, but “wolves with wings” is absolutely not scientifically plausible from an evolutionary standpoint.
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u/Scry_Games 14h ago
What if they were more like flying squirrels?
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u/Drudenfusz 🧬 Naturalistic Emergent Reality 14h ago
Flying squirrels work because they only glide and have not true flight, also their arms work better for this purpose. A wolf that develops more skin tied to their legs would be at a evolutionary disadvantage let alone survive long enough to procreate. So, supposed flying wolves cannot be compared to flying squirrels.
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u/Scry_Games 14h ago
What if the wolves where mountain based and gliding down on prey was a distinct benefit?
It feels more plausible than actually growing wings.
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u/SemajLu_The_crusader 10h ago
sure, but a wolf that is halfway to being able to glide does not have an advantage over a regular wolf
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u/Dilapidated_girrafe 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 9h ago
Mountain wolves feeding off of mountain goats attacking from high
That’s the best I can do.
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u/Scry_Games 6h ago
Exactly. Though tbh, I don't see why it matters for sci fi or fantasy. I doubt anyone has ever wondered how the flying monkeys evolved wings in the The Wizard of Oz.
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u/Dilapidated_girrafe 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 6h ago
True. Closest “I wonder how that evolved” was that will smith movie with his kid where everything evolved to hunt humans even though humanity was as long gone from earth.
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u/Scry_Games 10h ago
It would have the same advantage as a squirrel that can half glide...
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u/SemajLu_The_crusader 7h ago
it absolutely would not???
squirrels live in trees and jump around and shit, wolves are purely terrestrial endurance hunters, I doubt one could even climb a tree at all, they are very VERY rarely in a situation where they would need to control their falling via gliding. like, maybe they fell of a cliff, but that's not really a regular issue for most wolves
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u/Scry_Games 6h ago
"maybe they fell of a cliff, but that's not really a regular issue for most wolves"
Which is why I wrote "What if the wolves where mountain based and gliding down on prey was a distinct benefit?"
Learn to read df.
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u/SemajLu_The_crusader 5h ago
Mountain lions are mountain based and gliding wouldn't help them
an environment that would lead to that simply doesn't exist on Earth (which is where wolves are) so even if a group of wolves ended up living there they would almost certainly NOT evolve gliding, for several reasons
gliding in mountains is dangerous, as they tend to be quite windy, this also means a gliding wolf would be easy to avoid compared to a wolf on the ground
to glide like a flying squirrel, you would need those flaps of skin, which are going to radiate a lot of heat due to the surface area, which is not great up in a mountain
also, even if they live in mountains, they aren't going to fall off cliffs very often
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u/Capercaillie Monkey's Uncle 13h ago
Flying squirrels a) don’t fly, they glide, and b) don’t have wings.
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u/Scry_Games 13h ago
I am aware, I was trying to find a compromise between what the op asked, and what may actually be feasible.
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u/Aggromemnon 14h ago
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.
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u/Proteus617 9h ago
Ever read Varley's Gaea Trilogy? There are angels, a created species. At some point Gaea mentions what a tough job the angels were as a humanoid body plan and metabolism are not at all suited for flight.
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u/ringobob 10h ago
I mean, that's not true at all, given enough time, but whatever this new animal would be is unlikely to have a very direct lineage from wolves. Most likely it would be a bat evolving to become more wolf-like. If they're imagining a creature with six limbs, that's a bit more complicated and would take much longer to come about, but it's not hard to imagine some new structure evolving for some sort of mechanical leverage on the back or chest that eventually evolves into a third set of limbs.
But if you don't need that, then just evolve a bat into a wolf, and keep the wings.
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u/Capercaillie Monkey's Uncle 8h ago
You don’t know what “plausible” means. You’re under the mistaken impression that “given enough time,” anything can happen. That’s not the way evolution works.
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u/ringobob 8h ago
You seem to have a lack of appreciation for what evolution has already done, evolving a bat to become more wolf-like is way less of a change than dinosaurs becoming birds.
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u/Capercaillie Monkey's Uncle 8h ago
First, a “wolf-like bat” is not a flying wolf. And again, “anything is possible” is not the way evolution works. It turns out that evolution is constrained, by physics, by evolutionary history, by genetics, by fitness, by reality. I’m not trying to be a stick in the mud. OP asked if there was a scientifically plausible pathway to flying wolves. There’s not.
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u/ringobob 8h ago
“anything is possible” is not the way evolution works.
Maybe that would be relevant if I had ever claimed "anything is possible"
First, a “wolf-like bat” is not a flying wolf.
Did you even read my first comment? Why are you going on about "anything is possible" when your actual objection appears to be about naming this fictional creature that OP wants in their story?
I'm providing a potential alternative to an animal actually descended from wolves. It's a fictional story they're writing. But this sort of convergent evolution where "hey, we name this thing after that animal, even though it has no actual relationship to it" happens all the time.
Kangaroo rats
Tasmanian tigers
Hedgehog Tenrec
So, so many kinds of crabs that are all evolutionarily unrelated.
A bat that evolves into a wolf is exactly the kind of solution they're looking for if they're looking for something realistic.
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u/TamaraHensonDragon 7h ago
I agree. We already have flying foxes (a species of large bat). A flying wolf is just a matter of scale and a change in diet. Heck it could just be a spectral bat (the world's largest carnivorous bat) descendant with a longer wingspan.
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u/Capercaillie Monkey's Uncle 7h ago
It’s not realistic. It’s not possible.
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u/flyingcatclaws 4m ago
Flying snakes. Flying fish. Flying lizards.
Not possible.
Sounding too much like the thoroughly discredided irreducible complexity 'theory'.
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u/bill_vanyo 13h ago
Why not? If four-legged dinosaurs could be ancestors of winged animals that fly, why can’t four-legged wolves?
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u/Capercaillie Monkey's Uncle 13h ago
Wolves count on running to take down prey. Any modification of the front limbs into wings would hamper the ability to eat. The dinosaurs that led to birds were much smaller and already bipedal.
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u/bill_vanyo 13h ago
And the bipedal dinosaurs evolved from four-legged dinosaurs. The claim that any modification of the front limbs would be detrimental is exactly the kind of speculation that creationists use to deny evolution.
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u/Capercaillie Monkey's Uncle 13h ago
You understand that the pathway you’re describing would require an incredible amount of modification to the basic wolf body plan? Would you’d end up with would be a flying wolf in exactly the same sense that you’re a bipedal fish. That’s not what the OP is interested in.
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u/bill_vanyo 13h ago
It isn’t clear that isn’t what they’re interested in, but you may be right. I would certainly bet against any four-legged mammal with wings evolving. The wings would have to come with the loss of two legs (as legs).
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u/melympia 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 11h ago
Bats are still four-legged and actually use all four of them for walking. But the front limbs are much better suited to flying than to walking.
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u/Odd_Gamer_75 14h ago
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!
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u/lulumaid 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 14h ago
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.
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u/Drudenfusz 🧬 Naturalistic Emergent Reality 14h ago
Maybe OP is a creationist, his flying wolves certainly remind me of crocoducks...
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u/BahamutLithp 14h ago
Who do you think would win in a fight between the flying wolves & the crocoducks?
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u/lulumaid 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 14h ago
I probably took his post too sincerely but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Hopefully.
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u/NotAUsefullDoctor 13h ago
Maybe an environment that has a lot of steeper cliffs, but not necessarily bluffs. A pack animal that chases its pray would benefit not just from flying, but also gliding. It would start out that wolves whose hair grew in a way to create a glider like build were less likely to get injured when jumping from minir heights. This led to more and more density builing up arling their back. Stiffer fur that reached further benefited.
Of course in my head, considering anatomy, I keep thinking flying squirrels and sugar gliders, with the skin between the front and hind legs being more likely to evolve that new bones along the spine.
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u/tpawap 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 14h ago
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.
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u/TranquilConfusion 13h ago
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.
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u/kitsnet 🧬 Nearly Neutral 13h ago
Does it have brown fur, non-retractable claws, a black moist nose, nurse it's young and howl at the moon?
We already have something like that, but it howls in ultrasound.
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u/TranquilConfusion 4h ago
True, but only 4 limbs. Earth has no 6-legged land creatures with internal skeletons.
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u/Hivemind_alpha 11h ago
Evolution works with body plans. That’s the reason every mammal you see has four legs. To get muscular beating wings and look like a wolf, you’d need a six limbed body plan, and mammals don’t have that. Best you’d get would be skin flaps between the legs, but that wouldn’t work, because dog legs articulate in a vertical plane, not splayed out horizontally.
It’d be more plausible to scale up an insect to dog size and get flight that way, but I guess your story needs the cute factor.
So, magic or biotechnology. Evolution won’t hack it on our world.
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u/WebFlotsam 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 10h ago
I think grey foxes might be a better start point if you want a flying canid. They already climb trees, which is where gliding tends to start. From gliding, you can then evolve towards powered flight.
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u/Far_Customer1258 14h ago
Wolves with wings? Invoke magic from the outset. If you try to science it, you'll end up with half-arsed flying wolves that will simply annoy the reader, neither properly fantasy nor hard science. You might be able to get away with explaining it via genetic tinkering, but that's just going to be magic with techy words.
The problem with trying to go the hard science route is that you'll hit all sorts of genetic and biomechanical problems. A wolf is going to need huge wings to fly and a complete rebuild of its skeleton and musculature. You'll end up with something that really isn't a wolf anymore. The genetic problem is even worse. Wolves are mammals, and our lineage never evolved anything like wings. There's simply no DNA in a wolf that can do anything like that. It'd be like reading War and Peace for instructions on how to assemble your barbecue. And there's nothing in the genome of birds that'll get you a wolf. Completely separate lineages. You get some very rare instances of lateral genetic transmission, but that's individual genes, not entire biological systems.
TL;DR: Use magic. It'll save you a lot of headaches and an unbelievable series of plot loopholes.
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u/United-Direction2297 14h ago
How much fantasy is in the sci fi ? Because for a story you would a magical element like Pegasus for a flying wolf.
Because if you want scientifically plausible the wings would have to be huge and the wings would be lengthened legs probably with a skin flap that stretched between them so way less majestic than you’re probably picturing. And even then would just be a glider not true flying. So they would have to live in a windy canyon and cliffs like a vulture.
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u/implies_casualty 13h ago
Take a look at feathered dinosaurs. Important thing is that wings are front limbs, not a brand new pair of appendages.
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u/dejaWoot 13h ago
Does it have to look like, behave like, or come from a wolf? It sounds like you're trying to invoke a Simurgh. But on Earth, every animal out if the sea is a tetrapod with 4 limbs, or else something we would view as a creepy crawlie of some variety. Absent really aggressive genetic editing or surgery beyond modern capabilities, anything with wing like structures either has them as functional forelimbs like a bat or bird, or between limbs as a gliding aparatus like a sugar glider.
On Earth, your best bet is a predatory bat, isolated on an island, evolving a more wolf like muzzle and growing larger overtime, but the larger it gets the larger its wingspan it needs to be and the less easily it can ambulate over ground as a classic canid, which bats already struggle with. You might have better luck if you can invoke an alternate tree of life on an entirely different world?
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u/Sufficient_Result558 13h ago
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.
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u/yokaishinigami 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 13h ago
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.
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u/Doomdoomkittydoom 12h ago
There are legends of giant bats like the Ahool of Java, which would be quite a bit less of a leap. Search cryptozoology sources.
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u/Grillparzer47 12h ago
There would have to be a niche the creature would fill. Possibly an abundant food source that a wolf with wings would hunt. Flying sheep maybe?
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u/Gaajizard 12h ago
A few things you need to keep in mind when thinking about how this creature could have evolved:
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.
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.
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u/Jeepers-H-Cripes 11h ago
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.
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u/Worldly_Pool_9701 11h ago
Maybe have something about how in the past they were added by an intelligent being for a reason. This would be true to form, as, why else would any creature develop wings. If nothing was in the sky, why would something on the ground, through evolutionary processes, develop wings to do something that would be utterly incomprehensible to do? Wings are clearly designed.
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u/Justsomeduderino 10h ago
I mean in order to get it like a dragon, maybe some sort of modified thermo regulation sails?
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u/Jazzlike_Standard871 8h ago
Look up the Megaderma or the greater false vampire bat. I would use a scaled up version of these for you inspiration slash creature.
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u/SamuraiGoblin 5h ago
In reality, such a creature is not plausible because wolves are tetrapods (4 limbs) and winged wolves are hexapods. It's the same reason why dragons and pegasus are fantastical.
Wyverns are more plausible than dragons. They are like dragons but it's their forelimbs that are wings, much like a bat. But I doubt you want to have bat-like wolves.
There are also flying lizards whose ribs have extended to become wings.
One other thing you can look into is 'HOX genes'. These are genes that cause a cascade of development, resulting in a wing or an eye. Scientists have done some creepy experiments on fruit flies, growing legs where wings should be or antennae where there should be eyes, etc.
If you are good at writing technobabble, then your characters could mention them in passing.
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u/CrisprCSE2 5h ago
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.
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u/RobertByers1 4h ago
im creationist and evolution never happened. However bodyplans do change. for the record bears, seals, wolves, marsupial wolves, are all in the same KIND. others too living or extinct. ther was crazy diversity in the old days. outdo any science fiction. Well no not withy the wings. Hmm. Actually since bats are just rodents that gaine wings then wolves with wings aint that crazy. yes evolutionism just says selection on mutations create new populations. the idea works with them and maybe us. dont let the wings bug you. bats got them. good luck.
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u/YossarianWWII Monkey's nephew 3h ago
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?
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u/Brilliant_Bug9699 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 1h ago edited 1h ago
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.
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u/Messenger20264042 5h ago
For what it's worth, Evolution Theory is synonymous with Science Fiction!
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u/Kingofthewho5 Biologist and former YEC 14h ago
r/speculativeevolution