How Many Legs Are Best?

This is an important question.
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Featured Artists:

Have you ever wondered, ‘what is the best number of legs?’ I mean, probably not.

But how many legs a species has is vital to a lifeform’s success, and it’s time someone figured out which number reigns supreme. So, for this entry into the archive, we’ll explore every option for leg-count that nature makes available, excluding cases of genetic mutation or limb-loss.

Whether you’re reincarnating soon or a worldbuilder looking to improve the realism of an alien lifeform, this is a question you need answered…

0:00 The Best Number of Legs?
0:36 One Leg
1:58 Two Legs
4:37 Three Legs
5:45 Four Legs
7:21 Five Legs
8:07 No Legs
9:28 Six Legs
10:42 Seven Legs
11:45 Eight Legs
12:50 Nine & Ten Legs
14:02 Beyond
14:58 What’s The Answer?

Copyright Disclaimer: Under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research. All video/image content is edited under fair use rights for reasons of commentary.

I do not own the images, music, or footage used in this video. All rights and credit goes to the original owners.

Media Shown: Arrival, Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Floating Cities, Majestic Hills, Beauty Flow
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

#CuriousArchive #Worldbuilding #SpeculativeBiology

[elli_senfsaat]

My cousin, when she was little, when asked how many legs a cat has, she said: "Five." Turned out she counted the tail as extra leg lol

[Phantryx]

"but nature doesn't care what you think" is such a raw line

[azultarmizi]

Crabs, 10 legs. Two are used as pinchers, two at the back are used as flippers while swimming. Imagine they evolve one more time to convert another pair of legs to be wings. Truly the pinnacle of evolution

[violetlight]

I'm surprised you didn't add spider monkeys and other animals with prehensile tails to the 5 leg count. Also, on that note, a seahorse could be said to have a single "leg" with its tail.

[purplehaze]

I really like this more casual and humorous tone. It really differentiates this from a lot of the drier and more serious zoological content I watch.

[purplehaze]

It is worth noting that sometimes bears just.. randomly choose not to walk on all fours, for no apparent reason, but that's pretty rare.

[MoonGuardian]

sphinx : "what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon and three in the evening"

me : "Kangaroo"

[themarquess]

I wish you had included mudskippers. I would put them in the three legged category, as they use a sort of tripod locomotion. It's interesting to speculate what fully land animals might look like if they evolved from mudskippers.

[pennybutnotthecoin]

Loving your extra bits of humor and personality that seep into more of these videos, the bit where you just got frustrated at kangaroos for no reason other than they were in too many leg levels made me chuckle.

Wonderful that this channel took off over the last year and a half, I was personally here from I think around 100k, and it makes me happy that you have a great platform to share your love of biology, storytelling, and world building! ❤

[GreenskullAI]

Thoroughly enjoyed both the scientific aspects of this video and the comedy.

[neco]

6/8 legs seems like the clear winner. One has enough limbs for fast and secure walking/running and can evolve 2 or even 4 limbs into arms to manipulate the environment. If they somehow become impractical, one can even devolve them into little stumps to get them out of the way. It has all the advantages, none of the downwsides and just seems like the best decision overall

[j.f.fisher]

I was animating a crazy model with a lot of legs and tentacles, and researching the optimization of models for how much processing power it takes to animate them and I found out that the more bones a model has, the more processing power it takes to animate it. Which gave me a realization. Behavioral complexity tends to be inversely proportional to the number of limbs a creature has. With a few outliers like cephalopods.

[adamdubin]

David Weber's Honorverse has a very interesting example in the first book, _On Basilisk Station._ The Medusans are described as having trilateral symmetry with three legs and three arms with a seemingly unnatural (from the human perspective anyway) way of moving.

[Feuermiss]

In one of the old Avatar games, the player could ride and fight with a thanator (those big panther-like creatures that Neytiri rides at the end of the movie). I found the attack animation super interesting -- the thanator rears up with its first front legs and uses them to swipe at its target. The second pair of front legs and the hind legs stay on the ground. I imagine that gives the thanator great stability while still allowing it to use its paws to attack

[HallucigeniaIV]

I've always counted elephants and long tailed monkeys as five-limbed, but four-legged creatures.

an elephant's trunk is essentially a hand, and the monkey's tail let's them hang from a branch while using their four limbs as hands.

[Bzlaabnieni]

I teach a tutorial on creature design from a biological standpoint at uni and I use your vids as a starting point for my students - really love these and your humour! It really gets them thinking about what they know about biology from a more out-of-the-box angle.

[MysticalMutant]

A six legged creature becoming four-legged, becoming a centaur like creatures, a great all-rounder. But anyways great video as usual.

[ibarelymakecontent]

I love how during the crab section he sounds like he's holding back laughter.
"Forget creature, become crab."

[Mellow_Utopia]

This needs to be a TV show, your documentary-style videos are greatly appreciated!

[TheAlison]

So many good lines in the first few minutes alone
"Whether you're reincarnating or world building", "Nature doesn't care what you think", "If you oiled your foot and shuffled around you wouldn't get far either"
Artistic and comedic genius.
The shuffling analogy for the snail is amazing pedagogy, too.
"if you could hang around in a rock all day and have food come to you, would you be in a hurry to go anywhere?" hahahah. A reasonable basis for sedentarism.