Misinterpretation

File:FoureyedStumpworm.jpg

The four-eyed stumpworm was a fairly clear-cut example of misinterpretation, as its namesake feature is set on what were actually supposed to be its ancestor's face-guarding legs.

Misinterpretation is a common issue in Sagan 4 submissions, where the submitter's interpretation of a species (usually their submission's ancestor) doesn't match canon or the intent of said species' author. Though extreme examples such as the organism's front and back ends being mixed up or a beaked face being turned into giant mammalian lips for a small mouth on the throat are commonly discussed, misinterpretations that actually make it into canon entries usually take on very mild and hard-to-detect forms, such as accidentally adding or removing a toe.

In general, mild misinterpretation can simply be handwaved as exaption or polydactyly, sometimes even during the review process. For more extreme forms, however, it is usually used as grounds to reject a species, and if it is somehow approved regardless and detected long after the fact it can call for the organism to be significantly rewritten or redesigned.

As misinterpretation most commonly happens as a result of a species' ancestor having unclear artwork, there are a number of both written and unwritten rules about art clarity which are utilized or encouraged in newer species, such as never using top-down views.

Common Misinterpretations

General:

• Wrong number of digits: Often, species are not drawn with all of their digits visible, so it can be easy to mistakenly assume that they have more or fewer than they actually do. The likelihood of this happening is reduced if an organism is illustrated in such a way that all digits on at least one limb are visible, such as being depicted mid-stride with a foot raised.
• Markings as structures: This can happen if an artist draws hard outlines around markings. For example, the "ears" of living dwellers came from facial markings drawn with hard outlines in their ancestors, and similarly the dark mask marking in basal no-plents has on several occasions been mistakenly depicted as a raised piece based on an outline being drawn around it in some species.
• Spurs as toes: Sometimes, a spur like that on the feet of roosters is mistaken for a stylized claw. This mistake can be avoided by checking through ancestors to see where it came from.
• Terran anatomy: Some species resemble Earth animals--so much so that a submitter might forget that they are not. The number of rejected first-time submissions of ambulatory plents with nostrils on their faces like a tetrapod is near infinite.
• Biped limb girdle position shift: A problem in any lineage with two legs and no arms, the exact location of the limb girdle may unintentionally vary from artist to artist due to misinterpretation. Capiris, for example, had this happen quite often, as their legs are actually their forelegs but were commonly mistakenly placed in the pelvic region, possibly due to their resemblance to dinosaurs.
• Legless winged thing: If a species is only depicted from a top-down perspective, like many winged species are, artists will often either forget that they have legs at all or assume that they lost them, and thus depict descendants as limbless. This happened an almost obscene number of times with wingworms, but will also occasionally happen with phlyers. Alternatively, a flying species with no limbs apart from its wings, such as an interbiat, might mistakenly be assumed to have legs if the underside is not shown.
• Assumed feature, never evolved: Most commonly respiration or an endoskeleton. This generally becomes an especially big problem when species start to get larger.
• Alien feature missed: For example, missing that plents and saucebacks breathe through their tails and then failing to draw their nostrils in a descendant. Sometimes this will go unnoticed, so there are numerous examples of species with no visible way to breathe.

Lineage-specific:

• Carpozoa
  • Knees as heels: In terrestrial species, the hind legs were originally depicted as arm-like, complete with sliding, somewhat mammal-like shoulders, and therefore had "backwards knees". The knees are commonly misinterpreted as the heel of a digitigrade foot, so often in fact that very few lineages are left that actually retain their ancestral leg anatomy; fortunately, the visible presence of shoulder blades in early species has allowed this to generally be possible to fix via retconning the particular species to have protruding shoulders. This misinterpretation is, ironically, likely often the result of artists attempting to fix what they themselves thought was a misinterpretation--as many people, including amateur artists unfamiliar with anatomy, often mistake the heels of digitigrade feet for backwards knees and may depict them as such.
• Plents
  • Bones: Plents were originally envisioned as boneless, however they were misinterpreted as having bones so many times without correction that they were eventually retconned to have had wooden bones all along. Plents have since been split into groups which have jointed bones and groups which have unjointed bones; mix-ups between the two still occur, on occasion.
• Saucebacks
  • Nostrils as eyes: The scent pits of saucebacks are often depicted as dark and have on several occasions been mistaken for eyes, but such a mistake has never made it into a canon entry. The "eyestrils" of some modern lineages, which actually turned their nostrils into eyes on purpose, were inspired by this phenomenon.
  • Immobile jaws: The "tusks" of saucebacks are meant to be pincer-like jaws, however they have been interpreted as immobile tusks a very large number of times, sometimes even in immediate descendants of species that specifically mention their mobility. This mistake can on occasion lead to very strange adaptations such as a carnivore reducing their jaws, which they use to eat, specifically to get them out of the way of eating.

Notable One-Time Misinterpretations

There are a number of cases of extreme misinterpretations happening that were not detected until well after the fact, making fixing them often very tricky. This section holds a record of these and what has been done to fix them.

Fixed

• Stumpworm stump-legs became the head: Beginning in the four-eyed stumpworm, the namesake stump legs of the stumpworm lineage were mistaken for their heads and likewise given eyes and jaws. As it was a direct ancestor of scuttlecrabs and lizardworms, two very prominent and diverse lineages, a complicated explanation was written into the description of this and other early species years down the line.

Unfixed

• Jellysquid anatomy bust: The hydrogen jellysquid, despite its name, was not particularly squid-like; like the common ancestor of all "squids", it had four tails and a mouth opposite of these. However, in the sea floater, a case of terran anatomy being assumed led to it being read as though it were a cephalopod, thus its visibly beaked mouth became a nostril on its left side, and likewise this misinterpretation was assumed canon for its cousin the hydroskimmer as well. As these species are soft-bodied, a solution has been proposed to insert transitional forms to repair them, rather than attempt to explain in text.
• Backwards quids: Filtersquids were never particularly squid-like and always had their mouths on the opposite end of their body from their tentacles. However, similar to what happened with jellysquid anatomy, the ancestors of quids had cephalopod-like anatomy projected on them and were assumed and designed as though their mouths were between their tentacles where their anus would be, and their mouths likewise seem to have been assumed to be their anus. No satisfactory solution has been proposed for this thus far.