Taur
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- "Taur" redirects here. For the geographical area now known as Crimea, see Taurica. For the deity known as Tauric Diana or Tauric Artemis, see Diana Nemorensis.
A taur (metanalyzed from centaur), also called a centauroid, is a modern creature of science fiction and fantasy literature. It is a six-limbed creature patterned after a centaur, using four legs for locomotion and two arms for manipulation, and being a composite of two different creatures; often it has the lower body of an animal and the upper body of a human. In many, the "human" part also shares some features of the base animal: the wemic may have leonine facial features, the bariaur has a goat's horns, and the chakat is all covered by fur and has a very feline head.
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[edit] Etymology
Though the Greek word kentauros is said to be composed of a single morpheme—perhaps not a Greek one in its origin—the element -taur has been separated (perhaps with influence from "minotaur", another hybrid creature albeit dissimilar in form) in the late 20th century to create a generalized form, "taur".
[edit] Occurences
In furry fiction and art, -taur is highly productive as a suffix. There are creatures depicted such as wolftaurs, foxtaurs, chakats, and tigertaurs. While the upper half of a centaur is generally human, in furry the upper half of a taur is an anthropomorphized version of the animal lower half. For example, a felitaur will have the arms and upper body of an anthropomorphic feline, and the legs and lower body of an ordinary feline.
Taurs often appear in sexual contexts, where they may be depicted with either one or two sets of genitalia: the first between their hind legs, which is either horse-like (i.e., centaur-like) or like the lower half's animal; if a second set exists, it is usually between the front legs and more human-like or like the upper half's animal. Sometimes they are not of the same gender; chakats, for example are all hermaphrodite, though their anatomy differs.
[edit] Variations
Occasionally taurs are composed entirely of human elements. A humantaur is a human with four human legs.
In addition, a later variant of the humantaur is the boytaur, who like the humantaur is entirely human, although with four human legs and feet, and front and hind human genitalia. Additional variants include six-leggedness and wristfootedness, the latter being characterized by human feet replacing hands, mounted on the wrists (wristfeet), the feet being identical in size and appearance to the boytaur's other feet.
Hextaurs are less frequently depicted, being a kind of taur with six legs instead of four.
[edit] Kinds of taurs
- various anthropomorphic species with -taur appended to their names
- the bariaur from Planescape
- the centaurs from Greek Mythology
- chakat
- Leontaurs and cheetaurs, both completely animal in appearance but intelligent in the case of leontaurs from the Quest for Glory-series of games.
- The drider from Dungeons & Dragons, and its cousin from the Eberron setting, the scorrow.
- onocentaur, parts human and donkey, from the Middle Ages
- the Nerubian and the Keepers of the Grove from the Warcraft universe. Also notable are the actual Centaur themselves. Note that the *four-limbed Tauren, the enemies of the Cantaur, are based on the Minotaur.
- the wemic from the Forgotten Realms
- The Cray from The Bas-Lag novels of China Miéville, especially The Scar.
