Your Head, Animal Body

Otherwise entitled, A Biological Anthropologist’s Nightmare Fuel.

I was posed this question as an ice breaker today. If you could put your head on an animal’s body what would you pick? I shuddered immediately. Now, I know that half the fun of these kinds of questions is a certain suspension of disbelief, but I’m not even a professional in the field and I feel like I know too much about vertebrate skeletal systems to not be utterly horrified by the images my coworkers were conjuring forth.

A cheetah. How would you run without snapping your neck? Or without crashing into things, for that matter, as your eyes would no longer face forward but down.

A bald eagle. Your skull would probably weigh as much as the rest of your bones combined. Even assuming your bones took on bird morphology and filled with hollows, your brain alone weighs around 3 pounds, or about a quarter of a large bald eagle’s full body weight.

A giraffe. Okay, maybe we’re getting a little closer, we have the same number if vertebrae and our head could at least sit upright, but do you know what giraffes eat? Acacia leaves, mostly. Good luck navigating around those terrifying spiked branches with our flat human faces.

It’s like when a genie grants your wish but that wish comes out twisted because you didn’t set enough specifications. This is the absolute worst way to become an animal and I’m still horrified eleven hours later and likely will be for quite a while.

(My answer, by the way? If it really came down to it to attach my human skull to another species, I’d go for Homo neanderthalensis, which is maybe cheating but I prefer to think of it as creative problem solving.)