Comment by comex

I don't really understand what "pronating" is supposed to mean if you're not referring to human hands. This isn't a problem for the phrase "bunny hands", which refers to human hands.

But for, say, human feet, "pronation" would appear to refer to a position in which the soles of the feet face toward the ground, just as in hands it refers to a position in which the palms face toward the ground, or in humans overall it refers to a position in which the face and belly face toward the ground. That is the meaning of "prone" ("lying on your front"; it is the opposite of supine, "lying on your back"), and "pronation" just means "making something be prone".

But obviously all feet are always pronated in this sense. The article seems to have a model of the word which is more like "pronation [in the hands] involves a certain configuration of the bones in the arm, and I'm going to call that configuration pronation too". But then they also refer to rotating the forearm, which confuses bone configuration with yet another issue, the changeability of the configuration.†

So I'm left mystified as to how this single-or-possibly-manifold concept is supposed to apply to feet, human or otherwise. The article suggests that pronat_ed_ feet have the toes facing forward, parallel to the direction of the gaze, and also that pronat_ing_ feet requires the ability to rotate the lower part of the leg.

In humans, these claims cannot both be true. Toes are angled forward, but the lower leg doesn't rotate. Something else has happened.

So it's hard to say what I should conclude about the mammoth legs that the article also complains about.

† The article complains about a dinosaur skeleton in which the hands aren't pronated - they face inwards, in a pose we might call "karate chop hands". But it says that this pose requires "pronation" in what is presumably the arm-bones sense. In "bunny hands", the hands are pronated according to the normal definition of the word, facing the ground.