Wien Cod. 13647

[Koen G]

@Stolfi surely, the lobster with incorrect placement of legs is a rarity?

This was even thought to be unparalleled outside of the VM for a long time. When I researched the Alsatian examples, those were among the first ones (or even simply the first ones) we knew of. It's still rare enough for every clear instance to matter.

[eggyk]

@Stolfi surely, the lobster with incorrect placement of legs is a rarity?

This was even thought to be unparalleled outside of the VM for a long time. When I researched the Alsatian examples, those were among the first ones (or even simply the first ones) we knew of. It's still rare enough for every clear instance to matter.

Indeed. As time went on this category has been tweaked as weird and wonderful examples came in. Instances like Cod. 13647 are uncommon, and are typically in cases where the shape of the body lends itself to legs being placed incorrectly. As we can see in this example, the ribbed section of the lobster is shortened quite a lot which caused one pair to be drawn too far back. Most of the legs (although relatively left in the image) are on the correct part of the body. I think that the reason this mistake occured here is that the body was drawn too short (or the legs relatively too big), not a misplacement the legs. 

   

You can see the effect of the body in similar examples like these:
   

However, the important difference between these and the VMS is that the artists began drawing the back legs immediately behind the main legs. The fact that the legs end up on the ribbed part is simply because they wanted a certain amount of legs and ran out of space. The VMS front legs are really far forward, but then there is a large gap with the back legs drawn WAY further back on their own. Afaik, this has never been found in any other example. 

   

But yes, such examples of a a single pair of legs on the ribbed part happen often enough that they have their own score of 0.5 for the category. That is not at all to say that this example isn't informative for Voynich research though! It's possible that the VMS artist copied a similar depiction, internalised "legs on the left side", but applied that to a more anatomically correct lobster by mistake.

[Koen G]

Because of your explanation, I just realized that in the VM lobster, not only are the 8 smaller legs placed on the tail, but the main claws are actually placed on the head section, as marked by the double separation line. Is this worth checking in the spreadsheet?

If we include a small region of ambiguity around the separation lines, one could even say that not a single leg is clearly on the main body...

[Bluetoes101]

In true Voynich fashion also the tail is split into 4, when everyone else seems to have gone for 3 or 5