Alternate paths to orthostasis

I've asked a whole array of questions, so far, centered around an ongoing project of mine that features a world, in an alternate evolutionary timeline, where a variety of well-known mythological creatures live alongside humans.

One of the species I'm now considering to include in this project are werewolves - not shape-shifting ones, but just wolf-like creatures with a human-like, or orthostatic, posture.

I've seen a few similar projects (As in "plausible fantasy creatures" projects) with werewolves, and all have made them orthostatic descendants of wolves, often without providing any explanation why a group of cursorial quadrupedal hypercarnivores even evolved to stand upright.

Instead of humanoid wolves, I'd like to go for something a little more plausible; giant, bipedal baboons. Given that they are primates, it seems more likely that they might develop orthostasis (Since we did), and they have a very dog-like head, which could be developed into an even more wolf-like one.

I know that humans evolved orthostasis by being descended from arboreal primates which were driven into a savanna habitat, where they were forced to become cursorial, but could not become quadrupedal since their ancestors had hands, and could not take up bipedalism with a theropod-like gait because they were tailless.

However, are there any other reasons, set of events, or evolutionary transitions, that would make a population of baboons or baboon-like primates evolve to be bipedal with an upright back, besides that of humans? The main reason for this is just that I'd like to "shake things up" a bit, rather than copying the evolution of hominids.

I guess that somehow making the ancestral baboons be tailless would be a good idea, to avoid ending up with these:

Source: https://speculativeevolution.wikia.com/wiki/Raboon

Another key thing is that baboons already live in the savanna, or at least Olive baboons and Chacma baboons(the ones with the most dog-like heads) do, so any transition to bipedalism will be different to humans'. An important part of the end result is that they still have fur - humans lost most of their hair after becoming cursorial.

posted over 5 years ago

SealBoi‭

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