When one walks on campus and sees the amount of Penn State gear worn by football fans, one might notice that something just isn't right.

There's an uneasy feeling that there is something unusual about how Penn State supports their team.

It's the lion's paw logos: They have five toes.

"Theoretically, normal cats and dogs have four toes on the ground," said Dr. David Wolfgang, field studies director in the department of veterinary science. "Digit number one [the thumb] is on the wrist, or corpus."

"Polydactylism is the presence of supernumary digits," he said, reading aloud from his veterinary dictionary.

So why are lion paws with superfluous toes showing up on T-shirts and riding on the trunks of cars in magnet form?

Jeff Hermann, university editor for University Publications, shed some light on the mystery. The root of the story begins in 1988 and involves a mutual logo belonging to both Penn State and Clemson University when they met in a bowl game.

"Clemson has a four-toed paw print," Hermann said. "At that time, the licensing manager made an agreement that we would not do any four-toed paw print logos."

And so Penn State apparently just tacked an extra toe onto its paws.

The agreement somehow stuck. After several years, a new licensing manager came to Penn State, and Hermann said he asked the University Licensing Committee to look into the legal agreement.

"There are plenty of schools that have four-toed paw prints, why can't we have an anatomically correct paw print?" he said.

After investigating the paw agreement, Hermann said it was found that none actually existed. At that point, it was totally legal to use a paw print with four toes, as long as it didn't copy Clemson's.

"I was all in favor of doing away with the five-toed paw," Hermann said.

However, by the time the lack of an agreement was discovered, the five-toed design had become popular; people liked it, and the university was still collecting royalties on it.

The university receives royalties on all logos that are sold, and these royalties go toward scholarship funds, which Hermann said he would hardly want to disturb.

Robert Pass, assistant manager at The Family Clothesline, 352 E. College Ave., explained the logo process.

"The university has an approved list of logos, and you have to go by their approved list," he said.

Pass added that, to his knowledge, the five-toed paw print is still the only legal paw option.

However, Steve Moyer, a manager at Lion's Pride, 112 E. College Ave., lopped off the extra toe as soon as he had the chance. He said Lion's Pride switched its design the day Penn State did.

"It's amazing how many customers picked up on it," he said.

Matthew Alford, a manager at Got Used Bookstore, 206 E. College Ave., said he didn't think the number of toes mattered.

"It's one of our top sellers: the five-toed magnet paw," he said.

But legal agreements aren't the only way to add toes. Wolfgang tried to make sense of the extra toe through science; he jokingly presented some five-toed theories, including a possible deformity.

"Or maybe this paw print implies the cat is ill; a cat with rickets might have a print like that," he added jokingly.

Nevertheless, Wolfgang didn't think many people minded the extra toe.

Alford, too, couldn't help but poke fun at the toe discrepancy.

"I think it would just confuse people," Alford said. "You would have the four-toed people and the five-toed people; we wouldn't want to split the campus in half."

Although Pass and Moyer seem to disagree about the legal ramifications of the fifth toe, Moyer said four toes are perfectly fine.

"We've written back to Clemson, and they didn't care," Moyer said.

So, the history of the paw print lies not within the anomalies of science, but within the confines of the law.

Now that a four-toed paw is OK, will our Nittany Lion evolve once again?