The musculoskeletal system is made up of a number of tissue types, including bone, muscle, tendon and cartilage. While the development of each of these tissues has been studied, how they integrate into a functional superstructure, and the extent to which they develop independently, is unclear. Now, Ronen Schweitzer and co-workers investigate this interdependency by analysing tendon development in mice that have defective muscle or cartilage developmental programmes (p. 2431). They report that whereas tendon development in the zeugopod (arm/leg) is dependent on muscle, autopod (paw) tendon development occurs independently of muscle and instead requires cues from skeletal tissues. These findings suggest that autopod and zeugopod tendon segments can develop independently and, in line with this, the researchers demonstrate that they are derived from distinct progenitor pools. They further show that tendons are integrated in a modular fashion, whereby zeugopod muscles first connect to their respective autopod tendon via an anlagen of tendon progenitors in the presumptive wrist and the tendons then elongate proximally in parallel with skeletal growth. Based on their findings, the authors put forward a novel integrated model for limb tendon development.