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Archive for the ‘Mad Science’ Category

It Came From the Biomechanics Laboratory

Posted in Mad Science, Utter Frivolity, tagged , , , , , on October 31, 2012 | 3 Comments »

Boo!

At the Structure and Motion Laboratory, we’re not boring scientists who robotically focus only on writing grants and publishing papers, much as senior management might want us to pretend. We’re human. We like fun. And we like Halloween. And brainssss! What follows is some good, jolly, Halloweenerly, spooky, sciencey fun that we came up with yesterday (in between writing grants and papers, ahem).

First, our surreal B-movie extravaganza: It Came From the Biomechanics Laboratory. See if you can piece together the plot:

(subtitle: Open John’s freezer… if you dare!!!)

And in case you want more of the ritual sacrifice of the pumpkin at beginning, here are two versions in glorious slo-mo, from our AOS high-speed digital video cameras:

and

Finally, an outtake from the film, in which Gary, the RHex robot from Andrew Spence’s Spencelab, takes his gory vengeance on a hapless cameraman, and then turns on his masters!

Thanks to our brave participants: Miguel Lamas (who compiled the first video), Luis “Demon Emu” Lamas and his squad of brave –but now devoured– emu-wranglers from the RVC, Andrew “Robo Arrigato” Spence, Jeff “Giraffe Leg” Rankin (nice acting, Jeff!), Olgascoob Panagiotopoulou-doo, Becky “Schrodinger’s Evil Cat” Fischer, Rich “Sit, Stand, KILL!” Ellis,  Hazel Halliday, and finally that unnamed plucky, cute little kitty-girl (lone survivor and heroine of our story)!

Happy Halloween… muhahahahaaaaaa!!!

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Mix and Match Anatomy: Chimeras, Jenny Hanivers and More

Posted in Mad Science, Museums are Cool, Utter Frivolity, When Anatomy Goes Bad, tagged , , , , on September 3, 2012 | 20 Comments »

(The following post has a Stomach-Churning Rating of 3/10; the dried fish may not get you, but the bad jokes could. A respite before I slap some freezer-spawned Grand Guignolishness on you in future posts.)

Continuing this crazy summer’s theme of anatomy exhibits in museums, here’s a different twist: using cadavers, or mockups of animal bodies, to create chimeras – fusions of the bodies of multiple species to create new, fanciful organisms. This post was inspired, and will be illustrated, by my visit to Salzburg, Austria’s Haus der Natur, which is well worth a visit for its eclectic cornucopia of exhibits. I’ve also read that the Field Museum’s Mythic Creatures is worth a peek. The post is particularly timely as true chimeras are more and more a thing of scientific reality these days (unsettling testimonial here), although lion-(dragon/snake)-goat hybrids are not coming anytime soon–we can all hope. Enjoy the links! I’ve added a lot of external links to more content if you want to further explore this post’s subjects.

Anyway, my favourite Salzburg escape (from Mozart overdoses that are an all too real- and lethal- threat) was the “Fabel und Mythos” exhibit in the “Mensch und Natur” section of Haus der Natur, which is about just what it sounds like: how natural history and mythology/fantasy intersect. That theme is a passion of mine, as a sci fi/B-movie monster/horror/fantasy film and book fan and as a scientist. It is a big part of why I became a scientist (especially evolutionary biologist/anatomist/palaeontologist) — the junctures of art and science, imagination and reason, fantasy and reality, fascinate me, and if teamed up with the grotesque, monstrous, whimsical and nightmarish, I’m helpless to resist, much as I suspect many of this blog’s readers are. So sit back and enjoy.

Chimeras (in the broader sense of mixed-up animals) have a long history of cultural significance, from Greek myth (and an atrocious recent film featuring The Worthington) even to the godfather of taxonomy, Carl von Linne, and his Animalia Paradoxa. The chimeras (and basilisks, cockatrices, etc.) have featured prominently in the art of the past as well as of the present. People today remain fascinated by the role chimeras and other anatomical tomfooleries have played in hucksterism and hoaxes, as evidenced by many online exhibits such as the Museum of Hoaxes, 15 Craziest Biological Hoaxes, April Fool’s hoaxes, kickass artwork, lamest hoaxes, posts by The Bloggess, sightings of real (i.e. freakish) unicorns in real life, and taxidermy-gone-berserk sites like here and here and here and this cautionary tale; this also overlaps with cryptozoology and WTF-is-that internet fetishes. And let’s not forget the man-bear-pig. No, we shan’t forget that… Nor shall palaeontologists soon forget some famous chimeras in our field, particularly the infamous Piltdown man and Archaeoraptor. These hoaxes incidentally, ended up being not just a temporary embarrassment for science, but also an exemplar of how science is a self-correcting process, so frauds inevitably get unmasked– and in some cases (e.g. Archaeoraptor consisting of two very important legitimate fossils!), science makes new discoveries and advances in that process of corrective peer review.

First up in this blog post: the Bavarian Wolpertingers (leaking into native Austrian culture as the Raurackl; AKA Rasselbock, Dilldapp, Skvader and other names; and leaking into video games too)! The wolpertinger is a small and not-so-scary chimera, but often with fairy powers, and is very much akin to that folkloristic mainstay of Americana, the jackrabbit-pronghorn lovechild called the Jackalope. In contrast, however, the jackalope mainly has powers of being a lame souvenir, although fable has it they are prone to ventriloquism, pugnaciousness and whiskey– a fearsome combination (don’t try this at home). This panel from the museum illustrates the diversity and anatomical disparity of Wolpertingers:

And the museum did a great job making some physical chimeras using the wonders of taxidermy… aww, do you want one of your own now?

With closeups below–e.g. the jackalope from hell:

A flight of fancy?

Some quizzical quackery:

Echt toll, meine Freunde! A bit more about wolpertingers and their kin is here. Pokemonologists, take notes. People laughing at the alternative name for wolpertingers, “poontingers,” behave…

One can hardly discuss chimeras and fake animals/taxidermy hoaxes without getting into mermaids (no, I won’t discuss THAT recent TV debacle) and then into Jenny Hanivers; “devil fish”, seabishops or sea fairies. The hanivers go back to at least the 16th century, even being used by sailors to prove they’d had an exotic adventure after their voyages, or sold to supplement their meager salaries. There is plenty written on this phenomenon and how numerous people were skate punk’d (AHEM) by a simple dried fish. But then, skates (not to be confused with an altogether different, but related, kind of chimera) do look odd, and many people don’t know their anatomy or are just credulous, prone to self-deception and confirmation bias.

Stuart Pond was so kind as to send pics of a J.H. that he has in his shed (spinoff potential: What’s in Stu’s Shed???) for me to share— thanks again man! Note the apparent “legs” (probably organs used in mating’; claspers; but sometimes just snipped bits of the tail, which is also evident here):

Obviously the typical Jenny Haniver is a skate that has been messed with a bit to emphasize the humanoid features, but then there’s a sucker born every minute, and PT Barnum famously took advantage of that rhythmic nativity in the 1842 hoax he called the Fiji (Feejee) mermaid, which was a monkey’s head/torso with fish body and papier maché coating. Below, a wolpertinger-like “horn” is visible; this is the remnants of a nasal process of the chondrocranium of the ray; the flanges to either side of it are parts of the front of the head that have been cut apart to make the haniver’s head look more humanoid:

With a “face” only a mermother- or chondrichthyologist- could love– note that the “eyes” are actually nasal openings:

And thanks to Sven Sachs for some extra photos of a Jenny Haniver at the Zoological Museum Liege in Belgium– thanks Sven!:

 

But, in the world of academic science, there is perhaps no greater you-fools-I-invented-a-fanciful-critter hoax/joke than the Rhinogradentia (snouters, or rhinogrades), rumoured in 1905 but first described in Gerolf Steiner/Harald Stümpke’s (latter= pseudonym; AKA Karl D.S. Geeste, Hararuto Shutyunpuke) wonderfully over-the-top, tongue-in-cheekish 1957 faux-scientific monographic book Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia. Darren Naish‘s blog Tetrapod Zoology (along with others, in 4 parts) has done far better justice to the snouters than I could ever hope to, and others have contributed to the legend. But at least I can share some pics of the first reconstructed (or were they, hmm…?) rhinogrades I’ve ever seen in physical form (again from the Haus der Natur):

Here are the closeups; first Orchidiopsis rapax:

And next Otopteryx volitans:

Last but not beast, an infamous nasobeme, Nasobema lyricum!

Whether this post was hit or myth, please contribute more thoughts, stories and pictures in the Comments below. What’s your favourite hoax story, conglomerated creature, misidentified monstrous mush, wee little false beastie or taxidermy horror/beauty? Why do you enjoy fanciful creations like these?

And watch out- those chimeras can pack a whallop!

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Out of the Freezer and Into the Loading Jig

Posted in Mad Science, tagged , , on March 16, 2012 | 6 Comments »

Well, it’s time for the Grand Reveal of what the picture in the previous post is (reproduced below). The guesses ranged from bird to wallaby/kangaroo to the stuff of nightmares. And indeed Nick Gardner got it right first, it is a wallaby. Specifically, it is a Bennett’s Wallaby (Macropus rufogriseus rufogriseus), which is the Tasmanian island form related to the Red-necked Wallaby, and an animal that has gone feral (along with mara and other cool critters) in Whipsnade Zoo near the RVC. You can tell it is a wallaby and not a bird, because there is an “Achilles tendon” attaching to a calcaneal tuber (“heel bone”) on the back side of the limb (shown with asterisk below) that birds lack, and if you look closely the toes are hairy, lack bird-like claws, and a few other details like the profile of the musculature are very different; more mammalian than avian. The stump of the muscular tail (cut off) is also a clue. Although the avian similarity in the case of wallabies is still striking, which is one reason I chose this image. Well done, Nick!

I found this picture in my archives and remembered when it was taken back in ~2005- some lab members received some frozen wallaby legs and thawed them out to use in experiments. They tried to compress the legs in an Instron machine (mechanical testing system; partly visible at the top of the pic) to see what the passive, springlike properties of the legs are like in a wallaby, vs. the properties they could measure in a living animal. (The shiny white reflective areas in the pic are for tracking joint motions) And I thought it was a freaky cool pic, so I shared it.

I also posted that pic because my team has done some in vivo analysis of the leg properties in such animals (previous news story here; paper in preparation), and because we use this technique of loading cadaveric legs in such machines quite routinely. We did this for elephant feet to study how the “sixth toe” of elephants works, and we’re analyzing data (as I write) for how elephant feet and rhino feet deform or move when loaded similarly. This method has a long history; we didn’t invent it; perhaps most famously used for studying horse limb mechanics [pdf example], which have a lot of passive properties (almost everything below the elbow/knee is non-muscular). Many animals’ limbs are tendinous/elastic toward their distal end (toes), so the limbs tend to become less actively controlled by the nervous system and become more of a mechanical control system (sometimes involving a non-neural “preflex“) in that region; although it’s all a matter of relative degree of passive:active control in different situations, species, and limbs.

The picture below shows an x-ray of an elephant’s whole hind foot, in which you should be able to see the bones (brighter white) of the foot surrounded by a lot of soft tissue, mostly more passive kinds like fat, skin, fascial sheets, ligaments and tendon.

Here (further below) is a preliminary image from our elephant foot studies in progress, intended to reveal the passive properties/motions of the feet so we can figure out how those properties are combined with more active control, and how actively elephants control their feet vs. other, possibly more ‘passive-footed’ animals like horses. This is interesting from anatomical and evolutionary perspectives, and for helping with foot health problems that are serious concerns for such animals– more about that later. The arrow in the picture below shows where a lot of the motion is: at the knuckle (metatarsophalangeal) joints of the toes; the rest of the foot tends to rotate around these mobile joints. We can’t peer inside living elephant feet to see if they actually do this, but we can compare the external motions, pressure patterns, and other data from living and dead elephant feet to see how they match up, which is what we’re doing now — and we’re doing the same thing with rhinos, which have cool 3-toed, more “hoof-like” feet, as opposed to the 5-toed, fatter feet of elephants. To get this image, we’ve had to put the foot inside a custom-made device using a car jack to apply a constant load, and a wooden framework to hold the specimen still, and then run it through a CT machine in unloaded and then loaded states to see how the bones move. Here is what the crazy apparatus looks like, with enthusiastic undergrad for scale:

This, below, is a right hind foot (pes) of an Asian elephant, shown from the inside of the foot (toes are numbered 1-4 from the big toe/hallux toward the outside of the foot; 5th toe is not visible). The yellow image is the relaxed, unloaded foot; the green is after applying a large load equivalent to the animal standing on one foot (or running quickly). Notice how the third metatarsal (the long bone that the arrowhead is touching) for the unloaded state is in front of that for the loaded state, whereas yellow and green images of the bones toward the tip of the toes are overlapping more, indicating they did not move much/at all. That tells us that the motion is occuring at the joint indicated (“knuckle”), which makes sense anatomically, because that joint looks like it has a lot of mobility.

Image

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