I’ve been either super busy or on holiday and low on creative energy, so although I have five or so blog posts frozen in my mind, I haven’t progressed them far enough yet. To whet your appetite, they include a review of the bird book AND exhibit “The Unfeathered Bird”, a summary of our recent PeerJ paper on croc lungs (Schachner, Hutchinson and Farmer; see here and also here), a rant on optimality in biomechanics, and a summary of a new and (to us) very exciting dinosaur paper that is very-soon-to-come, and something else that I can’t remember right now but it probably is totally awesome.
But here’s an interlude to keep you stocked on freezer-related imagery. We did an annual inventory and massive cleanup (and clean-out!) of all our freezers, throwing out some 300ish chickens and other odds and ends, and finally loading all cadaveric material I have into a single database, which I’ll share here shortly! It was a long time coming, and took ~6 people about 4 exhausting hours; last year’s attempt was just a holding maneuver by comparison. Here is how it went.
Freezersaurus gut contents being sorted. A cold drizzle was falling. It was not pleasant work.
Large specimens, especially horse legs and the remnants of an ostrich hind end or two, being moved into the walk-in freezer.
Research Fellow Jeff Rankin wrangles some horse legs into their freezer. I like this photo for his knowing smile as he stands amidst horse limbs spread akimbo.
Postdoc Heather Paxton helps sort out elephant foot tendons and “predigits” in their freezer. Nice view of our long line of chest freezers in action, too.
And, as an extra reward if you made it to the end, here’s what I was doing for the past week (check out my Twitter feed for more)– seeing amazing art and architecture and food and stuff in Rome, which is just dripping with wicked anatomical portrayals (e.g. in this image; click to embiggen and oggle the classical physiques).
First, the usual consideration of statistics: wow! I never expected the blog to be this successful! I’d sort of hoped as much, but for such a niche blog it was far from guaranteed in my mind. However, the initial response was overwhelming: 4210 hits in its first month, many of them on the first day!
Since then, although the usual number of blog views are around 100-200/day, there are now 76 blog followers, and a total of ~111,000 views! According to ImpactStory and Topsy, the blog has had 48 tweets (7 of them “Influential”), 111 Facebook likes, 105 Facebook comments, and 53 Facebook shares. Nice!
The biggest day was April 27, 2012: 10,564 views– ZOWIE! That was fun. More about that below. I’m amused that my very first post only has 85 views even to this date, but it didn’t really contain much.
Visitors tended to come from browser searches (23,243 hits!), in particular hunting for images of the feet/limbs of elephants, rhinos, giraffes and other megafauna (looks like my intended purpose worked– vets and other anatomists want this rare information!). Oddly, from a few of my tweets that got listed on my blog, “deepstaria enigmatica” (remember that craze?) became one of the most common terms (214 to date!) that brings people here via the intertubez. Giraffe anatomy and patella are also major sources of search strikes. Interesting!
But don’t dismiss the power of Facebook (4,399 oggles on WIJF total) versus the somewhat surprisingly smaller impact of Twitter (2,036 pings). I say surprising because I push the blog much harder on Twitter than anywhere else, but Facebook pages like Perez’s Veterinary Anatomy (>33,000 members/likes!) have done far more than my mere ~1,300 Twitter followers can. Other blogs like the Chinleana palaeo blog (1,008 palaeo-hits here) and the ubiquitous Pharyngula (791 athe-hits) have helped a lot, too– thanks to all those bloggers and science writers who have linked to my humble little blog!!!
Who are YOU? You mostly come from the USA and UK, of course, but Japan is 3rd on my visitors ranking, followed by Canada, Germany, Australia and the Netherlands. Russia: we want more of you, too. Monaco, Nauru, Tuvalu and Liechtenstein- you as well, please! North Korea, keep trying.
So this is all great; really great. I’m rather amazed.
Definitely the blog has succeeded in what I aimed: to present the fun, awesome, curious side of anatomy in all its raw glory, using the freezer as a common theme (although I’ve felt free to deviate from purely freezer-based science when it pleases me). And it has crystallized for me just how important and powerful a single picture of anatomy can be.
That is what this post emphasizes- the pictures of the year from this blog. Enjoy the walk down morphology lane.
MOST POPULAR POSTS AND PERIODS:
Certainly the post; indeed the single photograph; that stands out for this blog is that of the elephant with its guts spilling out, from my Inside Nature’s Giants post on 13 April (so it took 2 weeks to gather momentum before the views spilled out like so many bowels). In a single day I had thousands of visitors from Boing Boing, Metafilter, Reddit, Gizmodo, io9, pinterest (which still sends me a lot of hits daily), and more! So here once again is that beastly image:
Stunning emergence of The Guts
The post even got re-discovered by Reddit (the dreaded repost), leading to another surge. 24,330 views of the blog post so far!
A distant second to the elephant guts in terms of broad popularity was the “how thick is a rhino’s skin?” image; another Reddit favourite; with 4,719 views of the post from World Rhino Day 2012:
But also the “Animal: Inside Out” review did very well here (2,338 views to date), which was quite gratifying because I did a lot of detailed but enjoyable research for that one. It continues to bring people here, long after the NHM exhibit closed (it is now at Chicago’s excellent Museum of Science & Industry), which is quite cool.
Thanks to the poll results from last week, I’ll be doing more exhibition reviews like this– see below. My favourite image from that post is this: the bull (but don’t forget the camel, either):
Great exhibit. No bullshit.
Once we’re past those top 3 pages, things settle down to numerous posts with ~1000 or less views to date– highlights include the big rhinos and giant rhinos post:
Here are a few thumbnails of the greatest hits from those posts and some others– which do you remember and why?
…and we’ll never speak of the freezer-penis again…
Of course, there were the puzzles and mysteries, too. When I think of those, the image I think of most is this one; one of the first. Remember what it is?
I’ll be defrosting some new ways to puzzle you this year.
I also featured a lot of movies here- if you want to peruse them, they’re always on my Youtube account here– >22,000 views so far; not bad. One of my favourites is this one, of a pumpkin being smashed in slow motion:
Furthermore, in terms of effort writing and researching, my very detailed post on chimeras and Jenny Hannivers and such is very memorable for me, and more recently the Freezermas series was a huge undertaking– which gave me needed breaks but also soaked up a lot of time during some intensive grant-writing!
I predict that the pangolin post, in particular, will proceed to provoke a promiscuous proportion of people to pass by this blog.
But the WIJF blog has always been about including you too, my loyal Freezerinos– what about you? Please thaw out your memories of past posts and comment below on what sticks out as your favourites and why. I’d love to hear about it!
Eggs: full of bountiful promise and symbolism for the future.
THE FROZEN TUNDRA OF THE FUTURE:
A final duty for this post, heralded by my poll earlier, is for me to peer into my frosty crystal ball and report on the future of this blog:
As promised, it will continue for a year or more; as long as I feel I have something new to say and someone to tell it to.
The poll convinced me, as I’d hoped, to venture into more reviews of museum/other exhibits that I visit locally or abroad. Now and then I’ll also tackle a new or classic paper, good or bad, that tickles my anatomical fancy, and give my perspective on it. The mysteries and puzzles will continue; I was checking in that poll to see what the enjoyment level was, and it is clearly still reasonably high. I’ll continue presenting my own research here, especially when it’s quite anatomical (stay tuned for something new and VERY exciting in a few weeks!). As I’d hoped, hardly anyone found the self-promotional aspect of this blog (presenting my own research) to need downplaying, but I think over the coming year you’ll see more diversity of what is presented in terms of current research by anyone. I welcome suggestions of cool anatomical science to cover. I will try to cover mostly postcranial anatomy, since other blogs/Facebook pages already do such a good job with cranial morphology, and postcranial is much more my expertise.
But generally I will just keep on keepin’ on with what I’ve been doing!
Examples of what’s yet to come: some close encounters with my collection of specimens– the cast of characters that populate my freezers. What exactly is there, and what are the odd things I haven’t yet even mentioned here? I’ll also just grab some specimens and thaw and dissect them for the purpose of blogging it (live-tweeting too?), and going through some of the anatomical talking points for each. And much more! You may even see Cryogenics, Yetis, or Snowball Earth come up in features touching on the theme of freezerness, general science and critical thinking.
But– IMPRESSIVE IMAGERY, again, is what WIJF is truly about. It’s what I’m about, too- I became an anatomist partly because the visually arresting nature of anatomy grabbed me and won’t let go.
Here are some NEW images to ponder. One is… unpleasant; one is more abstractly technical; but both are about the bewitching power of anatomy. The coming year will run the gamut between these extremes:
Thanks, everyone here, for helping to make blogging fun for me and for others, and for enduring my self-indulgence – especially in this post – but I hope you enjoyed a ramble through this past year in my freezers.
Keith Feinstein of Eureka Exhibits sent me this sketch he did, and when I expressed my reaction of hey-dude-this-is-awesome, he welcomed me to put it up on the blog. Well why the hell not? Awesome belongs here. Dinosaurs (especially space-tyrannosaurs) belong here. Astronauts go into space and space is cold– like an ultra-freezer? So there you are. Additional context: we’ve worked together on Eureka’s “Be the Dinosaur” simulation/exhibit and are now doing “Be the Astronaut.” I suppose this sketch foreshadows the next step: “Be The Astronaut Riding the Dinosaur in the Land of Badassedness”.
…a daily picture of anatomy! And today it is two pictures, tra-la-lee!
Welcome back to Freezermas! And HAPPY DARWIN DAY! Last year our whole lab got involved in DD2012, but this blog was just a twinkling in my keyboard back then. This year it was a more mellow, somber occasion for DD2013. But Heinrich Mallison of the dinosaurpalaeo blog took part, and took photos (all credits go to him), and the result kicked ass and took names. Bring it on!
Here is Darwin amidst a selection of greatest hits from my bone collection; post-freezer denizens. How many can you identify? Have a go in the comments below. A few should be quite familiar to blog followers… More about these bones later this week. Incidentally, Darwin is standing on a Kistler forceplate. So biomechanics afficionados can geek out about this, too.
And here I am hamming it up again. Give it a rest, John! But ’tis merely a humble offering to The Master. I’m sure he’d appreciate it. Any guesses what it is?
Happy Freezermas! Sing it: “On the second day of Freezermas, this blo-og gave to me: one tibiotarsus, a-and two silly pictures with Chucky D!”
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!
(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!
Utterly puerile post ahead. I was just in one of those silly moods… Six-year-old daughter, lately with a strong potty-humour tendency, will do that to you. So with that forewarning in mind…
I was rummaging around in the back of Freezersaurus yesterday and was quite surprised to encounter this:
I am deeply, deeply disturbed. And shocked. And a bit violated. Cover your shame, Freezersaurus! Now, I’ll freely admit, penises are great. Hilarious floppy bits to the common person, and fascinating adaptations to the scientist; e.g., duck penises, alligator penises… I’ll never forget the time my invertebrate zoology teacher showed a video of barnacle penises (immobile animals that need to reproduce by copulation– you do the math). But I digress. I was conveying my disturbed feelings about this blatant ICE PENIS in my freezer. Clearly Freezersaurus was either very happy to see me; perhaps titillated by all my rummaging around; or I need to get out more and get my mind out of the anatomical gutter. C’mon, look closer:
In any other place, it might just be an icicle. But here, under the baleful Eye-of-Sauron-like gaze of Freezersaurus’s fan unit, it can be only one thing. Penisicle. I’m not sure what to do with it now. It was such an awkward moment, I had to back off and leave The Freezer to its privacy. Not sure if I can go back there, especially not alone.
My therapy sessions start Monday. I’ll keep you posted on my progress. In the meantime: My gift to you: another emanation from The Freezer; because the last Mystery Dissection pic was too hard and then too easy after a not-so-subtle nudge…
hypnotosov comments that “a band named \\\Maytag uses refrigerator sounds as the basis for ambient black metal” and I could not resist delving deeper into this revelation; nor could many others, it seems.
Indeed, the “music” that resulted from their efforts is suitably majestic for this blog. CoverFeast your ears on this gem that is awesomely entitled “The Saga of the Frostbitten Lands of Frigidaire”:
And if that’s not enough aural assault for you, they are on Myspace; rejoice! I’m more of a “Frost Hammer” metalhead man myself, but I can appreciate a song like “I’m On a Fridge.”
In other news that is cold off the presses, here is an explanation of the phenomenon of freezer burn. And a Burning Man event held in the frigid wastes of Alberta, called Freezer Burn. Well I didn’t know of these things, anyway! I am learning as I go. No Siberian sage am I. Amazing what you can learn when you google random phrases. Just stay away from subjects like freeze-dried pets if you know what’s good for your sanity. Or don’t. Some sojourns down the rabbit hole are not meant to be taken.
To fit with the randomness and WTF-ness that infests this post, ponder this picture. I’ll discuss it in the next post.
A man had a parrot that could talk. Unfortunately, it swore a lot, as if a sailor and a pirate had created a drunken love-child. In an effort to get the parrot to be quiet, he put it in a cupboard. The parrot continued swearing and after a while the man decided to put the bird in the freezer. After that, the parrot started swearing even more. After a few minutes, it suddenly became quiet.
The man opened up the freezer and the wide-eyed parrot then said, “I’m sorry, sir, that kind of outburst will never happen again.” As the man took the bird out of the freezer he wondered what the difference was between the cupboard and the freezer. Just then, the parrot said, “So, uh, what did the chicken do?”
