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Posts Tagged ‘heavy breathing’

What’s It Like Spending a Year in John’s Freezer?

Posted in Utter Frivolity, tagged , , on March 3, 2013 | 9 Comments »

Chilly 1st Birthday to You, WIJF Blog!

It has indeed been a year of blogging now! And it has been a very fun year at that. Here is my look back at past events on this blog.

Stomach-Churning Rating: 8/10- some heavy-hitters in here, but to regular Freezerinos they will mostly be familiar.

giraffe-leg-CT

This blog’s first image and subject: giraffe legs and modelling.

NUMB WITH NUMBERS:

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

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:

Skinning a White rhino forelimb

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.

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: Rhino humeri

And the post on WCROC the big Nile crocodile got a fair amount of attention, as well as my posts on our Ichthyostega research and vertebral evolution discoveries, naked dinosaurian ostriches, chicken meat, giraffe anatomy (many pages, but this one is relatively most popular), and then the series I did on the RVC’s Anatomy Museum (first post here).

Here are a few thumbnails of the greatest hits from those posts and some others– which do you remember and why?

DSC_0203 Mystery Dissection 3  DSC_0963a  Whole 2 Gratuitious Melanosuchus (black caiman) shot. chicken-viscera-myopathy Gratuitious rhinoceros leg.  Kitty Hedz it is defunct rhino_front  hippo_L_knee Wolpertingers Jenny Hanniver- "face" windfall-croc (4) The nuchal ligament, which runs along the spine and helps hold up that long neck.  The left cheek's teeth-- and check out the spines on the inside of the cheek! Keratinous growths to aid in chewing, food movement, digestion etc. These extend into the stomach, too! Amazed me first time I saw them, in an okapi (giraffe cousin). my-brain2 If this post bummed you out, just focus on these contented cats. An offering to The Master

…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? DSCN0880

I’ll be defrosting some new ways to puzzle you this year.

Personally, my post about my brain means a lot to me (and any zombies out there) of course, but also I’m rather keen on my entry on elephant biomechanical models (cheeseburger units!), and the posts about elephant foot pathologies and the rhino crisis also carried a strong, semi-personal urgency.

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.

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:

PigsHeads
PURPLE EMU WHOLE 1 _Se1_Im002

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.

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A Tale of Two Scales: Big Rhinos and Giant Rhinos

Posted in Rhinoceros Crisis, tagged , , , , on November 28, 2012 | 5 Comments »

A vignette from research I’m engaged in with a couple of different projects follows. Below is a photo I took of two humeri (upper arm bones; humerus is singular).

One is from a Black Rhinoceros; Diceros bicornis (modern; specimen #H.6481 from the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge), which was collected in 1873 in Bogos, Abyssinia by zoologist ?Edward? Gerrard.

The other, larger one is from a giant long-necked and (presumably) hornless rhinocerotoid; Paraceratherium [AKA Indricotherium, Baluchitherium] (extinct of course; specimen #NHMUK PV M 12251 from The Natural History Museum, London); which was collected in 1911 in the Siwalik Hills of India by palaeontologist Forster Cooper.

For an idea of scale, the smaller one is 39 cm (just over a foot) long, so about the same length as your humerus, give or take a bit. It comes from an animal that probably weighed around one tonne (1000 kg; 2200 lbs) or so. Look back at the picture, and pause to reflect on the scale. This is one of the largest living land animals right here, and despite that size it is quite an athlete (watch the classic John Wayne chasing-animals-around-Africa film Hatari! if you want elegant proof, or browse Youtube videos of boisterous rhinos).

But any living rhino pales in comparison to the giant Oligocene form, whose humerus is twice the length (~80 cm; almost as long as your entire leg, probably) and quite a bit more robust. The best estimates of mass for such an animal are up to 15-20 tonnes, on a par with the largest mammoths and other elephant relatives. That’s like a ten-rhino rhino! Sure, they all pale somewhat in scale against the largest sauropods (or whales, which cheat by living in water). Yet for my money (warning: subjective value judgement ahead!) a rhinoceros is cooler than any sauropod at the same size, and sauropods are extinct so we have less left to study. (I’m being deliberately provocative for my sauropod researcher friends, but in a loving way)

The scale, and often cramped conditions, make it hard getting a good photo of a Paraceratherium skeleton or reconstruction, but here’s one I took at Tokyo’s Museum of Nature and Science.

Now, of course if you know me, you know I am thinking about how such giant land animals moved. Authors such as Gregory Paul and Per Christiansen have made arguments based on real data, both qualitative anatomy and quantitative bone dimension measurements, that even giant rhinos like Paraceratherium could trot and gallop much like living rhinos do, despite their giant size. They have inferred from the limb joint structure that these giant rhinos were more crouched, were less columnar (vertical-limbed) than living elephants are (although I’ve shown with my team that this characterization of elephants is quite misleading; they get quite un-columnar, rather crouched, as they attain faster speeds). If Paul and Christiansen were correct, it would be remarkable. I can’t definitively show either way, just yet. But I want to see how well this argument holds up with other data and methods, so I’ve been planning to test this idea for a long time. We’ll see how it goes.

Anyway, that was my brief tale of two scales. On one hand we have living “giants” in the form of the five currently remaining species of rhinoceroses, which are quite extraordinary in many ways, albeit in big trouble. On the other hand we have amazing, mysterious uber-giants like Paraceratherium, two or more times the size in linear dimensions and an order of magnitude greater in weight. Both are certainly giants by any measure of size in land animals.

But was the bigger rhino living in a rather different world, even more dominated by gravity than its smaller relative is today? (No, gravity was no different! It was only 30 or so million years ago; relatively recent!) Or did they live in relatively similar worlds of just being “bloody huge and devastatingly powerful, thank you very much”? I find that question really exciting and wondrous to ponder. What do you think?

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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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Chicken Hearts, Meat and Myopathies

Posted in When Anatomy Goes Bad, tagged , , , , , on June 22, 2012 | 12 Comments »

Here is a little vignette for you; a taster of the BBSRC-funded chicken biomechanics project my team has underway in collaboration with Jonathan Codd’s team at Uni Manchester. I did not know about the following situation until a couple of years ago during my former PhD student (now postdoc) Heather Paxton‘s research on chicken mechanics.

Regard this chicken, slit open along the midline to show the viscera. The huge pectoralis muscles (breast meat) have been pushed aside; the right side’s are clumsily outlined (I blame caffeine?) in blue.

Then consider the heart, within the jagged, shamefully and ineptly drawn green circle. I’ll come back to that.

So this broiler chicken took 6 weeks to reach this size, of about 3 kilograms (6.6 lbs). Fifty years ago, before artificial selection was imposed on a MASSIVE scale (many billions of chickens per year worldwide, bred in a complex pyramid scheme of crossed strains), that same chicken strain would have taken 15 weeks to reach a normal slaughter mass of roughly 2 kg (4.4 lbs). The major selection, of course, has been for edible meat, especially that lovely breast muscle’s white meat.

If we look at red junglefowl, to a large degree the “wild type” ancestors of domestic chickens that are native to southeast Asia, the leg muscles take up about 7.7% body mass per leg vs. about 6.3% in the broiler. Just a small decrease, but probably an important one, and something our research focuses a lot on (walking ability, lameness, activity levels etc). But that’s a subject for a future post. In stark contrast, the breast muscles (back to the blue ellipse above)  have gone from 7% to up to 11.6% body mass per wing; a huge change!

Now let’s return to another large muscle, the one within the green circle above; the heart. Not only must the heart, which has become relatively larger by perhaps 25%, pump blood to a body that has enlarged by >50%, but it also must perfuse the giant pectoral muscles, which have enlarged by >65%.

Herein lies the problem… You probably can predict what happens.

Several syndromes may develop, but the one I want to cover here is called deep pectoral myopathy (AKA “Oregon disease” or better yet “green muscle disease”, a very appropriate term as you’ll see below). Basically, the giant pectoralis muscles receive inadequate blood flow from the smallish heart, because the muscles are so big and under so much pressure, creating resistance to flow, and so the muscles begin dying from within. A picture tells the story:

While surely uncomfortable for the birds and hence a welfare problem, it is usually not found until the animals are slaughtered, and then of course the meat is destroyed rather than delivered for human consumption. Because of the welfare problems and loss of meat (i.e. financial loss), the poultry industry is trying to remedy this problem. W’e're working on aspects of this as well, as part of our study of how the locomotor and ventilatory systems of chickens develop and have evolved.

I am blogging this as a great example of how anatomy can go haywire and become imbalanced when evolutionary selection pressures are intense and highly specific (e.g. almost single-minded human selection for large breast muscle). It is also a conundrum that human society faces: while chicken meat seems more efficient and more ecologically sound than some other meats, and there is growing demand for meat as the human population grows, how do we balance welfare concerns with food security, economics and other factors? And how do we judge when artificial selection has gone too far? I do not present an answer because the answer is not easy, and because my team is still learning about how to answer it.

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Oh hai, Boing Boing!

Posted in Frozen Mammals, tagged , , on April 26, 2012 | 6 Comments »

Like I said, oh hai! Wow, I wasn’t expecting all of you here! Enjoy a random photo of some awesome anatomy, Boing Boing universe, and thanks for the nice story!!

Note that an elephant’s heart does not end in the stereotypical single apex (point) at the left ventricle. Elephants have a 2-pointed heart, with two large ventricles used to pump blood to the body AND lungs… who else has this feature? Ahh yes, their closest living relatives: seacows (manatees, dungongs; the Sirenia)! Probably a leftover swimming adaptation. Big, muscular ventricles (the darker purplish tissue to the left and right of the yellow-pinkish line of tissue running from top to bottom along the middle) are useful for pumping blood against resistance, such as when using the trunk as a snorkel while swimming.

The bottom of the heart is at the bottom of the screen; you’re looking straight at the front of the heart.

Human heart for comparison, from Wikipedia; scale relative to pic above is not too far off (elephant relatively a bit undersized):

For more info on elephant hearts, see here and here, and for the hardcore anatomists, here and here.

And more about elephants from Inside Nature’s Giants, too!

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Freezersaurus Gets a Makeover

Posted in Geeking Out, tagged , , , on April 19, 2012 | 8 Comments »

Much prettier now!

With the help of Heinrich Mallison of dinosaurpalaeo and his student Sebastian Marpmann (now having finished the Great Giraffe Deconstruction), I did a quick cleanup and reorganization of the big walk-in freezer we’ve all come to know and love as Freezersaurus. This had to be done because some of the big stuff was becoming a terrible obstacle to cross in order to get anything from inside; cue health-and-safety paperwork nightmares. And yes, the ice penis is now gone. End of an era…

All photos henceforth by Doktor Mallison:

Emerging from Freezersaurus; most big stuff removed (note our giraffe's metacarpus trying to escape, on right side)

The big stuff. Emus, elephant feet, too much giraffe (metacarpus continuing to sidle away), and horse legs.

Carnage remaining inside; needed to be taken out gradually and reorganized, to make more space on floor for intermittent human presence (i.e. walking in).

Elephant feet, mystery giraffe pelvis, oh my!

For ME!?!? Aww shucks, you shouldn't have. Reorganizing the small stuff on shelves. PhD student Mike Pittman makes a guest appearance, delivering crocodile vertebrae.

Sebastian poses with giraffe buddy. We emphasize the Buddy System when dealing with Freezersaurus; she is a treacherous hostess. Note that Sebastian has also cunningly halted the abscondence of the giraffe metacarpus.

Job done! Farewell Freezersaurus! You look mahvelous! Wall of archosaurs on the left; wall of synapsids on the right, and sundry giant mammals in the middle.

And so we finished, and so you’ve now had a very intimate look at Freezersaurus too! Don’t you feel lucky? :)

This post was brought to you by the wildly popular Nü-Folk-Metal post-bluegrass band Mystery Giraffe Pelvis, and the letter K.

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Archosaurian breathing: major anatomical differences

Posted in Exalting Archosauria, tagged , , , on March 8, 2012 | 1 Comment »

Birds and crocodiles are part of the spectacularly diverse group of animals called the Archosauria, or archosaurs if you’re on casual terms with them. Other (extinct) archosaurs include the dinosaurs (non-avian), pterosaurs, and sundry wondrous other beasts like aetosaurs and phytosaurs. Archosaurs have, and presumably their common ancestor had, many specialized features of their anatomy that are related to metabolism and locomotion. That’s a big reason why, as a scientist, I love them.

Yet the bird lineage evolved its own extreme specializations, whereas in some (but not all!) ways crocodilians stayed closer to the ancestral state. Here is a great example of one of the major categories of differences between living crocs and birds: the proportions of the respiratory system, from freezer specimens I’ve CT scanned with my former PhD student Vivian Allen, which were part of a paper we published in Anatomical Record back in 2009. We scanned the thawed specimens with and without the lungs inflated (croc results not shown for inflated state). This was easy; we just stuck a syringe into the windpipe and then tied it off once we had pressurized the lungs. [I'm now working with Colleen Farmer and Emma Schachner on using these specimens to learn more about the surprisingly "bird-like" features of croc lungs despite the smaller total volume of the airways; more about that another day... we can do MUCH better than these images!]

Here, the airways are coloured blue/purple and the flesh has been made transparent yellow, while the skeleton is orange. The relatively massive size of the airways is evident in birds, especially the air sacs (side pockets of the lungs/other air passages), whether they are relaxed or inflated. The lungs (purple) aren’t that differently sized in the two animals.

Australian Freshwater crocodile from CT scan:

Junglefowl (“ancestral wild chicken”) from CT scan; relaxed airways:

Junglefowl from CT scan; inflated airways:

(note that the light blue region is the expanded air sacs; the lung in purple hardly changes because it is fairly rigid in birds)

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