I will go into more detail soon on the broader subject that this involves, but am posting this image as a teaser– what’s up with this foot from my freezer?
Other than the obvious dead-ness and non-attached-to-body-ness…
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looks like two toes in one there…
or it’s missing a toe? this image reminds me of a woman i knew born with a missing thumb- there was kind of an area where you could imagine it coming out of, but it wasn’t there.
Think I should be playing in The Championship not the Premier League ‘cos I’m not even sure what beastie it’s from (think it’s a black or possibly Indian rhino). It does have a kinda club-footed look to it but I think that the middle digit is usually quite large. Is it missing a nail?
Is it perhaps the hindfoot and not the forefoot (manus) as the label would suggest?
I think the less I say here, the better, but some interesting comments above! More info in a day or so.
Shouldn’t that pad be about a third of the height? It looks like it ballooned to a size that would make walking difficult.
Well done everyone- there was some truth to pretty much all of the comments above. Basically, this was a messed up foot- and yes, Nick was right, this was a hind foot (left, IIRC). The rhino in question was a white rhino (again, IIRC; am without my notes), which purportedly have fewer foot pathologies in captivity than other species such as Indian rhinos (pretty scant data though).
This foot had an overgrown, swollen, infected third (middle) toe, and the other two toes had nails that were badly worn down/deformed (almost nonexistent, in the case of the fourth/outer toe) to the point that they lay above the foot pad.
As a result, almost all the forces went through the third toe, and the foot pad developed deep fissures that split open, so it’s no wonder it developed a severe pathology, for which it was treated by zoo vets and survived a while before the difficult decision was made to euthanase it.
We’ve compiled data for quite a large set of rhino specimens and species to see what the patterns of pathology are like, and finding some plenty of interesting things; more to come later. Elephant feet next!
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