What's In John's Freezer?

Well, I happened to take some more photos of a few of my favourite skeletons/bones from our Anatomy Museum during my last jaunt over to our Camden campus, and figured I might as well share them. So here you go! (Right now it’s so hot I wish I was a skeleton! Gigantothermy is not always so great) First, two views of our seated polar bear, which I learned this week is a celebrity— a model for the kickass armoured polar bears in the film The Golden Compass:

Then, also out in our cafe area you’ll find some nice smaller specimens in addition to our elephant. Such as:

A decent mount of a three-toed sloth is above; and below I’ll share several skulls including a second hippo (male? quite different morphology from the other one I showed):

And another charismatic megafauna, a ?black? rhinoceros (shown previously as a mounted skeleton in our old hall):

And a small gharial (Gavialis) skull:

Which can be nicely juxtaposed with a more robust Caiman (or our earlier Alligator):

And then a small wallaby:

Let’s go back inside. I have a few more friends for you to meet. Such as our chimp next to a Lucy skeleton (both casts), briefly glimpsed in my first post:

And a really, really gnarly-faced bulldog! Shudder.

During my brief perusal of the exhibits the other day, I realized I had never shared our nice knee joint dissection in my post on those specimens, nor had I included it in my knotations about knee joints. This is particularly egregious as I am now doing a year-long fellowship/sabbatical to study knee joints, in particular the patella (kneecap) of birds. Here, a dog, with helpful labels of the anatomy around the stifle:

And that’s all folks! I’m preparing a particularly wacky post for later, which will include lots of whimsical anatomy, so stay tuned and keep coooooooool!