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Posts Tagged ‘cool cats’

My Kind of Palace

Posted in Museums are Cool, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 29, 2019| 6 Comments »

If you go into central Lausanne, Switzerland, you’re likely to pass the Palais du Remine, and if you do, I recommend you go inside. I was happy I did while visiting Lausanne for the AMAM2019 conference. A luxurious palace has been given over to house five (!) free (!) museums on science and culture. These include the canton’s (~state’s) museums of palaeontology and zoology, which I’ll showcase here (also a little of geology and archaeology museums). Tripadvisor’s reviews were good but not as glowing as I’d make mine, so I will remedy that. I’m a sucka for old-school museums, and that’s what these are. So if that sounds right for you, journey onward!

It’s nice.

As you may be expecting by now if you’ve been here before, it’s time for another museum photo blog!

Stomach-Churning Rating: 5/10 for bones, preserved organs, taxidermy aplenty, and animal developmental deformities.

Nice cathedral nearby, w/great view of the city.

Nice interior architecture. There’s lots of nice to behold.

Posters That Get You Excited 101. But you must wait. Like I did.

Quadrupedal human at Zoology museum entry.

Tomistoma, false gharial.

Not a bad collection of taxidermied Crocodylia!

Visually arresting cobra display.

I’ve never seen three Draco gliding lizards on display together!

Bipedal lizard taxidermy displays, freezing the dynamic in the static, are no easy feat.

Plenty of stuffed animals like these raptors/other large birds. Classical zoology museum style. Minimal signage. Just specimen labels, mainly.

Coelacanth!

Sperm whale jaw.

Open space with big specimens. A ~4m long great white shark included.

Second zoology hall: bones!

Gorilla standing tall next to human.

Ostrich skeleton up close, amongst the mammalz.

Cassowary skeleton.

Emu shoulder/arm bones in right side view.

Walrus skeleton in what seems like an odd pose to me, but then they are odd on land.

Alligator skeleton in repose.

Giant anteater, “knuckle-walking”.

Pangolin skeleton! And mounted digging into a nest– very well done!

Bernard Heuvelmans display, about the (in)famous cryptozoologist. This was quite a surprise to me. I’m sure I’d read his English-translated book “On the Track of Unknown Animals” as a kid, during my long stint as an avid reader of much zoology, crypto- and otherwise. He bequeathed a lot of his work to the museum.

Bernard’s handwritten CV!? With a “sea serpent” sketch.

A “sea serpent” vertebra… but if you know any anatomy, it’s not a snake’s vertebra at all but a fish’s, such as a basking shark‘s.

Are you ready for more weirdness? How about some “mutants”- congenital deformities of animals? Fascinating errors of developmental anatomy… somehow this two-headed calf survived awhile. Plenty more where that came from, as follows:

And then there’s all kinds of wonderful comparative anatomy. To be a student of this subject in Lausanne would be a lucky thing, with this museum’s collection at hand. These are valuable specimens, made with love and skill.

Jaws

Fish head anatomy. Some vertebrae on the left, too.

Developmental regions of the head: a lovely wax(?) model of an Echidna skull. A treasure.

Brains: alligator vs. pigeon.

Salamander muscles.

Pigeon muscles.

More spotted felids than you can shake a jar of catnip at.

Another pangolin!

Giant armadillo.

Petaurus: flying phalanger (a gliding marsupial).

Second zoology hall open area: left side.

Second zoology hall open area: right side.

A final hall with a more new-fangled display, on the topic of evolution and extinction. Attractive phylogeny graphic here. Birds at the “top”, of course. Poor lowly mammals!

Taxidermied giant auk- not a common sight! (Extinct)

The extinct southern pig-footed bandicoot. Also a rare sight of a whole specimen- in a Swiss museum, too.

NOW ON TO THE FOSSILS!

You’ve been very patient. Here, have a Toblerone.

Palaeo museum entry. Already there are cool things visible. Inside, we find it just like I prefer my zoo/palaeo museums (as above): stuffed with specimens and leaving plenty for you to wonder about and investigate. Not frilly; a well-stocked museum that mostly lets its specimens speak for themselves.

Sauriermuseum (Aathal) specimen of Plateosaurus: sculpt/cast. A very good, big skeleton of this common dinosaur, rearing up.

Rear view of same.

Real bones of same; vertebrae and pelvic (this is the “Frick specimen”).

Metaxytherium (current name), an ancient and large fossil dugong/seacow. Skull is in left side view. (that may help, as their skulls are odd!)

Anthracotherium upper jaw: ancient hippo-cousin.

Prolagus: the “Sardinian hare” (recently extinct; old lineage).

Potamotherium: to some an early otter-like mammal, more recently thought to be an ancient seal.

“Broke-ulum”: a walrus broke its penis bone (baculum) and was surely not pleased about it, but lived to heal— physically if not mentally. Yeesh!

Glyptodont tail club and armour.

Aepyornis elephant bird legs!

A partial/reconstructed skeleton of the dodo.

Velociraptor preparing to pounce from above. It’s too late for you!

Rhamphorhynchus fossil (2D slab) and sculpt/cast coming alive in 3D– good stuff.

Anhanguera pterosaur watches the chaos from above, fish snagged in its teeth.

Not-shabby metriorhynchid marine croc fossils, from Britain.

Lovely 3D plesiosaur bones (flippers, neck, etc.) from near RVC: Peterborough!

Mesosaur; early reptile.

The museum clearly is proud of its excellent “Mammoth of Brassus” skeleton, essentially complete.

Ice Age elk/moose, a 10,000 year old skeleton in fine shape.

Cave bear skull rawr

Purty ammonites!

Spiky ammonite!

Cretaceous sponge colony from France. I hadn’t seen something like this before, so here it is.

Trilobites, brittlestars and friends.

Well I did wander through the geology and archaeology museums too, and while I liked them I did not take so many photos. My non-human organismal bias is apparent. But check these final ones out:

Splendid cross-section of the stratigraphy of the Alps around Lausanne. I gazed at this for quite a few minutes, trying to figure out what was where in the landscape I’d seen and how old, how deformed, etc.

Slab of “dinosaur” tracks but it was not clear to me what dinosaurs/archosaurs/whatever made them. I wish my French was better. Closeup below shows two footprints superimposed.

At last, the coup de grace! What museum would be complete without a diorama!? (I love them) This one, with a goat sacrifice and early Stone Age people praying to heathen deities/spirits at an elaborate petroglyph array rocked my world. And so it makes a perfect final image. Enjoy, and conduct the proper rites.  \m/

 

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Better Know A Muscle: 2. Biceps brachii

Posted in Better Know A Muscle, tagged , , , , , , , on February 11, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Nice GIF of the human biceps in action- By Niwadare - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38718790

GIF of the human biceps (above) and its antagonist triceps (below) in action- By “Niwadare” – own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38718790

Last year on Darwin Day I debuted “Better Know A Muscle” (BKAM), which was intended to be a series of posts focusing on one cool muscle at a time, and its anatomical, functional and evolutionary diversity and history. A year later, it’s another post on another muscle! Several dozen more muscles to go, so I’ve got my work cut out for me… But today: get ready to FLEX your myology knowledge! Our subject is Musculus biceps brachii; the “biceps” (“two-headed muscle of the arm”). Beloved of Arnie and anatomists alike, the biceps brachii is. Let’s get pumped up!

Stomach-Churning Rating: 7/10. Lots of meaty elbow flexion!

While the previous BKAM’s topic was a hindlimb muscle with a somewhat complex history (and some uncertainties), the biceps brachii is a forelimb muscle with a simpler, clearer history. Fish lack a biceps, just having simple fin ab/adductor muscles with little differentiation. Between fish and tetrapods (limb-bearing vertebrates), there was an explosion in the number of muscles; part of transforming fins into limbs; and the biceps is thenceforth evident in all known tetrapods in a readily identifiable anatomical form. In salamanders and their amphibian kin, there is a muscle usually called “humeroantebrachialis” that seems to be an undivided mass corresponding to the biceps brachii plus the brachialis (shorter humerus-to-elbow) muscle:

Most of the humerobrachialis muscle (purplish colour), in dorsal (top) view of the right forelimb of the fire salamander Salamandra salamandra (draft from unpublished work by my team).

Most of the humerobrachialis muscle (purplish colour), in dorsal (top) view of the right forelimb of the fire salamander Salamandra salamandra (draft from unpublished work by my team).

In all other tetrapods; the amniote group (reptiles, mammals, etc.); there is a separate biceps and brachialis, so these muscles split up from the ancestrally single “humeroantebrachialis” muscle sometime after the amphibian lineage diverged from the amniotes. And not much changed after then– the biceps is a relatively conservative muscle, in an evolutionary (not political!) sense. In amniote tetrapods that have a biceps, it develops as part of the ventral mass of the embryonic forelimb along with other muscles such as the shorter, humerus-originating brachialis, from which it diverges late in development (reinforcing that these two muscles are more recent evolutionary divergences, too).

Biceps brachialis or humerobrachialis, the “biceps group” tends to originate just in front of the shoulder (from the scapula/coracoid/pectoral girdle), running in front of (parallel to) the humerus. It usually forms of two closely linked heads (hence the “two heads” name), most obviously in mammals; one head is longer and comes from higher/deeper on the pectoral girdle, whereas the other is closer to the shoulder joint and thus is shorter. The two heads fuse as they cross the shoulder joint and we can then refer to them collectively as “the biceps”. It can be harder to see the longer vs. shorter heads of the biceps in non-mammals such as crocodiles, or they may be more or less fused/undifferentiated, but that’s just details of relatively minor evolutionary variation.

The biceps muscle then crosses in front of the elbow to insert mainly onto the radius (bone that connects your elbow to your wrist/thumb region) and somewhat to the ulna (“funny bone”) via various extra tendons, fascia and/or aponeuroses. The origin from the shoulder region tends to have a strong mark or bony process that identifies it, such as the coracoid process in most mammals (I know this well as I had my coracoid process surgically moved!). The insertion onto the radius tends to have a marked muscle scar (the radial tuberosity or a similar name), shared with the brachialis to some degree. A nice thing about the biceps is that, because it may leave clear tendinous marks on the skeleton, we sometimes can reconstruct how its attachments and path evolved (and any obvious specializations; even perhaps changes of functions if/when they happened).

Here are some biceps examples from the world of crocodiles:

Crocodile's right forelimb showing the huge pectoralis, and the biceps underlying it on the bottom right.

Crocodile’s right forelimb showing the huge pectoralis, and the biceps underlying it; on the bottom right (“BB”- click to embiceps it).

Crocodile left forelimb with biceps visible (

Crocodile left forelimb with biceps visible (“BB”) on the left.

Crocodile biceps muscle cut off, showing the proximal and distal tendons (and long parallel muscle fibres) for a typical amniote vertebrate.

Crocodile biceps muscle cut off, showing the proximal (to right) and distal (to left) tendons (and long parallel muscle fibres) for a typical amniote vertebrate.

What does the biceps muscle do? It flexes (draws forward) the shoulder joint/humerus, and does the same for the elbow/forearm while supinating it (i.e. rotating the radius around the ulna so that the palm faces upwards, in animals like us who can rotate those two bones around each other). In humans, which have had their biceps muscles studied by far the most extensively, we know for example that the biceps is most effective at flexing the elbow (e.g. lifting a dumbbell weight) when the elbow is moderately straight. These same general functions (shoulder and elbow flexion; with some supination) prevail across the biceps muscle of [almost; I am sure there are exceptions] all tetrapods, because the attachments and path of the biceps brachii are so conservative.

And this flexor function of the biceps brachii stands in contrast to our first BKAM muscle, the caudofemoralis (longus): that muscle acts mainly during weight support (stance phase) as an antigravity/extensor muscle, whereas the flexor action of biceps makes it more useful as a limb protractor or “swing phase” muscle used to collapse the limb and draw it forwards during weight support. However, mammals add some complexity to that non-supportive function of the biceps…

Hey mammals! Show us your biceps!

Jaguar forelimb with biceps peeking out from the other superficial muscles, and its cousin brachialis nicely visible.

Jaguar forelimb with biceps peeking out from the other superficial muscles, and its cousin brachialis nicely visible, running along the front of the forearm for a bit.

Elephant's left forelimb with the biceps labelled.

Elephant’s left forelimb with the biceps labelled.

Longitudinal slice thru the biceps of an elephant, showing the internal tendon.

Longitudinal slice thru the biceps of an elephant, showing the internal tendon that helps identify where the two bellies of the biceps fuse.

In certain mammals; the phylogenetic distribution of which is still not clear; the biceps brachii forms a key part of a passive “stay apparatus” that helps keep the forelimb upright against gravity while standing (even sleeping). The classic example is in horses but plenty of other quadrupedal mammals, especially ungulate herbivores, show evidence of similar traits:

Giraffe biceps cut away proximally to show the

Giraffe biceps cut away proximally to show the “stay apparatus” around the shoulder joint (upper right).

Zooming in on the

Zooming in on the “stay apparatus”; now in proximal view, with the biceps tendon on the left and the humeral head (showing some arthritic damage) on the right, with the groove for the biceps in between.

Hippo's humerus (upper left) and biceps muscle cut away proximally, displaying the same sort of

Hippo’s humerus (upper left) and biceps muscle cut away proximally, displaying the same sort of “stay apparatus” as in the giraffe. Again, note the stout proximal and distal tendons of the biceps. The proximal tendon fits into the groove of the humerus on the far left side of the image; becoming constrained into a narrow circular “tunnel” there. It’s neat to dissect that region because of its fascinating relationships between bone and soft tissues.

The biceps brachii, in those mammals with a stay apparatus, seems to me to have a larger tendon overall, especially around the shoulder, and that helps brace the shoulder joint from extending (retracting) too far backward, whilst also transmitting passive tension down the arm to the forearm, and bracing the elbow (as well as distal joints via other muscles and ligaments). It’s a neat adaptation whose evolution still needs to be further inspected.

Otherwise, I shouldn’t say this but the biceps is sort of boring, anatomically. Whether you’re a lizard, croc, bird or mammal, a biceps is a biceps is a biceps; more or less-ceps. But the biceps still has a clear evolutionary history and Darwin would gladly flex his biceps to raise a pint in toast to it.

So now we know a muscle better. That’s two muscles now. And that is good; be you predator or prey. Let’s shake on it!

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The cat’s back!

Posted in Frozen Mammals, Guestsicle, tagged , , , , , , on November 23, 2016| Leave a Comment »

(Marcela with some furry friends; photo by Oliver Siddon)

(Marcela with some felid friends; photo by Oliver Siddon)

A guest post by Marcela Randau (m.randau@ucl.ac.uk)

Stomach-Churning Rating: 1/10; just bones and data plots!

It is often said that all cats are very similar in terms of their skeletal morphology (“a cat is a cat is a cat”). But is this really the case? It may be if only gross, qualitative anatomy is taken into consideration, i.e., if you just eyeball the skeletons of tigers and lions you might find yourself not knowing which one is which. But with huge advances in technology that allows for extracting detailed shape information off a structure (e.g., a skull) and for analysing this information (‘Geometric Morphometrics’), it has become more and more possible to distinguish between relatively similar forms – which may be from distinct species, separate sexes, or even just different populations of the same taxon.

And it is reasonable to think that cat skeletons might be a lot more different than what meets the eye, as for a lineage of apparently similarly built animals, with not that much variation in diet  (all cats are hypercarnivores) there is substantial variation in body mass (over 300-fold just in living species!) and in ecology across cat species. From the cursorial cheetah to the arboreal clouded leopard, felids present a wide range of locomotory adaptations. Yes, all cats can climb, but some do it better than others: think lion versus margay (yes, they do descend trees head-first). As hypercarnivores, all cats are meat specialists, but they also change with regards to how big their prey is, with a general and sometimes-not-so-black-and-white three-tier classification into small, mixed and large prey specialists. The rule of thumb is ‘if you are lighter than ~20-25 kg, hunt small stuff. If you are heavier than that, hunt BIG BIG things; bigger than yourself. And if you are in the middle ground, hunt some small-ish things, some big-ish things, and things about your size. Well, -ish’ – their prey size preference has a lot to do with energetic constraints (have a look at Carbone et al. 1999; and Carbone et al. 2007, if you’re interested in this). But the fun bit here is that form sometimes correlates quite strongly with function, so we should be able to find differences in some of their bones that carry this ecological signal.

Indeed, for a while now, we have known that the shape of the skull and limbs of felids can tell us a lot about how they move and how big their prey is (Meachen-Samuels and Van Valkenburgh 2009, 2009), but a large proportion of their skeleton has been largely ignored: we don’t know half as much about ecomorphology and evolution of the vertebral column. Well, it was time we changed this a bit! As the PhD student in the Leverhulme-funded ‘Walking the cat back’ (or more informally, “Team Cat”) project, I’ve spend a big chunk of my first two years travelling around the world (well, ok, mainly to several locations in the USA) carrying a heavy pellet case containing my working tool, a Microscribe, to collect 3-D landmarks (Fig. 1) across the presacral vertebral column of several cat species. And some of first results are just out! Check them out by reading our latest paper, “Regional differentiation of felid vertebral column evolution: a study of 3D shape trajectories” in the Organisms Diversity and Evolution journal (Randau, Cuff, et al. 2016).

cheetah-verts

Fig. 1: Different vertebral morphologies and their respective three-dimensional landmarks. Vertebral images are from CT scans of Acinonyx jubatus (Cheetah, USNM 520539)

Building from results based on our linear vertebral data from the beginning of the year (Randau, Goswami, et al. 2016), the 3-D vertebral coordinates carry a lot more information and we were able to describe how this complex shape-function relationship takes place throughout the axial skeleton (in cats at least) in much better detail than our prior study did. One of the difficulties in studying serial structures such as the vertebral column is that some clades present variation in vertebral count which makes it less straightforward to compare individual vertebrae or regions across species. However, mammals are relatively strongly constrained in vertebral count, and Felidae (cats; living and known fossils) show no variation at all, having 27 presacral vertebrae. So adaptation of the axial skeleton in mammals has been suggested to happen by modification of shape rather than changes in vertebral number.

Using a variety of geometric morphometric analyses, under a phylogenetically informative methodology, we have shown that there is clear shape and functional regionalisation across the vertebral column, with vertebrae forming clusters that share similar signal. Most interestingly, the big picture of these results is a neck region which is either very conservative in shape, or is under much stronger constraints preventing it from responding to direct evolutionary pressures, contrasting with the ‘posteriormost’ post-diaphragmatic tenth thoracic (T10) to last lumbar (L7) vertebral region, which show the strongest ecological correlations.

We were able to analyse shape change through functional vertebral regions, rather than individual vertebrae alone, by making a novel application of a technique called the ‘Phenotypic Trajectory Analysis’, and demonstrated that the direction of vertebral shape trajectories in the morphospace changes considerably between both prey size and locomotory ecomorphs in cats, but that the amount of change in each group was the same. It was again in this T10-L7 region that ecological groups differed the most in vertebral shape trajectories (Fig. 2).

pta-cats

Figure 2: Phenotypic trajectory analysis (PTA) of vertebrae in the T10 – L7 region grouped by prey size (A) and locomotory (B) categories.

So in the postcranial morphology of cats can be distinguished, changing its anatomy in order to accommodate the different lifestyles we see across species. But the distinct parts of this structure respond to selection differently. The next step is figuring out how that might happen and we are working on it.

While Team Cat continues to investigate other biomechanical and evolutionary aspects of postcranial morphology in this interesting family, we’ve been able to discuss some of these and other results in a recent outreach event organised by the University College of London Grant Museum of Zoology and The Royal Veterinary College. We called it “Wild Cats Uncovered: movement evolves”. Check how it went here: (https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/museums/2016/11/17/cheetah-post-mortem/) and here (http://www.rvc.ac.uk/research/research-centres-and-facilities/structure-and-motion/news/wild-cats-uncovered), with even more pics here (https://www.flickr.com/photos/144824896@N07/sets/72157676695634065/).

References used here:

Carbone, C., Mace, G. M., Roberts, S. C., and Macdonald, D. W. 1999. Energetic constaints on the diet of terrestrial carnivores. Nature 402:286-288.

Carbone, C., Teacher, A., and Rowcliffe, J. M. 2007. The costs of carnivory. PLoS biology 5 (2):e22.

Meachen-Samuels, J. and Van Valkenburgh, B. 2009. Craniodental indicators of prey size preference in the Felidae. Biol J Linn Soc 96 (4):784-799.

———. 2009. Forelimb indicators of prey-size preference in the Felidae. Journal of morphology 270 (6):729-744.

Randau, M., Cuff, A. R., Hutchinson, J. R., Pierce, S. E., and Goswami, A. 2016. Regional differentiation of felid vertebral column evolution: a study of 3D shape trajectories. Organisms Diversity and Evolution Online First.

Randau, M., Goswami, A., Hutchinson, J. R., Cuff, A. R., and Pierce, S. E. 2016. Cryptic complexity in felid vertebral evolution: shape differentiation and allometry of the axial skeleton. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 178 (1):183-202.

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Time

Posted in Frozen Mammals, Museums are Cool, When Anatomy Goes Bad, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on October 21, 2016| 4 Comments »

It has been almost three months since my last post here, and things have fallen quiet on our sister blog Anatomy to You, too. I thought it was time for an update, which is mostly a summary of stuff we’ve been doing on my team, but also featuring some interesting images if you stick around. The relative silence here has partly been due to me giving myself some nice holiday time w/family in L.A., then having surgery to fix my right shoulder, then recovering from that and some complications (still underway, but the fact that I am doing this post is itself evidence of recovery).

Stomach-Churning Rating: 4/10; semi-gruesome x-rays of me and hippo bits at the end, but just bones really.

X-ray of my right shoulder from frontal view, unlabelled

X-ray of my right shoulder from frontal view, unlabelled

Labelled x-ray

Labelled x-ray

So my priorities shifted to those things and to what work priorities most badly needed my limited energy and time. I’ve also felt that, especially since my health has had its two-year rough patch, this blog has been quieter and less interactive than it used to be, but that is the nature of things and maybe part of a broader trend in blogs, too. My creative juices in terms of social media just haven’t been at their ~2011-2014 levels but much is out of my control, and I am hopeful that time will reverse that trend. Enough about all this. I want to talk about science for the rest of this post.

My team, and collaborators as well, have published six recent studies that are very relevant to this blog’s theme- how about we run through them quickly? OK then.

  1. Panagiotopoulou, O., Pataky, T.C., Day, M., Hensman, M.C., Hensman, S., Hutchinson, J.R., Clemente, C.J. 2016. Foot pressure distributions during walking in African elephants (Loxodonta africana). Royal Society Open Science 3: 160203.

Our Australian collaborators got five African elephants together in Limpopo, South Africa and walked them over pressure-measuring mats, mimicking our 2012 study of Asian elephants. While sample sizes were too limited to say much statistically, in qualitatively descriptive terms we didn’t find striking differences between the two species’ foot pressure patterns. I particularly like how the centre of pressure of each foot (i.e. abstracting all regional pressures down to one mean point over time) followed essentially the same pattern in our African and Asian elephants, with a variable heelstrike concentration that then moved forward throughout the step, and finally moved toward the outer (3rd-5th; especially 3rd) toes as the foot pushed off the ground, as below.

African elephant foot COP traces vs. time in red; Asian elephant in orange. Left and right forefeet above; hindfeet below.

African elephant foot COP traces vs. time in red; Asian elephant in orange-yellow. Left and right forefeet above; hindfeet below.

Gradually, this work is moving the field toward better ability to use similar techniques to compare elephant foot mechanics among species, individuals, or over time– especially with the potential of using this method (popular in human clinical gait labs) to monitor foot (and broader musculoskeletal) health in elephants. I am hopeful that a difference can be made, and the basic science we’ve done to date will be a foundation for that.

  1. Panagiotopoulou, O., Rankin, J.W., Gatesy, S.M., Hutchinson, J.R. 2016. A preliminary case study of the effect of shoe-wearing on the biomechanics of a horse’s foot. PeerJ 4: e2164.

Finally, about six years after we collected some very challenging experimental data in our lab, we’ve published our first study on them. It’s a methodological study of one horse, not something one can hang any hats on statistically, but we threw the “kitchen sink” of biomechanics at that horse (harmlessly!) by combining standard in vivo forceplate analysis with “XROMM” (scientific rotoscopy with biplanar fluoroscopy or “x-ray video”) to conduct dynamic analysis of forefoot joint motions and forces (with and without horseshoes on the horse), and then to use these data as input values for finite element analysis (FEA) of estimated skeletal stresses and strains. This method sets the stage for some even more ambitious comparative studies that we’re finishing up now. And it is not in short supply of cool biomechanical, anatomical images so here ya go:

fig5-vonmises

Above: The toe bones (phalanges) of our horse’s forefoot in dorsal (cranial/front) view, from our FEA results, with hot colours showing higher relative stresses- in this case, hinting (but not demonstrating statistically) that wearing horseshoes might increase stresses in some regions on the feet. But more convincingly, showing that we have a scientific workflow set up to do these kinds of biomechanical calculations from experiments to computer models and simulations, which was not trivial.

And a cool XROMM video of our horse’s foot motions:

  1. Bates, K.T., Mannion, P.D., Falkingham, P.L., Brusatte, S.L., Hutchinson, J.R., Otero, A., Sellers, W.I., Sullivan, C., Stevens, K.A., Allen, V. 2016. Temporal and phylogenetic evolution of the sauropod dinosaur body plan. Royal Society Open Science 3: 150636.

I had the good fortune of joining a big international team of sauropod experts to look at how the shapes and sizes of body segments in sauropods evolved and how those influenced the position of the body’s centre of mass, similar to what we did earlier with theropod dinosaurs. My role was minor but I enjoyed the study (despite a rough ride with some early reviews) and the final product is one cool paper in my opinion. Here’s an example:

fig6a-bates-sauropod-com-evol

The (embiggenable-by-clicking) plot shows that early dinosaurs shifted their centre of mass (COM) backwards (maybe related to becoming bipedal?) and then sauropods shifted the COM forwards again (i.e. toward their forelimbs and heads) throughout much of their evolution. This was related to quadrupedalism and giant size as well as to evolving a longer neck; which makes sense (and I’m glad the data broadly supported it). But it is also a reminder that not all sauropods moved in the same ways- the change of COM would have required changes in how they moved. There was also plenty of methodological nuance here to cover all the uncertainties but for that, see the 17 page paper and 86 pages of supplementary material…

  1. Randau, M., Goswami, A., Hutchinson, J.R., Cuff, A.R., Pierce, S.E. 2016. Cryptic complexity in felid vertebral evolution: shape differentiation and allometry of the axial skeleton. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 178:183-202.

Back in 2011, Stephanie Pierce, Jenny Clack and I tried some simple linear morphometrics (shape analysis) to see how pinniped (seal, walrus, etc) mammals changed their vertebral morphology with size and regionally across their backbones. Now in this new study, with “Team Cat” assembled, PhD student Marcela Randau collected her own big dataset for felid (cat) backbones and applied some even fancier techniques to see how cat spines change their shape and size. We found that overall the vertebrae tended to get relatively more robust in larger cats, helping to resist gravity and other forces, and that cats with different ecologies across the arboreal-to-terrestrial spectrum also changed their (lumbar) vertebral shape differently. Now Marcela’s work is diving even deeper into these issues; stay tuned…

fig2-randau-measurements

Example measurements taken on felid vertebrae, from the neck (A-F) to the lumbar region (G-J), using a cheetah skeleton.

  1. Charles, J.P., Cappellari, O., Spence, A.J., Hutchinson, J.R., Wells, D.J. 2016. Musculoskeletal geometry, muscle architecture and functional specialisations of the mouse hindlimb. PLOS One 11(4): e0147669.

RVC PhD student James Charles measured the heck out of some normal mice, dissecting their hindlimb muscle anatomy, and using microCT scans produced some gorgeous images of that anatomy too. In the process, he also quantified how each muscle is differently specialized for the ability to produce large forces, rapid contractions or fine control. Those data were essential for the next study, where we got more computational!

mouse-mimics

  1. Charles, J.P., Cappellari, O., Spence, A.J., Wells, D.J., Hutchinson, J.R. 2016. Muscle moment arms and sensitivity analysis of a mouse hindlimb musculoskeletal model. Journal of Anatomy 229:514–535.

James wrangled together a lovely musculoskeletal model of our representative mouse subject’s hindlimb in the SIMM software that my team uses for these kinds of biomechanical analyses. As we normally do as a first step, we used the model to estimate things that are hard to measure directly, such as the leverages (moment arms) of each individual muscle and how those change with limb posture (which can produce variable gearing of muscles around joints). James has his PhD viva (defense) next week so good luck James!

mouse-simm

The horse and mouse papers are exemplars of what my team now does routinely. For about 15 years now, I’ve been building my team toward doing these kinds of fusion of data from anatomy, experimental biomechanics, musculoskeletal and other models, and simulation (i.e. estimating unmeasurable parameters by telling a model to execute a behaviour with a given set of criteria to try to perform well). Big thanks go to collaborator Jeff Rankin for helping us move that along lately. Our ostrich study from earlier this year shows the best example we’ve done yet with this, but there’s plenty more to come.

I am incredibly excited that, now that my team has the tools and expertise built up to do what I’ve long wanted to do, we can finally deliver the goods on the aspirations I had back when I was a postdoc, and which we have put enormous effort into pushing forward since then. In addition to new analyses of horses and mice and other animals, we’ll be trying to push the envelope more with how well we can apply similar methods to extinct animals, which brings new challenges– and evolutionary questions that get me very, very fired up.

Here we are, then; time has brought some changes to my life and work and it will continue to as we pass this juncture. I suspect I’ll look back on 2016 and see it as transformative, but it hasn’t been an easy year either, to say the least. “Draining” is the word that leaps to mind right now—but also “Focused” applies, because I had to try to be that, and sometimes succeeded. I’ve certainly benefited a lot at work from having some talented staff, students and other collaborators cranking out cool papers with me.

I still have time to do other things, too. Once in a while, a cool critter manifests in The Freezers. Check out a hippo foot from a CT scan! It’s not my best scan ever (noisy data) but it shows the anatomy fairly well, and some odd pathologies such as tiny floating lumps of mineralized soft tissue here and there. Lots to puzzle over.

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The Freezers Hit the Road

Posted in Conference, Geeking Out, Two-Dog-Night Tetrapods, Voyages, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 7, 2016| 3 Comments »

Who needs “Ice Road Truckers” when you have the “John’s Freezer” team on the road with fossils, amphibians, felids and 3D phenotype fun? No one, that’s who. We’re rocking the Cheltenham Science Festival for our first time (as a group), and pulling out all the stops by presenting two events! Here’s the skinny on them, with updates as the week proceeds.

Stomach-Churning Rating: 2/10 for now (just bones), but it could change once the cheetah dissection is under way… 8/10 bloody cheetah bits but only at the end (updated)

Right now, Lauren Sumner-Rooney (of “Anatomy To You” and other fame) is on-site with a rotating team of others from our lab, in the “Free Activity Tents” area of the Imperial Gardens/Square, inside a marquee where we’ll be showing off our NERC-funded tetrapod research all week. This “First Steps” event features not only our past and present work with Jenny Clack, Stephanie Pierce, Julia Molnar and others on Ichthyostega & its “fishapod” mates, but also our “scampering salamanders” research in Spain, Germany and England. I’ve blogged a lot about all that, and won’t repeat it here, but you can see a 3D-printed Ichthyostega skeleton, view the skeleton in a virtual reality 3D environment, see related specimens and engage in kid-friendly activities, and talk to our team about this and other related research.

Ichthyostega 3D printed backbone is born!

Ichthyostega 3D printed backbone is born!

The central themes of that event are how bone structure relates to function and how we can use such information, along with experimental measurements and computer models of real salamanders, to reconstruct how extinct animals might have behaved as well as how swimming animals became walking ones. How did fins transform into limbs and what did that mean for how vertebrates made the evolutionary transition onto land? If you know my team’s work, that encapsulates our general approach to many other problems in evolutionary biomechanics (e.g. how did avian bipedalism evolve?). Added benefits are that you too can explore this theme in a hands-on way, and you can talk with us about it in person. That continues all week (i.e. until Saturday evening); I’ll be around from Thursday afternoon onwards, too. Kids of all ages are welcome!

Ichthyostega 3D print taking shape!

Ichthyostega 3D print taking shape!

Then, on Saturday for our second free event we join forces with Ben Garrod (master of primate evolution, the secrets of bones, and “Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur”) and RVC’s forensic pathologist Alexander Stoll as well as Sophie Regnault (“sesamoid street” PhD student w/me). As the “Large Animal Dissection” title hints, it’s not the right kind of gig to bring small kids to. There will be blood and stuff— we’ll be dissecting a cheetah together from 10am-4pm. This will involve walking through all the major organ systems, giving evolutionary anecdotes, and plenty more, with an aim to understand how the magnificent adaptations of cheetahs evolved—but also to investigate what problem(s) this animal faced that led to its sad demise. By the day’s end, there will just be a skeleton left. Get a front row seat early for this event, which serendipitously ties into “Team Cat”’s Leverhulme Trust-funded research project (we wanted a big animal and it just happened to be a cheetah; I had hoped for a giant croc or a shark or something but can’t complain!).

Ichthyostega 3D print is ready!

Ichthyostega 3D print is ready!

If you miss these events, please do cry bitter tears of regret. But don’t despair, there will be another “big cat dissection” in the London area in ~November (watch here for details), and plenty more fossil tetrapod stuff to come, plus a LOT more dinosaurs on the horizon!

Guess the bones! (photo by Zoe Self)

Guess the bones! (photo by Zoe Self)

And please come back to this blog post for more pics and stories as the week carries on… For hashtag afficionados, you can follow the fun on Twitter etc. at #firststepsCSF16. What a world we live in!

Update 1: While you’re here, check out our Youtube playlists of tetrapod-related videos:

Lobe-finned fishes

Ichthyostega‘s awesome anatomy

Tetrapod evolution: Tiktaalik to salamanders!

Update 2: Photos of our main stand (about tetrapod evolution)

csf2016-display

Our poster/banner display looks nice.

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Our tent brings in some punters.

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Our bones excite people young and old, sighted and blind.

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Fun with stickers and lab t-shirts.

And…

Update 3: Cheetah meat & greet
Ben, Alex, Sophie and I tackled the cheetah dissection today and it went GREAT! Much better than I’d optimistically expected. Rain didn’t scare the crowds off and neither did the gore, which there was some of (gelatinous spinal cords, lumpy tumors and at least one flying tiny bit of cheetah flesh that landed on a good-natured audience member!). Photos will tell the tale:

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Peek-a-boo!

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Sophie and Alex help us get set up in our tent.

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Our initial rough schedule- although we ended up improvising more after lunch.

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Dissectors assemble!

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The beast revealed. It was skinned by the museum that loaned it to us.

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Alex showing his talent: removing the viscera in one piece from end to end, starting with the tongue.

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Impressive finding of a surgical fixture (plate and wires) on the tibia, which had been used to hold the shattered bone back together long enough for it to heal. Added to the kidney disease and liver-spleen-lung cancer, this cheetah was in the sorriest shape of any cadaver I’ve seen yet.

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Cheetah coming to pieces: (from bottom) lumbar/pelvic region, hindlimb, thorax, forelimb and other bits.

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Dr Adam Rutherford, an eye expert, did a nice dissection of the cheetah’s eye, here showing the tapetum lucidum (reflective membrane), which shows up as light blue colour. Its small size befits the not-very-nocturnal habits of cheetahs.

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The lens of the cheetah’s eye. Now cloudy because of dehydration and crystalization, but still fascinating to see.

Want to see more images and the enthusiastic responses from the audience (we got some great feedback)? Check out Twitter’s #cheltscifest feed, or more simply my Storify condensation of the cheetah-related tweets here.

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Fat Cat

Posted in Anatomy Vignette, Frozen Mammals, tagged , , , , on April 1, 2014| 6 Comments »

I’ve described our “Walking the Cat Back” Leverhulme Trust-funded project with Dr. Anjali Goswami and colleagues before, but today we really got stuck into it. We’re dissecting a 46kg male Snow Leopard (Panthera uncia) as the first “data point” (actually several hundred data points, but anyway, first individual) in our study of how limb and back muscles change with size in felids. No April Fools’ pranks here; real science-as-it-happens.

Stomach-Churning Rating: 7/10 for skinned leopard and globs of fat. Much worse in person, hence the downgrading from what could be a higher score. Don’t click the photos to emkitten them if you don’t want to see the details.

This leopard is the same one that Veterinary Forensics blogged about. It died in a UK cat conservation/recovery centre. Today is simply a short post, but it is the first in what will surely be a continued series of posts on felid postcranial anatomy and musculoskeletal biomechanics by our felid research team, with bits of natural history and evolution thrown in when we can manage. As befits one of my curt “Anatomy Vignette” posts, pictures will tell the story.

Skinned and mostly de-fatted snow leopard, with fat piled up on the lower left hand corner near the hind feet. Here we are identifying and then removing and measuring the individual muscles. Project postdoc Andrew Cuff is hard at work on the forelimb while I'm mucking around with the hindlimb.

Skinned and mostly de-fatted snow leopard, with fat piled up on the lower left hand corner near the hind feet. Here we are identifying and then removing and measuring the individual muscles. Project postdoc Andrew Cuff is hard at work on the forelimb while I’m mucking around with the hindlimb. The fat here is about 3kg subcutaneous fat, so around 6.5% of body mass. And as the cat has been around for a while, that fat has gone a bit rancid and that is not nice. Not nice at all, no… Usually smells do not bother me, but this took some adjustment. Fortunately, the muscles are still OK, and work is coming along well.

UCL PhD student Marcela Randau,, carving up our cat's limb muscles. As usual in comparative biomechanics, we measure the "architecture"- parameters of the muscle that relate in a somewhat straightforward fashion to function.

UCL PhD student Marcela Randau, carving up our cat’s limb muscles. As usual in comparative biomechanics, we measure the “architecture”- parameters of the muscle that relate in a somewhat straightforward fashion to function. This muscular architecture includes things like muscle mass, the lengths of the fibers (fascicles) that make up the muscles, and the angle of the fascicles to the muscle’s line of action. These parameters correlate reasonably well with the force and power that the muscle can develop, and its working range of length change. Other posts here have discussed this more, but by measuring the architecture of many muscles in many felids of different sizes, we can determine how felids large and small adapt their anatomy to support their bodies and move their limbs. This will help to solve some lingering mysteries about the odd ways that cats move and how their movement changes with body size.

This research is being driven forward mainly by Andrew and Marcela, shown above, so I wanted to introduce them and our odoriferous fat cat. Upcoming dissections: 1-2 more snow leopards, tiger, various lions, ocelot, black-footed cat, leopard, and a bunch of moggies, and whatever else comes our way. All were EU zoo/park mortalities (there are a LOT of big cats out there!).

EDIT: Had to add a photo of the CLAWS! Whoa dude.

CLAWS

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Freezermas Day 3: To the Five Felids

Posted in Freezermas, Frozen Mammals, tagged , , , , , on February 11, 2014| 15 Comments »

Freezermas continues with track 3 of our rockin’ anatomy concept album! The number of the beast today is 5 (five days to go in Freezermas!), and I will deviate from the rock/metal theme to embrace the other side of the tracks: hip hop and rap. The Beastie Boys and I go way back: their “Licensed to Ill” album was the second cassette tape I bought (I remember proudly showing it off in Geometry class, circa 1986/7), and still ranks as one of my favourite albums ever. Everyone should own a copy of that, and of this next album…

The Five Felids, featuring KC

If only MCA were still alive to do this follow-up album…

The Beastie Boys’ superb, old school rap NYC-style (and themed) “To The Five Boroughs” (2004) satisfies my search for a #5-themed concept album/song. No track has that title, so I’m going with this one, “Triple Trouble” (song 3; day 3 of Freezermas… c’mon this is all just an excuse for me to talk about music I like and celebrate the concept album/freezers anyway!), as an introduction to a collaborative cat (felid) project we’ve started; and to continue the felid theme from Sunday (also be sure to check out the Snow Leopard dissection I posted on earlier!):

If You If You 
Wanna Know Wanna Know 
The real deal about the cats
Well let me tell you 
We’re felid funded ya’ll 
We’re gonna bring you some mad facts

(yes, that’s painful, I know… be relieved, I tried working some rap jargon into this post’s text but it just looked wack)

Dodgy-looking bagged-up skinned jaguar (bag-uar?) after delivery from Scotland.

Dodgy-looking bagged-up skinned jaguar (bag-uar?) after delivery from Scotland.

Anjali Goswami at University College London, myself, and Stephanie Pierce have teamed up to join the former’s skills in mammalian evolution, morphometrics, evo-devo and more together with our RVC team’s talents in biomechanics, evolution and modelling, and to apply them to resolving some key questions in felid evolution. We’ve hired a great postdoc from Bristol’s PhD programme, soon-to-be-Dr. Andrew Cuff, to do a lot of the experimental/modelling work, and then we have the marvellous Marcela Randau as a PhD student to tackle more of the morphometrics/evo-devo questions, which we’ll then tie together, as our Leverhulme Trust grant’s abstract explains:

“In studying the evolution of vertebrate locomotion, the focus for centuries has been on limb evolution. Despite significant evolutionary and developmental correlations among the limbs, vertebrae, and girdles, no biomechanical studies have examined the entire postcranial skeleton or explicitly considered the genetic and developmental processes that underly morphological variation, which are captured in phenotypic correlations. We propose to conduct experimental and geometric morphometric analyses of living and fossil cats, including the only large, crouching mammals, to study the evolution of locomotion, the mechanical consequences of size-related morphological evolution, and the evolution of correlations (modularity) in the postcranial musculoskeletal system.”

Above: snow leopard (headless) reconstructed and taken for a spin

Our study will integrate some prior studies from Anjali’s group, on modularity for example, and from my group, on the apparent lack of postural change with increasing size in felids (most other birds and mammals get more straight-legged as size increases, to aid in support, cats don’t– paper forthcoming). How does the neglected vertebral column fit into these limb-focused ideas? We’ll find out!

And it’s all very freezer-based research, using a growing stock of specimens that we’ve collected from zoo/park mortalities, many of which are kindly being supplied by Dr. Andrew Kitchener from the National Museums Scotland. We’ll be scanning, dissecting, measuring and modelling them and then returning the skeletons to be curated as museum specimens. This page features five sets of felid specimens involved in the research. We’ll be presenting plenty more about this research on this blog and elsewhere as it continues!

Above: ocelot from Freezermas day 1, now in 3D!

The Bag-o-Cats: whole specimens of a black-footed cat (Felis nigripes), juvenile cheetah, and juvenile snow leopard. I think. Sometimes you get a bag-o-cats and are not sure.

The Bag-o-Cats: x-ray CT slice showing whole specimens of a black-footed cat (Felis nigripes), juvenile cheetah, and juvenile snow leopard. I think. Sometimes you get a bag-o-cats and are not sure.

Panthera atrox (large American lion) from the NHM in LA. Oh yes we'll be applying our insights to strange extinct cats, too!

Panthera atrox (large American lion; “Naegele’s giant jaguar”) from the NHM in LA. Oh yes we’ll be applying our insights to strange extinct cats, too!

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The Secret Slo-Mo Videos of the Cats

Posted in Frozen Mammals, tagged , , , on June 17, 2013| 2 Comments »

So in my last post I promised to put up the videos of my cat biomechanics footage online (cut scene from “The Secret Life of the Cat” documentary). Here I deliver on that promise.

Note that all this footage was filmed at 250 frames/second, so it is 10 times faster than conventional UK/EU (PAL format) video and thus it plays 10x slower if replayed at PAL format speeds. Hence it is often called “slo-mo”/slow motion video. However, most experts would call it high speed video due to the high frame rate that gives us higher temporal resolution, ideal for studying fast movements.

It was cold that day; indeed the Colchester Zoo area where we filmed the tiger videos below had been snowed in earlier; so the posting of these videos on my freezer-based blog is DEFINITELY apropos.

First, the cat (named Ricochet, not Rocket, I now recall; I’m sure you’re all ineffably outraged at this mistake in my prior post) that we filmed to show how a standard; if rather shy; cat walks:

Second, here I am goofing off. High speed video is so fun! OK actually I was testing the video camera to ensure it worked; we only got one chance with each of 2 tigers. As you can imagine it’s not easy to get a tiger back in its indoor enclosure when it’s nice and sunny outside! So my gear needed to work, and it did, despite the cameraman’s bum being in the shot here:

Third, a tiger whom we filmed at Colchester Zoo. It nonchalantly strolled out of its indoor enclosure upon release. No drama. It was a bit unnerved by our presence but took its time.

Finally, this is the video that we were really hoping for with the tiger; a dramatic turn and gallop out of the “tiger chute” into its main enclosure:

Pretty nice! And thanks to the magic of blogging, you get to see it, rather than having it banished forever to the purgatorial cutting room floor!

Here are some parting shots of the male tiger happily checking out his snowy paddock upon release, and then…

Tiger outdoors

I turned around and he was checking me out; I was just on the other side of the fence. That was a fun surprise! Some close-up time with a curious tiger.2013-03-12 12.38.13

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RVC Anatomy Museum, Part 5- Skele-tonnes

Posted in Museums are Cool, tagged , , , , , , , on August 7, 2012| 4 Comments »

Well, here we are at the end of our virtual tour of the RVC’s little-anatomy-museum-that-could. Soon we will return to our regularly scheduled programme of dismembered cadavers and frozen body segments. I know you’ve missed them.

This post has a Stomach-Churning Rating (SCR) of 2/10, unless either penis bones or the backs of knees really gross you out (then maybe 4/10 at worst, although there is a link hidden in the text that might really freak you out).

OK, here we go. You might remember this chap, the famed racehorse Foxhunter:

And the museum features sundry other domestic-type species and their close kin, such as this sheep (a Soay Ram):

And this skeleton that is probably also a sheep, unless it is a tricky goat (notice framed photo of Bodyworlds exhibit on wall):

As well as his barnyard buddy, a quite robust pig:

But I want to focus more here on the surprises that the museum’s collection of skeletons has to offer, like this tiger poised below the pig:

Along with a wide assortment of smaller mammals such as this kinkajou coatimundi (note: label is wrong; see this Twitter chat we had that solved this mystery):

And a rhesus monkey (our primate skeletal collection is not shabby at all!):

And a whole shelf of ossified dog (and other carnivore) penises, oh joy! (os baculum; the “penis bone” of various Primata, Rodentia, Insectivora, Carnivora and Chiroptera– the infamous mnemonic P.R.I.C.C. of comparative anatomy):

But, great as penises may be and much as the internet may love them, there is much more to see here. Carry on reading, or incur the wrath of the giant fossil walrus baculum [oosik]! (this, Freezerinos, is called an argument ad baculum, I have just discovered; had to share!)

As I mentioned way back in my first post, what really sold me on the museum when I first viewed it back in 2003 was the megafauna! Here’s a photo I dug up of how the rhino used to appear in the museum’s old settings:

And the hippo was close by:

My off-with-their heads bias rears its ugly cranial appendage here, but I’ve already shown you its skull, so rest easy craniophiles; you had your day of glory. It’s time to kneel before Zod, or in this case kneel before my collection of animal knee photos! I hate to remind you of the trauma, but I did promise this with the mystery emu knee dissection, so suppress your PTSD [knee TSD?] and come along quietly now… Let an elephant knee soothe your tortured soul (from here on, all knees are left knees, in caudal/rear view):

I’m going to continue on without providing longwinded interpretations. I’ll leave you to draw your own, and just enjoy the diversity of knee anatomy, with some surprises toward the end. Descending in the size scale from multi-tonnes to semi-tonnes, first, a rhino:

And then our hippo:

The RVC does not have a mounted giraffe skeleton but I can show you the knee from our dissections, now nice and tidy (note the absence of a fibula, reduced to a small tarsal (ankle) bone in many artiodactyls– but not pigs or hippos as you can see above; what consequences this change has for knee joint mechanics is entirely unknown! However, the fibula has such a small/nonexistent connection to the femur/knee joint in many large mammals that the consequences may be negligible; who knows.):

Now, a horse of course:

One reason I find knees so fascinating scientifically is that they are mechanically so complex (and often over-simplified as simple hinges) and yet so fragile (knee injuries are common in many species; poorly adapted humans in particular! To wit…). But I also love knees because they feature prominently in discussions of form and function in extinct animals; in particular, dinosaurs. Let’s not forget Scrotum humanum, either…

Consider a few representative dinosaur images (mostly from the AMNH; not RVC!) here, starting with my old pal Tyrannosaurus (sorry, dislocated knee in this mount; ouch!):

Now, a ceratopsian (probably Triceratops??), I think; photo-labelling fail! Could easily be some sort of hadrosaur or something, though:

For what its worth, sans massive cartilages, a sauropod knee to round out the holy trinity of Dinosauria:

Consider here how the fibula plays a greater role in the dinosaurian knee joint (as in birds, too, to some degree), compared with the mammals above. But also consider the whopping amount of soft tissues missing here, as made evident in the emu post. Daunting indeed.

We kneed to know more about knees before we can knavigate their aknatomy and make knew iknfereknces about their fukntiokn! And so I’m coming back full circle to my earlier anatomical studies this year to look more closely at knees in a variety of species; more about that later.

And that’s the end. I hope you liked the kneet photos and knurture the kneed to come back for my knext post, which will kontain more knormal spellikng.

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RVC’s Anatomy Museum, Part 2

Posted in Museums are Cool, tagged , , , , , , , on July 3, 2012| 2 Comments »

Last time I gave a quick overview of the museum and anatomy’s long history at the RVC. I’ll cover some of the cool skulls we have on display first, then in future posts the dissected specimens, then some of the neat birds and other exotic animals, and I’ll return to bones with a general overview of rockin’ skeletons at the end. Or something like that order. I am a fickle beast and might do otherwise. On with the show then!

So, skulls… I dread talking about skulls. As people on my research team know, I have at least one Cardinal Rule: I don’t work on skulls or heads. Except maybe skulls of Cardinals? Skull anatomy is too complex for my feeble old mind to grasp, and there are too many people working on them that are really great scientists, so I feel I have little to contribute to that area. But I do appreciate them, even if with a glazed look of apprehension and lack of comprehension. 🙂

It may not surprise you to learn that we have dog skulls in our vet anatomy museum, but you might be impressed by the selection! We have a case full of a diverse set of domestic breeds and non-domestic species (fox, wolf, etc.) of canids, shown above. There is bound to be a good research project in there somewhere- the plasticity of dog skeletons under humans’ artificial selection has done some amazing, and disturbing, stuff, especially to skulls and heads!

But I’m a cat lover and, lest the felids get jealous and enact their final vengeance upon us all, let me move quickly to our felid skull collection:

Yep, not just domestic cats but a nice assortment of lions, tigers and other hypercarnivorous predators! Many from local zoos, especially London Zoo over the past centuries/decades.

Not to be outdone, the ungulates are braying for predationattention, so let’s give them some love:

With some requisite horses thrown in but also quite a few exotic species! And right next to them is another case full of coneheads:

With one prominent member that definitely deserves a closeup, since giraffes are what got this blog started, and this is a lovely old ?male? specimen with honking big ossicones:

Don’t worry old bean, your artiodactyl chum the hippo is keeping you company, pip pip!

Look closely at the right side of the mandible (lower jaw) of that hippo and observe the lumpy bit in the middle of the jaw, which would be inside the cheek in life. That is apparently (I am no skull pathologist by any stretch) an impacted or otherwise severely wonky tooth, and it shows some signs of having been operated on, presumably to keep it from puncturing the cheek or getting infected. Ouch! (For comparison see this more normal, more toothsome skull) It is unilateral (just right side) so I presume this is a sound, if rough, diagnosis. Anyway, stunning skull nonetheless!

Stunning as that may be, archosaurs aren’t going to take this skull-off lying down! Here is one of our crocodylian species; an American Alligator (I think, but I know if I am wrong one of my readers will steer me to an alternative ID, presumably a common caiman, which I know we also have, along with a Tomistoma), with a turtle and python cowering behind it:

Indeed, some Alligator teeth,  with a horse jaw on display, make a lovely halo-like effect when viewed from a certain angle, in a set of shelves devoted to the diversity of tooth forms and functions:

But let’s get real, folks. Fish (OK systematists, non-tetrapod vertebrate) skulls could be said to blow away the diversity of tetrapod skulls. Or at least that’s what the wolffish is trying to tell us, from his vantage point in a display about jaws and ears (more evolutionary context, yay!):

And because I am not one to argue with a wolffish, I will let him have the last word. Hope you enjoyed another quick tour! I’ve only scratched the surface of our selection of skulls; there are plenty more good ones, so come visit sometime!

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