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…

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.

(The following post has a Stomach-Churning Rating of 3/10; the dried fish may not get you, but the bad jokes could. A respite before I slap some freezer-spawned Grand Guignolishness on you in future posts.)

Continuing this crazy summer’s theme of anatomy exhibits in museums, here’s a different twist: using cadavers, or mockups of animal bodies, to create chimeras – fusions of the bodies of multiple species to create new, fanciful organisms. This post was inspired, and will be illustrated, by my visit to Salzburg, Austria’s Haus der Natur, which is well worth a visit for its eclectic cornucopia of exhibits. I’ve also read that the Field Museum’s Mythic Creatures is worth a peek. The post is particularly timely as true chimeras are more and more a thing of scientific reality these days (unsettling testimonial here), although lion-(dragon/snake)-goat hybrids are not coming anytime soon–we can all hope. Enjoy the links! I’ve added a lot of external links to more content if you want to further explore this post’s subjects.

Anyway, my favourite Salzburg escape (from Mozart overdoses that are an all too real- and lethal- threat) was the “Fabel und Mythos” exhibit in the “Mensch und Natur” section of Haus der Natur, which is about just what it sounds like: how natural history and mythology/fantasy intersect. That theme is a passion of mine, as a sci fi/B-movie monster/horror/fantasy film and book fan and as a scientist. It is a big part of why I became a scientist (especially evolutionary biologist/anatomist/palaeontologist) — the junctures of art and science, imagination and reason, fantasy and reality, fascinate me, and if teamed up with the grotesque, monstrous, whimsical and nightmarish, I’m helpless to resist, much as I suspect many of this blog’s readers are. So sit back and enjoy.

Chimeras (in the broader sense of mixed-up animals) have a long history of cultural significance, from Greek myth (and an atrocious recent film featuring The Worthington) even to the godfather of taxonomy, Carl von Linne, and his Animalia Paradoxa. The chimeras (and basilisks, cockatrices, etc.) have featured prominently in the art of the past as well as of the present. People today remain fascinated by the role chimeras and other anatomical tomfooleries have played in hucksterism and hoaxes, as evidenced by many online exhibits such as the Museum of Hoaxes, 15 Craziest Biological Hoaxes, April Fool’s hoaxes, kickass artwork, lamest hoaxes, posts by The Bloggess, sightings of real (i.e. freakish) unicorns in real life, and taxidermy-gone-berserk sites like here and here and here and this cautionary tale; this also overlaps with cryptozoology and WTF-is-that internet fetishes. And let’s not forget the man-bear-pig. No, we shan’t forget that… Nor shall palaeontologists soon forget some famous chimeras in our field, particularly the infamous Piltdown man and Archaeoraptor. These hoaxes incidentally, ended up being not just a temporary embarrassment for science, but also an exemplar of how science is a self-correcting process, so frauds inevitably get unmasked– and in some cases (e.g. Archaeoraptor consisting of two very important legitimate fossils!), science makes new discoveries and advances in that process of corrective peer review.

First up in this blog post: the Bavarian Wolpertingers (leaking into native Austrian culture as the Raurackl; AKA Rasselbock, Dilldapp, Skvader and other names; and leaking into video games too)! The wolpertinger is a small and not-so-scary chimera, but often with fairy powers, and is very much akin to that folkloristic mainstay of Americana, the jackrabbit-pronghorn lovechild called the Jackalope. In contrast, however, the jackalope mainly has powers of being a lame souvenir, although fable has it they are prone to ventriloquism, pugnaciousness and whiskey– a fearsome combination (don’t try this at home). This panel from the museum illustrates the diversity and anatomical disparity of Wolpertingers:

And the museum did a great job making some physical chimeras using the wonders of taxidermy… aww, do you want one of your own now?

With closeups below–e.g. the jackalope from hell:

A flight of fancy?

Some quizzical quackery:

Echt toll, meine Freunde! A bit more about wolpertingers and their kin is here. Pokemonologists, take notes. People laughing at the alternative name for wolpertingers, “poontingers,” behave…

One can hardly discuss chimeras and fake animals/taxidermy hoaxes without getting into mermaids (no, I won’t discuss THAT recent TV debacle) and then into Jenny Hanivers; “devil fish”, seabishops or sea fairies. The hanivers go back to at least the 16th century, even being used by sailors to prove they’d had an exotic adventure after their voyages, or sold to supplement their meager salaries. There is plenty written on this phenomenon and how numerous people were skate punk’d (AHEM) by a simple dried fish. But then, skates (not to be confused with an altogether different, but related, kind of chimera) do look odd, and many people don’t know their anatomy or are just credulous, prone to self-deception and confirmation bias.

Stuart Pond was so kind as to send pics of a J.H. that he has in his shed (spinoff potential: What’s in Stu’s Shed???) for me to share— thanks again man! Note the apparent “legs” (probably organs used in mating’; claspers; but sometimes just snipped bits of the tail, which is also evident here):

Obviously the typical Jenny Haniver is a skate that has been messed with a bit to emphasize the humanoid features, but then there’s a sucker born every minute, and PT Barnum famously took advantage of that rhythmic nativity in the 1842 hoax he called the Fiji (Feejee) mermaid, which was a monkey’s head/torso with fish body and papier maché coating. Below, a wolpertinger-like “horn” is visible; this is the remnants of a nasal process of the chondrocranium of the ray; the flanges to either side of it are parts of the front of the head that have been cut apart to make the haniver’s head look more humanoid:

With a “face” only a mermother- or chondrichthyologist- could love– note that the “eyes” are actually nasal openings:

And thanks to Sven Sachs for some extra photos of a Jenny Haniver at the Zoological Museum Liege in Belgium– thanks Sven!:

But, in the world of academic science, there is perhaps no greater you-fools-I-invented-a-fanciful-critter hoax/joke than the Rhinogradentia (snouters, or rhinogrades), rumoured in 1905 but first described in Gerolf Steiner/Harald Stümpke’s (latter= pseudonym; AKA Karl D.S. Geeste, Hararuto Shutyunpuke) wonderfully over-the-top, tongue-in-cheekish 1957 faux-scientific monographic book Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia. Darren Naish‘s blog Tetrapod Zoology (along with others, in 4 parts) has done far better justice to the snouters than I could ever hope to, and others have contributed to the legend. But at least I can share some pics of the first reconstructed (or were they, hmm…?) rhinogrades I’ve ever seen in physical form (again from the Haus der Natur):

Here are the closeups; first Orchidiopsis rapax:

And next Otopteryx volitans:

Last but not beast, an infamous nasobeme, Nasobema lyricum!

Whether this post was hit or myth, please contribute more thoughts, stories and pictures in the Comments below. What’s your favourite hoax story, conglomerated creature, misidentified monstrous mush, wee little false beastie or taxidermy horror/beauty? Why do you enjoy fanciful creations like these?

And watch out- those chimeras can pack a whallop!

Good day, everyone. Maybe by the end of this post if you don’t agree that it is a good day, you will at least see why I think it is.

Ten years ago today, something Really Bad happened to my brain. I don’t need to go into details, but it is very fair to say that I almost died. And that was the second close call in my adult life; there was another, years earlier, with a different vital organ system. So I celebrate December 16th each year as “Not Dead Yet Day“. As this is this blog’s first NDYD, I figure you can all join in the celebration, for any reason you might have to celebrate life. It can be hard to love some aspects of life sometimes, especially in pretty depressing times like the 21st century can be (so far). This can especially feel true in light of recent events in Connecticut, or ongoing nightmares in Syria and many other lands, with vanishing innocents, vanishing wildlife and vanishing habitats, the inexorable heat death of the universe… shit I’d better stop now or I’ll lose it!

This day helps to remind me to stay focused, as much as I can, on what matters in my life, and what I can control in my life to make things better for the little bubble of the world that I exist in. Some things are far beyond even our hope, let alone our means, to control. And sometimes we get broadsided by Really Bad Shit. But in between any of that powerlessness or inauspicious shit, there can be joy from many sources– for me (like many others), it comes from family and friends, science and the natural world’s wonders, delicious food and amazing travel, and much more. It comes from experiencing reality with all its facets.

Here is my brain. You can’t see much. Feel free to make jokes about that, I’ve set myself up nicely with that last sentence!

These are MRI scan images from a routine checkup I had about 3 years ago. I suppose you can consider it a game of “Mystery MRI slices”, but one in which I give you the answer (my brain). You can see lots of cool anatomy here; if you know your anatomy feel free to mention what’s visible (or not) in the Comments, and make jokes– I will probably enjoy any of them. I like self-deprecatory humour. And happily, I checked out fine in that scan, and continue to be fine… relatively. I’m not the same person I was >10 years ago— in 2002 I got married (but missed my bachelor party because I was hospitalized for another problem), got an important paper (“Tyrannosaurus was not a fast runner”) published in Nature that changed my career (and arguably got me my job today), had this Really Bad thing happen, and plenty more. It was an eventful year.

At the time the Really Bad thing happened, I was feeling poorly but working very hard on final revisions/re-analysis of elephant gait data for a paper that ended up being published in Nature in 2003; so things ended up looking even better for my career. But I made a decision that day that, in a fortunate way, ended up having a greater impact than any mere publication. Rather than sit in my house with our cats and feel poorly, I made the choice to drive in to work and process more elephant video data. Just as I was parking my car on the Berkeley campus (illegally; I was feeling very poorly by that point) to go in to do the work… I woke up in an ambulance.

I was lucky. I was somewhere public where I was spotted having trouble, not alone in my house for >8 hours until my newlywed-wife came home to discover me. So I got help, and medical science saved my ass — and my brain, and thus other regions of my anatomy and my mortal existence. If I’d adopted the other choice, and stayed home alone, our cats probably would have witnessed something terrible and been unable to help, awesome as kitties can be.

I’ve never felt the same after that day. I’m certainly a case of “scarred but smarter.” I can say smarter mainly because my brain survived the trauma OK and I learned from the experience. I can say scarred because I still feel repercussions of all sorts from that Really Bad day. Although I’ve always had a dark sense of humour, strongly connected with my eccentric passions in science (e.g. this blog! Go figure.), I think it’s fair to say that my humour darkened. I’m not as bubbling with joy as I used to be. I used to almost always grin and exclaim “Excellent!” when someone asked me “how’s it going?”. I can still burble with frabjous joy, but not quite as often.

That day brought me closer in touch with the darker side of life, and the brighter side too. I think I’d been overlooking both. Closer in touch with reality, and with the serendipity and calamity that accompany it. There have been other, terrible events in my life since then, too, that have brought new existentialist focus to my mind, but that’s a part of most people’s middle age period (e.g. losing many loved ones).  I’ve had a great career so far, too, thanks in part to good things that happened 10 years ago, and to good things that have happened since thanks to hard work and some good fortune. But that doesn’t mean life has been a nonstop joyride, or even easy.

So today I take some special time to think about what life is about, what is real and must be faced wide awake vs. what is self-deceitful slumber, and why life is still worth loving– which I do love, with all my brain. And every day I think about the big changes that 2002 wrought on my life, and how so many other seemingly important things that happen in my life don’t matter one fucking bit– hence I try to just have fun, be a good human and not worry so much.

Have the best day you can have, everyone. I’m off to have some fun family time, but wanted to share my brain’s thoughts with you today. Maybe you have a similar story to share, too, or maybe my brain’s thoughts inspire some in your own brain. It’s wonderful how that glistening anatomy can do such things, and it’s wonderful how resilient that anatomy is, much as we need to be… because we are one and the same, our brains and our selves that dwell inside them, and the love of life that they can conjure.

If this post bummed you out, just focus on these contented cats.

I’m not sure if this is a new tradition at this blog or not (probably not), but hey let’s give it a name: an Anatomy Vignette. Just something curious I notice during my research that deserves more than just a tweet. I borrowed some bones from the University of Cambridge Museum of Zoology (whom I love, because they have great exhibits and are very research-friendly) to CT scan for some projects. I noticed this:

And I thought “Ouch! That’s nasty, dude.” (the holes in the bone just above the knee joint– these should just be a roughened area where the adductor muscles and other leg muscles attach)

So I was interested to see the CT scan images to find out how these possibly osteomyelitic lesions continued into the bone. They’re really pervasive, continuing into the marrow cavity quite far up the femur, as this shows (good CT-viewing practice to match up what you are seeing in the photo above with this movie):

I would be surprised if this was not the reason this animal died (presumably being euthanased at a UK zoo). There would have been extensive infection and pain resulting from this bony disease. How did it originate? Who knows. Maybe the animal strained a muscle and bacteria got inside, or maybe there was a fall or other injury. Hard to tell.

Oh, and also note the lack of a true marrow cavity in hippos, which is true for all the long bones. The “cavity” is filled in with cancellous bone. Same with rhinos, elephants, and many other species… science doesn’t entirely know why but this feature surely does help support the body on land, and grants at least some extra negative buoyancy in water; at a cost of some extra weight to lug around, of course.

And so ends this Anatomy Vignette.

Less words, more pictures in this post, and I’ll get the one lame cake joke out of the way early. I’ve nearly finished my research blitz through the postcranial material of the NHM-Tring’s osteological collection and have made some pit-stops for cake skulls now and then when I see one that pleases me. Now I shall present a survey of some of the species I’ve examined. I’ll proceed up from the base of the crown clade of living birds (Neornithes/Aves; the most recent common ancestor of living birds and all its descendants) and first take a tour of Palaeognathae; the ratites and kin; then move another step up into the Neognathae, first featuring the lineage featuring the ground fowl (Galliformes) and then the waterfowl (Anseriformes). If all this taxonomy and phylogeny is a bit much, check out this page for a brush-up on the bushy branches of bird biodiversity.

First, lots of bones of our cast of currasows, chachalacas, cassowaries and other kooky characters. And then, perhaps, a stop to the excessive alliteration. Finally, I will finish with some examples of species oddity (hat tip to Chris Hadfield).

Stomach-Churning Rating: 2/10- some bony pathologies but still just dry bones. Minimal cake jokes, and no filthy swearing this time.

BRING ON THE BONES:

Exploded skull of an ostrich, Struthio camelus. This kind of careful preparation takes crazy skill, and creates a thing of rare beauty.

Imposing skull of a cassowary, Casuarius casuarius, with a rather worn head casque.

Mummified Owen’s Little Spotted Kiwi, Apteryx owenii. The feathers were still soft and fluffy, but I would not call this specimen cuddly.

Dorsal view of the back/hips of the Great Spotted Kiwi, Apteryx haasti. I like this photo and am not sure why. The symmetry and shading pleases me, I guess.

Front view of the back/hips of the Great Spotted Kiwi, Apteryx haasti, watching over my laptop and watching me while I write this blog on my laptop… so meta(ornithine)!

Wing of a kiwi, showing the fragile bones and feather attachments. “Apteryx” = “no wings”… well not quite. Click to emkiwi(?) so you can identify the individual bones, from the humerus right down to the fingers! I love this specimen.

The titanic left leg (in front view) of the Elephant Bird, Aepyornis maximus, from Madagascar, with a small moa nearby in left side view. There’s so much awesomeness about elephant birds I don’t know where to start, but this is one good place to do so.

The smaller end of the palaeognath scale: a mummified Undulated Tinamou, Crypturellus undulatus. Somehow the head got stuck into the abdominal cavity underneath the sternum, so this tinamou almost had its head up its arse. A tinamou with head in its proper position looks and sounds like this (video).

And now we take a left turn into the Galloanseres, most basal branch of the neognath birds, to see some of the neglected, strange early branches off from the “main line” that led to the modern diversity of ducks, geeses and swans (Anatinae, Anserinae).

Screamers (Anhimidae) are to Anseriformes as megapodes (see below; brush turkeys) are to Galliformes. By that I mean that both screamers and megapodes are very early branches off the main line of their respective lineages’ evolution, and both are quite strange when seen in that context… an unfair one, frankly; over-focused on the most familiar, “modern” or most speciose group. More about this issue further below.

This was my first hands-on experience with screamer anatomy; I was familiar from reading Tetrapod Zoology and other material about them. Check out the sound that gives them their name here! I’m now a big fan- they have so many strange features: oddly chunky but often very light bones, big feet with long toes, and then these switchblade-wrists, which would make Batman jealous:

Crested Screamer, Chauna torquata, showing the wicked spur (and smaller one) on the carpometacarpus.

Horned Screamer, Anhima cornuta; similar carpometacarpal spurs as in Chauna.

Torso of a screamer seen in top view. Nice narrow body, and no uncinate processes (spur-like bony struts that cross the ribs and act as levers for the muscles that move the ribcage during breathing)

The long, gracile, clawed toes of a screamer. Those toes, especially as they belong to an animal called a screamer, are spooky for me. Note also: very little toe-webbing for a “waterfowl.”

Not to be outdone, on the Galliformes side of Galloanserae, we have some funky headgear in the Maleo (a megapode bird/Megapodiidae; a very basal branch of “brush turkeys” and kin) and curassows (part of the Cracidae; odd South American birds whose males make booming sounds, presumably using their head-casques as resonating chambers?):

Skull of a male Maleo, Macrocephalon maleo. AR Wallace famously pursued it, and here is its funky call.

Australian brush-turkeys, Alectura lathami, at the Alma Park Zoo near Brisbane, Australia; they run wild there. Here they are doing what they are best known for: making a mound-like nest. We were doing kangaroo biomechanics experiments and they were everywhere. I was in awe to see such exotic (to me) birds; locals seemed not so enthused (the birds are loud and make a lot of mess).

Skull of Helmeted Curassow, Crax/Pauxi pauxi,  showing that resonating chamber. Along with this boom-boom-room, the male uses a piece of food that he holds to draw in the female; if she takes it, then it’s sexy time.

Foot of a Siberian Black Grouse, Tetrao tetrix (nothing to do with a certain videogame), with and without flesh. Regard the broad, feathered feet, well insulated and with plenty of surface area for prancing around in the snow or moorlands. Tetrao engage in a cool display pattern called lekking, in which the males group together and show off to watching females.

A theme in the section above that is not to be missed is that there is some amazing disparity of anatomical forms in these basal lineages of poultry-relatives. Don’t dismiss the Galloanserae as just boring food-birds! Heaps of not-so-well-studied species exist here, surely with a treasure trove of cool neontological and evolutionary questions waiting for the right person to ask! Darwin’s chickens may get their share of neglect, but that pales in comparison to how little we understand about many basal Galloanserae.

What a lot of people think of as a “ground fowl” or galliform way of life is more of a way of life somewhat typical of the Phasanidae- chickens, pheasants and their familiar kin. Megapodes, curassows, guans, grouse and other Galliformes do not necessarily do things in the “typical” ground fowl way, much as the earlier branches of the Anseriformes don’t always look/act like “proper water fowl” (i.e. Anatidae). The phenomenon at play here is one of the great bugaboos in biology: essentialism– the often implicit misconception that variation away from some abstract ideal is negligible, uninteresting or just not conceivable due to mental blinders. When we say something like “the chicken is a fascinating species” we are sliding down the essentialistic slope. There is no “the chicken.” Not really. Oh dear, speaking of slippery slopes, I’d best stop here before I start talking about species concepts. And no one wants that to happen! Anyway, essentialism still pervades a lot of modern scientific thinking, and has its place as a conceptual crutch sometimes. But in biology, essentialism can be very insidious and misleading. It burrows in deep into the scientific mind and can be hard to root out. Unfortunately, it is entrenched in a lot of science education, as it makes things easier to teach if you sweep aside the exceptions to the essentialist “rules” in biology. I catch myself thinking in static, essentialist ways sometimes. The punishment is no cake for a week; so awful.

And speaking of “normal” or “typical,” morphology is of course often not that way even within a species, age class or gender. Pathology is a great example; by definition it is abnormal. It is a shattering of the “essence” of animals, brought on by some malady.

Next I’ve highlighted some of the amazing pathologies I’ve seen in the Tring skeletons. There have been so many I’ve been unable to keep track of them– some of these birds had the stuffing beaten out of them, and I’m not talking about Thanksgiving turkeys. Some were captive animals, in which the pathology might be blamed on living an inappropriate environment, but some were wild-caught — given the extreme pathologies, it’s a wonder those even survived to be found, but perhaps less a surprise that they were caught.

BONES GONE BONKERS:

View of left knee of a specimen of the Highland Guan, Penelopina nigra, showing some nasty osteoarthritis around the whole joint. Eew.  A happier Guan sounds like this.

Femora and tibiotarsi of the Blue-throated Piping Guan, Aburria cumanensis. Amazing pathology involving the left femur (broken, rehealed) and tibiotarsus (secondary infection?). Interestingly, the non-fractured limb also showed some pathology, perhaps indicating general infection and/or arthritis in reaction to the severe damage to the other leg, or just increased load-bearing on that leg.

Little Chachalaca, Ortalis motmot, showing a broken and rehealed right femur and the tibiotarsus. As in the guan above, this animal was not walking for many weeks; its femur had snapped in two, but somehow melted back together. The tibiotarsus didn’t look too great, either; lumpy and bendy. In better times, the Chachalaca does the cha-cha like this.

These two specimens blew my mind. On the left is a normal Tetrao tetrix (Black Grouse); on the right is one hybridized with another (unknown) species.

In the picture above, what amazed me first was the very unusual flattened pelvis/synsacrum of Tetrao, which characteristically is light and wide. But in the hybrid this morphology was completely gone; the pelvis had a more standard “galliform” (read: Phasianid)-like shape, deeper and narrower and more solid in build. I am guessing that the hybrid was a cross with a pheasant like Phasianus itself, whose anatomy would be more like this. Somewhere in here there is a fantastic evo-devo/morphometrics project waiting to happen.

That’s my quick specimen-based tour of “basal birds”. Beyond these two clades of Palaeognathae and Galloanseres, there lies the forebidding territory of Neoaves: much of living avian diversity, and extremely contentious in its phylogenetic relationships. I’m tackling them next for my research on the evolution of the patella/kneecap. But first, I’ll be at the NHM-Tring today for a whirlwind tour through the respectably speciose “normal” Galloanseres clades of Phasianidae and Anserinae+Anatidae, so off I go! (It’s my wife’s birthday celebration, so cake may have to wait for later this time)

So what do you think? What’s your favourite neglected “primitive” bird group (more apropos: early branching avian lineage that may still be very specialized, rare and poorly understood), or cool factoid about palaeognaths and basal neognaths?

No quaggas were harmed during the writing of this post. Polly wanna quagga?

Greetings, freezerinos! WIJF has been on hiatus this summer because my life has been freaking insane! ICVM conference with 3 talks (See earlier post), then grant deadlines, camping trip, packing and moving house, hiring new staff and inducting them into my team, breathing, and other activities (ranging from essential to trivial and/or infuriating) in addition to Actually Doing Some Science have been to blame. But WIJF is coming back like a bad rash! It cannot be defeated by bureaucracy, by my current lack of home internet connection, or even by the end of the universe! I have grand plans, muhahaha… This is just a teaser to give me some blog-writing momentum so I can finish some of those bigger posts sooner or later.

So I mentioned house-moving above, and we’ve finished that over the previous week. I had two ponds at my old home, full of >200 fish and (during breeding season; tweeted under #FrogCount) >200 frogs and toads, among other critters, documented on occasion in my Flickr photostream/set. Our new abode just has one pond, but a decent one at that, and we inherited some new fish that I am getting to know. Here is a peculiar goldfish, whose unusual anatomy inspired me to catch it, take a photo, and blog about it. Consider this:

The fish in question. Not your standard sleek, hydrodynamic specimen of Carassius auratus auratus!

I’ve done some Googling and confirmed my suspicions that this is not a pregnant goldfish but is some other condition that we could loosely term as pathological. It has been feeding reasonably well and seems not too perturbed– as much as a fish’s degree of perturbation can be read from its behaviour– by its rotund morphology. It has some problems controlling its inertia in rolling and pitching, which makes for some amusing viewing as well as easy capture.

But what’s up with this fish? It does not have dropsy, a nasty condition fish get that leaves the scales in a “pinecone” sort of extruded orientation. It may have a gut infection or other air sac problem. I’m certainly not a vet and don’t know and fishy vets. But I wanted to share the photo to stimulate discussion of fishy fish physiognomy. What’s your diagnosis, doctor internet?

Also, if this fish takes a turn for the worse, it very well may end up in my freezer and thence into an internal anatomy WIJF post (“What’s In John’s Goldfish?”). We shall see. But I’ve grown fond of this unnamed fish (soliciting suggestions for names below in the Comments), so I’ll see how long I can keep it out of that situation.

Today, to help thaw you poor Americans out of that Arctic Vortex, we have a guest post bringing the heat, by my PhD student Sophie Regnault! This relates to some old posts about rhinos, which are a mainstay here at the WIJF blog- I’ve posted a lot about the rhino extinction crisis, feet, skin, big and bigger bones, and more, but this is our first rhinoceros-focused, actual published scientific paper! Take it away, Sophie! (We’re planning a few more “guest” blog posts from my team, so enjoy it, folks!)

Almost a year ago to the day, I submitted my first paper written with John Hutchinson and Renate Weller at the RVC and it has (finally!) just been published. To celebrate, I have been allowed to temporarily hijack ‘What’s in John’s Freezer?’ for my first foray into the world of blogging. I started the paper back as an undergraduate veterinary student. It was my first experience of proper research, and so enjoyable that I’m now doing a PhD, studying sesamoid bones like the patella!

We wanted to discover more about the types of bony disease rhinos get in their feet, of which there isn’t much known. Rhinos, of course, are big, potentially dangerous animals – difficult enough to examine and doubly difficult to x-ray clearly because of their thick skin. Unlike diseases which are fairly easy to spot (like abscesses or splitting of the nails and footpad), there is hardly anything out there in the scientific literature on bony diseases in rhino feet. It’s no small issue, either. When your feet each need to support over 900kg (typical for a large white rhino), even a relatively minor problem can be a major pain. Progressing unseen under their tough hide, lesions in the bone can eventually become so serious than the only solution is euthanasia, but even mild conditions can have negative consequences. For example, foot problems in other animals are known to have knock-on effects on fertility, which would be a big deal for programs trying to breed these species in captivity.

Hidden treasures abound! (Photos can be clicked to embiggen)

Data gathering was a blast. I got to travel to Cambridge, Oxford, and London during one of England’s better summers, and these beautiful old museums were letting me snoop around their skeleton collections. I’d been there often as a visitor, but it was anatomy-nerd-heaven to go behind the scenes at the Natural History Museum, and to be left alone with drawers and drawers of fantastic old bones. Some of the specimens hadn’t been touched for decades – at Cambridge University Museum of Zoology, we opened an old biscuit tin filled with the smallest rhinoceros foot bones, only to realise they were wrapped in perfectly preserved 1940’s wartime Britain newspaper.

In addition to my museum studies, I had another fun opportunity to do hands-on research.  John (of course!) had freezers full of rhino legs (looking disconcertingly like doner kebabs, but maybe that’s just me!), which we CT scanned to see the bones. Although it is a pretty standard imaging technique, at this point I had only just started my clinical studies at the vet hospital, and being able to flick through CT scans felt super badass. Most vet students just get to see some horse feet or dog/cat scans, at best.

Another osteomyelitis fracture, visible in a CT scan reconstruction.

We expected to find diseases like osteoarthritis (a degenerative joint disease) and osteomyelitis (bone infection and inflammation). Both had previously been reported in rhinoceroses, although it was interesting that we saw three cases of osteomyelitis in only 27 rhinos, perhaps making it a fairly common complication. It’s an ugly-looking disease, and in two of the cases led to the fat, fluffy bones fracturing apart.

We also had several unexpected findings, like flakes of fractured bone, mild dislocations, tons of enthesiophytes (bone depositions at tendon/ligament attachments) and lots of holes in the bones (usually small, occasionally massive). For me, writing up some of these findings was cool and freaky paranoid in equal measures. They hadn’t been much described before, and we were unsure of their significance. Was it normal, or pathological? Were we interpreting it correctly? Discussions with John and Renate (often involving cake) were reassuring, as was the realisation that in science (unlike vet school at the time, where every question seemed to have a concrete answer) you can never be 100% sure of things. Our study has a few important limitations, but has addressed a gap in the field and found some neat new things. Six months into my PhD, I’m enjoying research more than ever, and hoping that this paper will be the first of many (though I promise I won’t keep nicking John’s blog for my own shameless self-promotion if that happens!  EDIT BY JOHN: Please do!).

Nasty osteoarthritis wearing away the bone at the joint surface. Most cases occurred in the most distal joint.

Deep holes in some of the bones: infection, injury?

The paper:
Sophie Regnault, Robert Hermes, Thomas Hildebrandt, John Hutchinson, and Renate Weller (2013) OSTEOPATHOLOGY IN THE FEET OF RHINOCEROSES: LESION TYPE AND DISTRIBUTION. Journal of Zoo and Wildlife Medicine: December 2013, Vol. 44, No. 4, pp. 918-927.

Hey, a short post here to say go check this new blog out! I love it. The first main post-introductory post is a dissection of a snow leopard, documenting a real vet case attempting to figure out why it died. The “Veterinary Forensics blog” is going cool places, and it is a kindred spirit to this blog. You might, as I do sometimes when walking into a veterinary pathology/postmortem facility, see surprising and rare stuff– like in this photo of urban foxes:

Why should you care
If you have to trim my hooves?
I’ve got to move with good feet
Or be put down fast.
I know I should trot
But my old vet she cares a lot.
And I’m still living on stone
Even though these feet won’t last.

(mutated from The Who, “Cut My Hair“, Quadrophenia… from the heyday of concept albums and grandiose rock!)

Talkin’ bout my osteitis

Day Four of Freezermas. Four posts to go. I can see through time… Hence the silly title for today’s concept album track. Quadrupedophilia did not have a good ring to it, anyway.

Stomach-Churning Rating: 4/10. Reasonably tame; bones and hooves. Some pathologies of those, but not gory.

If Quadrophenia was the story of a man with four personalities (metaphor for the four band members), then quadrupedopheniaphilia is the story of how diverse forms of four-legged animals have lots of problems because of our exploitation of them, which leaves a crisis to resolve: Who are we? Are we caring enough to fix a bad situation we’ve created for our four-legged ungulate comrades?

Four legs good, two legs bad? Not really. I featured ostriches earlier this week and two legs are indeed pretty good. Four-legged cats are great, too. But four-footed big beasties with deformed hooves: those are bad all around. That leads to today’s topic…

But hey, happy 205th funkin’ birthday Charles freakin’ Robert Darwin!

Charles Darwin on his horse “Tommy” in 1868- from the Darwin Correspondence Project, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwins-photographic-portraits

Today’s post concerns a phenomenon that (Western) civilization has wrought with large hoofed mammals, and evolution is a big part of it (as well as biomechanics and anatomy) . Cynical perspective, with some truth to it: We’ve evolved larger and heavier animals to either do harder and harder work on tough surfaces like concrete floors and tarmac roads, or to stand around while we gawk at them or wait for them to get fat and tasty. Either way, the outcome should come as no surprise: their feet, the interface of that hard ground and their body, eventually start falling apart.

I’ve posted about this several times with respect to rhinos and elephants (here and here and here and here and here), but this post hits closer to home: what goes wrong with the humble hoof of our friend the horse, cow, sheep or other ungulate. It’s where the rubberkeratin hits the road. Ungulates have not evolved to live on dirty, wet concrete floors; to be obese and inactive; or to have hooves that don’t get worn down. So they suffer when they do encounter those modern conditions.

“No foot no horse,” they say, and it’s so true- once the feet start to go (due to hoof overgrowth or cracks, abscesses or other trouble), it’s hard to reverse the pathologies that ensue (arthritis, osteomyelitis, infections, fractures, etc.) and the animals start going lame, then other limbs (supporting greater loads than the affected limb) start to go, too, sometimes.

Jerry the obese, untrimmed-hoof-bearing horse. “Turkish slippers” is an apt description. DM has more here.

We can do plenty about these problems, and the title track above explains one of them: trimming hooves. Hooves often get overgrown, and if animals are tame enough (requires training!) or are sedated (risky!), hoof care experts (farriers) can rasp/file/saw them down to a more acceptable conformation. If we don’t, and the animals don’t do the trimming themselves by digging or walking around or living on varied surfaces, then the feet can suffer. But there’s still not much evidence for most common species kept in captivity by humans that indicates what the best methods are for avoiding or fixing foot problems.

What we’ve been trying to do at the RVC is use our expertise in evolution, anatomy and biomechanics to find new ways to prevent, detect, monitor or reverse these foot problems. We had BBSRC grant funding from 2009-2012 to do this, and the work continues, as it behooves us to do… Past posts have described some of this research, which spun off into other benefits like re-discovering/illuminating the false sixth toes of elephants. We’re working with several zoos in the UK to apply some of the lessons we’re learning to their animals and management practices.

Above: Thunderous hoof impacts with nasty vibrations, and large forces concentrated on small areas, seem to contribute to foot problems in hoofed mammals. From our recent work published in PLOS ONE.

Foot health check on a white rhino at a UK zoo; one of the animals we’ve worked with. Photo by Ann & Steve Toon, http://www.toonphoto.com/

If it works, it’s the most satisfying outcome my research will have ever had, and it will prevent my freezers from filling up with foot-influenced mortality victims.

Again, I’ll tell this tale mainly in photos. First, by showing some cool variations evolved in the feet of hoofed mammals (artiodactyls and perissodactyls; mostly even/odd-toed ungulates of the cow/sheep and horse lineages, respectively). Second, by showing some pretty amazing and shocking images of how “normal” hooves go all wonky.

Two ways to evolve a splayed hoof for crossing soft ground: 2 toes that are flexible and linked to big pads (camel), and 2 main toes that allow some extra support from 2 side toes when needed (elk). At Univ. Mus. Zoology- Cambridge.

Diversity of camelid foot forms: big clunky, soft Old World camel feet and dainty, sharp highland New World camelids. [Image source uncertain]

Moschus, Siberian musk deer with remarkable splayed hooves/claws; aiding it in crossing snowy or swampy ground. At Univ. Mus. Zoology- Cambridge.

Tragulus, or mouse-deer, with freaky long “splint bones” (evolutionarily reduced sole bones or metatarsals) and dainty hooved feet. At Univ. Mus. Zoology- Cambridge.

Overgrown giraffe hooves. An all-too-common problem, and one we’re tacking with gusto lately, thanks to PhD student Chris Basu’s NERC-funded giraffe project!

Wayyyyyyyyy overgrown hooves of a ?sheep, from the RVC’s pathology collection.

Craaaaaaazy overgrown ?sheep hooves, from the RVC’s pathology collection.

If we understand how foot form, function and pathology relate in diverse living hoofed mammals, we can start to piece together how extinct ones lived and evolved- like this giant rhinoceros! At IVPP museum in Beijing.

So, what do we do now? If we love our diverse hoofed quadrupeds, we need to exert that quadrupedopheniaphilia and take better care of them. Finding out how to do that is where science comes in. I’d call that a bargain. The best hooves ever had?

Sick feet, pig feet, boo hoo, in pain you are
Not well heeled; fate sealed, oh no, inflamed they are
And when your trotter’s on the floor
You’re nearly a good boar
Almost a porker

(corrupted from Pink Floyd’s “Pigs (Three Different Ones)” track #3 from the Animals concept album (1977). A song with quite a history- check out some more about it.)

It could happen…

Concept albums often weave back and forth between themes in a non-linear story, returning to refrains and leitmotifs to create their narrative weft and warp. This Freezermas, I’ve already woven in two legs and four legs, cats and other beasts, x-rays and more. Today, I tie in another thread, which extends throughout the blog, but especially into yesterday’s post. This post is about feet and health again. But it is also solely about pigs, which are cool animals whose biomechanics are surprisingly little studied.

It’s a shorter post (in contrast to the 11-17 minute Pink Floyd cousin song); a drum solo if you will; with just three images representing three big pigs and their funky feats of footedness, and the three days left in Freezermas. One image is about ongoing research; the other two about bizarre cases that kinda freak me out (enough to want to know more about them).

Stomach-Churning Rating: 4/10, not for gore but for surreality; things that should not be. Especially the 2nd picture.

Above: X-ray GIF (may take a while to load) from our 3D XROMM analyses of foot biomechanics, here showing a pig studied by Dr. Olga Panagiotopoulou (also RVC Fellow Jeff Rankin; and Prof. Steve Gatesy at Brown University). With data like these, we not only can measure how the tiny bones move, but also get better estimates of the loads on the soft tissues within those feet. Those loads should relate to the risks of musculoskeletal injury or disease. This GIF is just a teaser for some fantastic 3D images we’re producing. The pig’s feet were normal. The odd little spheres on them are skin-adhered markers that let us compare how external estimates of skeletal motion compare to actual motion; normally this is a big source of error.

I know little about this case (seems to trace back to an original Brazilian news story), posted on Reddit (link here), except that the overgrown, grossly deformed toes/hooves of this pig are like nothing I’ve seen before! This almost gave me nightmares. Poor chicken-footed pig. Foot deformities of this kind in pigs don’t seem to be as much of a problem as in cattle or horses; from the limited literature I’ve seen on this, they seem to have more problems with the soft tissues of their feet, such as  abscesses or inflammation of the digital cushion (padding) of the trotter.

Another crazy case; but this one I was able to track down more about after reading the Reddit post here. This news image page says:
“This photo dated November 24, 2011 shows a Chinese farmer showing off his prize swine, which he named ‘Strong Pig’, as the disabled animal keeps its 30kgs of body suspended in midair, in Mengcheng, east China’s Anhui province. The pig has become an internet sensation around China due to its ability to walk around balancing on its two front legs. TOPSHOTS CHINA OUT AFP PHOTO (Photo credit should read STR/AFP/Getty Images)”

Bipedal pigs– two legs good again? I guess so. Well done, Strong Pig. Well done.

Bipedal ability in injured/deformed/spooked quadrupeds is not so unusual- in addition to trained macaques and rats that have been scientifically studied, there are plenty of examples out there on the internet of videos/GIFs of bipedal cats, dogs, and so on… Post your favourites below. Hooray for the marvelous plasticity of the locomotor system! As Pink Floyd famously wrote, “Any fool knows a dog needs a home, a shelter from bipedal pigs.” (or something like that)

I awoke on the floor in the aisle of my United Airlines flight to Los Angeles, with three unfamiliar men crouched around me, bearing serious expressions as they looked down on my prone body.

I was next to my seat. My daughter was crying inconsolably in her seat next to mine, and my wife was calling to me with an urgent tone from the next seat over.

Gradually, as my confusion faded and the men let go of me (I’d been cursing them out, in mangled words because I had bitten my tongue), I became aware that I was in intense pain, I could not move much, and my wife’s words became clearer:

I’d had a seizure. And so our relaxing family holiday, which had only just begun, ended. And so my waking nightmare began.

Stomach-Churning Rating: 5/10; lots of Anatomy Fail CT/x-ray images and gruesome descriptions, and a photo of some bruising.

I was helped back into my seat as I regained my senses, I noticed blood on me from my tongue, and I learned that we were 2 hours away from L.A. As I was acting more normal, and we were 5/6 of our journey along, there was no need to prematurely land the flight. I had fallen asleep while watching “22 Jump Street”, about 1.5 hrs in, and that’s when my seizure struck– much like the previous two seizures I’d had. Jonah Hill could be ruled out as a culprit, but going to sleep was an enabling factor. I got some over-the-counter painkillers and sat in a daze as time ticked by, we landed, and paramedics boarded the plane to whisk me off to the hospital with my family.

Two gruelling days and nights in a California hospital later, with my first night spent in a haze of clinical tests, begging for painkillers, yelling in pain every time I moved, and otherwise keeping my hospital roommate awake, the story became clearer: my seizure was so intense that I’d dislocated my right shoulder (unfortunately I’d not had much pain relief when the emergency room staff popped it back into my glenoid), probably dislocated my left shoulder too but then relocated it myself admist my thrashing, and done this (cue Anatomy Fail images):

Left shoulder, with the offending greater tubercle/tuberosity of the humerus showing fracture(s).

Right shoulder x-ray, showing dislocation of the head of the humerus from the glenoid. Compare with above image- humerus has been shifted down, the shoulder joint is facing you. BUT no fractures, yay!

CT scan axial slice showing my spine (on left), then scapula with fractured coracoid process (“Bad”) and displaced, fractured greater tubercle of humerus on right side (“V bad”).

So, that explains most of the pain I was in.

What’s amazing is that the fractures most likely occurred purely via my own uncontrolled muscle contractions. All the karate and weight-training I’d been doing certainly had made me stronger in my rotator cuff muscles, which attach to the greater tubercle of the humerus. And with inhibition of my motoneurons turned off during my seizure, and both agonist and antagonist muscles near-maximally turned on, rapid motions of my shoulders by my spasming muscles would have dislocated my shoulders and then wrenched apart some of the bony attachments of those same muscles. I’m glad I don’t remember this happening.

I had also complained of pain in my neck, so they did a CT scan and x-ray there too:

X-ray: No broken neck. This is good. Just muscle strain, which soon faded.

The left shoulder injuries created a hematoma, or mass of blood beneath my skin, and soon that surfaced and began draining down my arm (via the lymphatic system under gravity’s pull), creating fascinating patterns:

Bruises migrating; no pain associated with these, just superficial drainage of old blood. This is tame, tame, tame compared to what my left ribcage looked like. I’ve spared you that.

But then more fundamentally there was the question of, why a seizure? With no clear warning? As I’ve explained before, I’d had a stroke ~12 yrs ago that caused a similar seizure but with no injuries to my postcranial body. So a series of MRI and CT scans ensued (the radiation I’ve had from the latter is good fodder for a superhero/villain origin tale? Marvel, I’ll await your call), and there was no clear damage or bleeding, and hence no stroke evident. Good news.

There are, however, at least two sizeable calcifications in my brain that are likely to be hardened scar tissue from my stroke. These may or may not have an identifiable affect on me or linkage with the seizure. Brain calcifications can happen for a variety of reasons, sometimes without clear ill effects.

Calcification in parietal lobe of my cerebrum, from axial CT scan slice. But no bleeding (zone of altered density/contrast).

That is the state of the evidence. I’ve since had what semblance of a L.A. family holiday I could manage, benefitting from a touching surge of support from my family, friends and colleagues that has kept me from sinking entirely into despair and has brought quite a few smiles.

The plane flight home was tense. We were in the same seats again and one of the flight attendants recognized us and came to chat, eager to learn what had happened after we left the plane a week ago. He was very nice and the doctors had given me an “OK to fly” letter. But it was an evening flight. I needed to sleep, yet it was clear to me that sleep was no longer the fortress of regenerative sanctity that I was used to it being. Sleep had taken on a certain menace, because it was a state in which I’d now had three seizures. Warily, I drifted off to sleep after having some hearty chuckles at the ending to “22 Jump Street”. And while it was not very restful slumber, it was the friendly kind of slumber that held no convulsive violence within its embrace. We returned home safely.

In a rush, I cancelled my attendance at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference this week, turning over the symposium I’d convened to honour one of my scientific heroes, biomechanist R. McNeill Alexander (who also could not attend due to ill health), to my co-convenors Eric Snively and Andreas Christian (by accounts I heard, all went well). I missed out on a lot of fun and the joy of watching 2 of my PhD students present posters on preliminary results of their research. Thanks to social media and email, however, I’ve been able to catch a lot of the highlights and excitement from that conference in Berlin.That has helped distract me somewhat from other goings-on.

Meanwhile, I’ve been resting, doing a minimal amount of catching up with work, having a lot of meetings with doctors to arrange treatment, and pondering my situation– a lot.

I know this much: I’ve had two violent seizures in a month (the previous one was milder but still bad, and not a story I need to tell here), and so I’m now an epileptic, technically. When and if I’ll have another seizure is totally uncertain, but to boost the odds in my favour I’m on anti-convulsant drugs for a long time now.

In about half of seizure cases, it’s never clear what caused the seizures. What caused my 2002 stroke is somewhat clear, but the mechanism behind that remains a mystery, and my other health problems likewise have a lot of question marks regarding their genesis and mutually causative relationships, if any. The outcome of this new development in my medical history is likely to be: “maybe your brain calcifications and scar tissue helped stimulate your new seizures, but we can’t be sure. The treatment is the same regardless: stay on anti-convulsants for a while, try going off them later, and see if seizures manifest themselves again or not.” Brains are freaking complicated; when they go haywire it can be perplexing why.

As a scientist, I thrill at finding uncertainty in my research topics because that always means there is work left to be done. But in my own life outside of science, stubborn, independent, strong-willed control freak that I can certainly be at times, I am not such a fan of uncertainty. In both cases the goal is to minimize that uncertainty by gathering more information, but in our lives we often encounter unscalable walls of uncertainty that persist because of lack of knowledge regarding a problem that vexes us, especially a medical problem. We then can feel in a helpless state, adrift on the horizon of science, waiting for explorers to push that horizon further and with it advance our treatment or at least our insight into ourselves.

When the subject of that uncertainty is not some detached, objective, unthreatening, exciting research topic but rather ourselves and our own future constitution and mortality, it thus becomes deeply personal and disconcerting. I’m grateful that I don’t have brain cancer or some other clear and present threat to my immediate vitality. Things could be a lot worse; I am here writing this blog after all. I’ll never forget now being in the ambulance and thinking “this may be the end of it all; I might not last much longer”, and choking out a farewell to my wife just in case things took a bad turn. I’m grateful for the amazing things that modern medicine and imaging techniques can do– these have saved my life so many times over, I cannot fathom how to quantify it. And I’m grateful for the people that have helped me through this so far. Fiercely independent as I may be, I can’t face everything alone.

I am reminded of words I read recently by Baruch Spinoza, “The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.” To further paraphrase him, we love truth because it is knowledge that enables us to stay alive- without it, we are flying blind and soon will crash. With the freedom it brings, we know the landscape of our own life and where the frontiers of uncertainty lie (“here be dragons”).

The past two weeks have been horrendous for me. I’d been feeling healthy and stronger than ever in many ways, and my life as of my birthday a month ago felt pretty damn good. But now everything has come crashing down in disaster, and I have been suffering from the realization, once again, of how vulnerable I am and how little I can control, and the darkness that ushers in as the odds begin to stack up against our future lives. I am acutely aware now of where the “dragons” are.

I am taking one important step forward, though, in wresting life back onto the rails again- this week I undergo surgery to put my left shoulder back together. While that’s scary, to be sliced open and have my rotator cuff and bones carpentered back where they should be, I know I’m in good hands with a top UK shoulder surgeon and methods that are tried-and-true. The risks are small, although the recovery time will be long. There won’t be any hefting of big frozen elephant feet in my research soon, not for me, and so my enjoyable anatomy studies are going to have to change their track for coming months while I regain my strength and rely on others’ help.

(do you know the movie reference? I have a new empathy for Ash.)

Then we’re on to the frightening task of tackling the spasmodic-gorilla-in-the-room with neurologists. We’ll see where that journey leads.

One thing is certain: I’m still me and there’s still a lot of fight left in me, because I have a lot left to fight for, and people and knowledge to aid me in that fight. I can shoulder the burden of uncertainty in my life because I have all that. Off I go…

20 November UPDATE:

I’ve had surgery to put my greater tuberosity back where it belongs. Thanks to a skilled surgeon’s team, some sutures and nickel-titanium staples, I am back closer to my normal morphology and can begin recovering my (currently negligible) shoulder joint’s range of motion via some physiotherapy. Surgery went very well; I was just in hospital for ~30 hours; but the 9 days of recovery since have been brutally hard due to problems switching medications around. Today I got my stitches out and a beautiful x-ray showing plentiful healing; yay!

This is a slightly oblique anterior (front) view of my left shoulder/chest. Fracture callus means healing is working well!
Four surgical staples (bright white thingies on upper RH side of image): forever now a part of my anatomy.

I have an impression that there is a large disparity between how the public views museums and how scientists who use museums view them. Presumably there are survey data on public attitudes, but surely the common impression is that museums mainly exist to exhibit cool stuff and educate/entertain the public. Yet, furthermore, I bet that many members of the public don’t really understand the nature of museum collections (how and why they are curated and studied) or what those collections even look like. As a researcher who tends to do heavily specimen-oriented and often museum-based research, I thought I’d take the opportunity to describe my experience at one museum collection recently. This visit was fairly representative of what it’s like, as a scientist, to visit a museum with the purpose of using its collection for research, rather than mingling with the public to oggle the exhibits — although I did a little of that at the end of the day…

Stomach-Churning Rating: 4/10; mostly bones except a jar of preserved critters, but also some funky bone pathologies! Darwin hurls once, totally blowing chunks, but only in text.

Early camel is sitting down on the job at the NHMLA.

About two weeks ago, I had the pleasure to spend a fast-paced day in the Ornithology collection of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLA or LACM). I arranged the visit (you have to be a credible researcher to get access; luckily I seemed to be that!) via email, took an Uber car to the museum, and was quickly cut loose in the collection. I was hosted by the Collections Manager Kimball Garrett, who is an avid birder (adept at citizen science, too!) and a longtime LA native.

Amongst museum curators and collections managers (there can be a distinction between the two but here I’ll refer to them all as “curators”), there is a wide array of attitudes toward and practices with museum collections, regarding how the curators balance their varied duties of not only making the museum collection accessible to researchers (via behind-scenes studies) and the public (via exhibits and behind-scenes tours etc.), but also curation (maintaining a record of what they have in their collection, adding to it, and keeping the specimen in good condition), research, admin, teaching and other duties.

Most curators I’ve known, like Kimball, are passionate about all of these things, and very generous with their time to help scientists make the most of the collection during their visit, offering hospitality and cutting through the bureaucracy as much as possible to ensure that the science gets done. There are those few curators that aren’t great hosts because they’ve had a bad day or a bad attitude (e.g. obsession with paperwork and finding obstacles to accessing specimens for research; or just not responding to communication), but they are few and far between in my experience.

Regardless, the curator is the critical human being that keeps the wheels of specimen-based museum research rolling, and I am appreciative of how deeply dedicated and efficient most curators are. Indeed, I enjoy meeting and chatting with them because they tend not only to be fun people but also incredibly knowledgeable about their collection, museum, and area of expertise. Sadly, this trip was so time-constrained that I didn’t get much time at all for socializing. I had about five hours to get work done so I plunged on in!

Images, as always, can be clicked to emu-biggen them. Thanks to the NHMLA for access!

My initial look down the halls of the osteology storage. Rolling cabinets (on the right) are a typical sight.

Freezers ahoy! With Batman watching over them.

A jar of bats? Why not? Batman approves.

The curator cleared a space on a table for me to set bones on. Then the anatomizing and photographing began!

On entering a museum collection, one quickly gets a sense of its “personality” and the culture of the museum itself, which emerges from the curator, the collection’s history, and the museum’s priorities. There are fun human touches like the ones in the photos below, interspersed between the stinking carcasses awaiting skeletonization, the crumbling bone specimens on tables that need repair or new ID tags, or the rows upon rows of coffee cups ready to fuel the staff’s labours.

Yet another reason why Darwin kicks ass. And fine curator-humour!

Ironic bird pic posted on the wall.

Below a typical wall-hanging of a bovid skull, an atypical display of a clutch of marshmallow peeps. Contest to see whether the mammalian or pseudo-avian specimens last longest?

The NHMLA’s collection is a world-class one, which I why I chose it as the example for this post. When I entered the collection, I got that staggering sense of awe that I love feeling, to look down the halls of cabinets full of skeletonized specimens of birds and be overwhelmed by the vast scientific resource it represents, and the effort it has taken to create and maintain it. Imagine entering a library in which every book had the librarian’s hand in writing and printing it, and that those books’ contents were largely mysteries to humanity, only some of which you could investigate during your visit. Museum collections exist to fuel generations of scientific inquiry in this way. Their possibilities are endless. And that is why I love visiting them, because every trip is an adventure into the unknown– you do not know what you will find. Like these random encounters I had in the collection’s shelves:

Sectioned moa thigh bones, showing thick walls and spars of trabecular bone criss-crossing the marrow cavities.

My gut reaction was that this is a moa wishbone (furcula)- not often seen! It is definitely not a shoulder girdle (scapulocoracoid), which would be larger and more robust, and have a proper shoulder joint. It could, though, be a small odd rib, I suppose. EDIT: Think again, John! See 1st comment below, and follow-ups. I seem to be totally wrong and the ID of scapulocoracoid is right.

A cigar box makes an excellent improvised container for moa toe bones- why not?

Moa feet: all the moa to love!

May the skull of the magpie goose (Anseranas semipalmata) haunt your nightmares.

Healed shank (tibiotarsus) bone of the same magpie goose as above. It had its own nightmares! No mystery why this guy died: vet staff at the zoo tried to fix a major bone fracture (bracing it with tubes and metal spars), and it had time to heal (see the frothy bone formation) but presumably succumbed to these injuries/infection.

Kiwi (Apteryx australis mantelli) hand, showing feather attachments and remnant of finger(s).

Now that I’m in the collection shelves area, it brings me to this trip and my purpose for it! I wanted to look at some “basal birds” for our ongoing patella (kneecap) evolution project, to check which species (or individuals, such as juveniles/adults) have patellae. Every museum visit as a scientist is fundamentally about testing whether what you think you know about nature is correct or not. We’d published on how the patella evolved in birds, but mysteries remain about which species definitely had a patella or how it develops. Museum collections often have the depth and breath of individual variation and taxonomic coverage to be able to address such mysteries, and every museum collection has different strengths that can test those ideas in different, often surprising, ways. So I ventured off to see what the NHMLA would teach me.

Shelves full of boxes, begging to be opened- but unlike Pandora’s box, they release joyous science!

Boxes of kiwis, oh frabjous day! A nice sample size like this for a “rare” (to Northern hemispherites) bird is a pleasure to see.

Well, in my blitz through this museum collection I didn’t see a single damn patella!

As that kneecap bone is infamously seldom preserved in nice clean museum specimens, this did not surprise me. So I took serendipity by the horns to check some of my ideas about how the limb joints in birds in general develop and evolve. One thing I’ve been educating myself about with my freezer specimens and with museum visits (plus the scientific literature) is how the ends (epiphyses) of the limb bones form in different species of land vertebrates (tetrapods). There are complex patterns linked with evolution, biomechanics and development that still need to be understood.

Left side view of the pelvis of a very mature, HUGE Casuarius casuarius (cassowary). The space between the ilium (upper flat bone) and ischium (elongate bone on middle right side) has begun to be closed by a mineralization of the membrane that spanned those bones in life. A side effect of maturity, most likely. But cool- I’ve never seen this in a ratite bird before, that I can recall.

Hatchling ostrich thigh bones (femora), showing the pitted, un-ossified ends that in life would be occupied by thick cartilage.

A more adult ostrich’s femora, with more ossified ends and thinner cartilages.

Rhea pennata (Darwin’s rhea) femora; right (top) one with a major pathology on the knee end; overgrown bone (osteoarthritis?). Owie!

Also very-unfused knee joints of a Darwin’s rhea hatchling. Cool Y-shape!

In birds, most of the bones don’t have anything that truly could be called an epiphysis– the bone ends are capped with thick cartilage that only gradually becomes bone as the birds get older, and even old-ish birds can still have a lot of cartilage (see photos above)– no “secondary centre” (true epiphysis) of bone mineralization ever forms inside that cartilage. However, there are two curious apparent exceptions to this absence of true epiphyses in avian limbs:

(1) in the knee joint, something like an epiphysis forms on the upper end of the tibia (shank bone) and fuses during growth (shown below). Sometimes that unfused epiphysis is confused with a patella, as our recent paper discussed; in any case, where that “epiphysis” came from in avian evolution is unclear. But also:

(2) in the ankle joint, several bones on both sides (shank and foot) of the joint fuse to the long-bones of the limbs, acting like epiphyses. It is well documented by the fossil record of non-avian and avian dinosaurs that these were the tarsals: at least five different bones (astragalus, calcaneum and distal tarsals) were individual bones for millions of years in various dinosaurs, then these all fused to form the “epiphyses” of the shank and foot, eventually completing this gradual fusion within the bird lineage. Modern birds obliterate the boundaries between these five or more bones as they grow.

These are worthwhile questions to pursue because they show us (1) how odd, little-explored features of the avian skeleton came to be; and (2) potentially more generally why limb bones develop the many ways they do in vertebrates, and how they might develop incorrectly — or heal if damaged.

Images below from the NHMLA collections show how this is the case. Fortunately(?) for me, they supported how I thought the “epiphyses” of avian limbs develop/evolved; there were no big surprises. But I still learned neat details about how this happens in individual species or lineages, especially for the knee joint.

Juvenile kiwi’s shank (tibiotarsus) bones viewed from the top (proximal) ends, showing the bubbly nubbins of bone (very bottom of each bone image; lighter region) that are the “cranial tibial epiphyses” often mistaken for patellae.

Subadult kiwi’s tibiotarsi in same view as above, showing the smooth triangular epiphyses fusing onto the tibiae.

Adult kiwi’s tibiotarsi (sorry, blurry photo) in which all fusion is complete.

Looking down at the top/ankle end of the tarsometatarsal (sole) bones in a hatchling ostrich: the three bones are separate and hollow, where “cartilage cones” would have filled them in. The left and right bones have different amounts of ossification; not unusual in such a young bird.

Ossified tendons (little spurs of long, thin bone) on the soles of the feet (tarsometatarsal bones) of a brush-turkey (Alectura lathami)- seldom described in this unusual galliform bird or its close relatives, and thus nice to see. These would be parts of the toe-flexor tendons. Another nice thing about these two tarsometatarsus specimens is that their fusion is basically complete- each is one single bone unit, as in normal adult birds, rather than five or more.

My visit to the NHMLA bird bone collection was a lot of fun, because I got to do what I love: opening box after box of bone specimens, with bated breath wondering what would be inside. In this case, familiarity was inside, but my knowledge of avian bone development and evolution still improved. I got to look at a lot of ostriches, rheas, cassowaries and kiwis, more than I’d seen in one museum before, and that broadened my sample of young, juvenile and adult animals that I’d seen for these species. Their knees and ankles all grew in grossly similar ways, supporting this assumption in my prior work and building my confidence in published ideas. It’s always good to check such things. Each box opened takes some careful observation and cross-checking against all the facts and ideas swirling around in your head. You take notes, scale photos, measurements, do comparisons between specimens, and just explore; letting your curiosity run unleashed as you assemble knowledge, Tetris-like, in your mind.

And I had a lot of fun because a museum collection visit is like swimming in anatomy. You’re surrounded by more specimens than you could ever fully comprehend. Sometimes you run across an odd specimen whose anatomy tells you something about its life, like pathologies such as the terrible fractured magpie goose leg shown above. Or you see some curatorial touch that makes you chuckle at an apparent inside joke or mutter respect for their careful organization in tending their charges. That feeling of pulling open a museum drawer or box lid and peering inside is like few others in science — there might be disappointment inside (e.g. “Crap, that specimen sucks!”), boredom (“Oh. Another one of these!?”) or the joy of discovery (“Holy *@$£, I’ve never seen that before!”). My first scientific publication (in 1998) came from rummaging through the UCMP museum collections as a grad student and spotting an obscure pelvic bone that turned out to be highly diagnostic for the equally obscure clade of bird-like dinosaurs called alvarezsaurids. I happened to open that drawer with the alvarezsaurid specimen at the right time, shortly after the first ever specimen of that dinosaur had been described in the literature (~1994). Before then, no one could have identified what that bone was!

There is time for hours of quiet introspection during museum collection studies, immersed in this wealth of anatomical resources and isolated in a silent, climate-controlled tomb-like hall. It is relaxing and overwhelming at the same time. Especially in my case with just five hours to survey numerous species, you have to budget your time and think efficiently. It’s a unique challenge to explore a museum collection as a researcher. If you don’t learn something — especially in a good museum collection — you’re doing it wrong. In this time of tight finances and trends to close museums or stow away precious collections, it is important to vocally celebrate what a vast treasure museum collections are, and how the people that maintain them are vital stewards of those treasures.

I set the cat amongst the pigeons by also visiting the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits in LA, to study fossil cats– like this American lion (Panthera atrox), code-named “Fluffy”, that we CT scanned during my LA visit– more about that later!

EDIT: I hurried this post off during my free time today, and still feel I didn’t fully capture the deep, complex feelings I have regarding museum collections and the delight I get from studying them. Other freezerinos, please add your thoughts in the Comments below!

I was recently featured on Daily Planet, a great Canadian science show on TV that lamentably is not broadcast more globally. It is always high quality science communication, aided by the superb hosts Ziya Tong and Dan Riskin (and a talented crew!). What were we doing? Dissecting an elephant’s foot, of course!

Stomach-Churning Rating: 9/10; no-holds-barred dismantling of elephant feet, from the video onwards, and this post is heavy on moist, goopy photos afterwards, with some nasty pathologies. Not nice at all. I’ll give you a chance to turn around while contemplating the cart that we use to carry elephant feet around campus (each foot is 20-30kg; up to 70lbs; so we need the help!), before the video.

Here is a snippet of the full segment from Daily Planet:

And here is more of some of my recent dissections. I’ll walk you through two dissections, via photos. This goes back to the roots of this blog: unflinching, gritty examinations of real anatomy! Of course, no elephants were harmed for this work. They died at EU zoos/parks and were sent to me for postmortem examination and research, so we hope that this benefits the future care of elephants. We’re currently finishing up a grand overview paper that describes all of the odd pathologies we’ve observed in elephant feet, for the benefit of zoo keepers and vets who are trying to detect, diagnose and monitor any foot problems.

As the post’s title alludes, elephant feet (and more proximal parts of the limbs) are no stranger to this blog. If you’ve forgotten or are unfamiliar, here are some of my past proboscidean-posts: on elephant foot pathologies (a close sister post to this one), our “six-toed” elephants paper, how to make a computer simulation of an elephant’s limb (umm, paper yet to come!), how we boil and bleach bones to clean them up, and a few others. Last but not least, there was the post that went viral in the early #JohnsFreezer/WIJF days: dissecting an elephant with the “Inside Nature’s Giants” show.

There are two feet in this post, both front right feet (manus is the technical term; singular and plural). The first one is the messier (unhealthy and bloodier, less fresh and clean) one, from the show/video. It is an Asian elephant (Elephas maximus). I kick off with photos I took after the filming, so the foot is already deconstructed:

Skinned foot, oblique front/inside view. The wrist is on the right side of the photo; the toes on the left.

Sole (“slipper”), with a hole on the fourth toe showing where the abscess is that let infection in/pus drain out. The slipper here is upside-down.

Top-down view of the sole of the foot, once the slipper is removed; flipped over and rotated 90 degrees clockwise from the above photo. Some of the fat pad of the foot is on the right side of the image; it’s very hard to separate from the keratinous sole of the foot.

Looking down into the fourth toe’s (ring finger) abscess on the other side of the above view.

Looking down into the second toe (index finger), same view as above. Some redness and greyness where this toe had some of its own pathological issues like infection and a smaller abscess.

Looking up from the slipper (removed) at the fat pad and toes of the foot, where they interface with the sole/slipper. The fat pad is toward the bottom and left side; the five toes are on the upper/right side (knobby subcircular regions on the perimeter of the foot). The very bad infection on the fourth toe is visible on the bottom right.

The sproingy fat pad is worth a video!

And one good wiggle deserves another!

A view down onto the wrist joint. The carpal (wrist) bones are visible at the bottom of the image, whereas the flexor (palmar) tendons and muscles on the back of the “hand” are at the top. There is a LOT of musculotendinous tissue on the back side of an elephant’s foot. As you will see in my dissection of the second foot, further below!

Looking down onto the medial (inner/”thumb”) border of the foot, where I’ve exposed the prepollex, or false “sixth finger”, by removing the first metacarpal (knuckle) bone.

I’ve removed the prepollex from the foot. The white oval structure (bottom right) is the top of the conical prepollex, where it connected to the rest of the foot. White is cartilage, whereas the red “islands” are blood vessels that have invaded the cartilage and are starting to turn it into patches of bone. So this prepollex is at a very early stage of bone formation, still almost entirely cartilaginous, whereas some older elephants have the prepollex largely formed of bone. The fleshy pink tissue adhering to the surface of the prepollex here is a remnant of “abductor” muscle that connects it to the thumb and thus could allow some active control of the prepollex’s mobility.

Well, that was one very pathological elephant’s foot; one of the worst I have ever seen. Every foot I dissect is different and tells me a unique story about that animal’s development, history and health. This one told a very sad tale. What does a somewhat normal elephant’s foot look like? I thawed one out for comparison, and to thin out my overstuffed freezer stock. This one starts off from an intact (if severed) foot so you can witness the stages of dissection:

Whole foot. African elephant (Loxodonta africana). You may spot in later photos that the second and fourth toes’ nails are cracked longitudinally. This happens sometimes in elephants without any obvious health problems such as infection, but if it lasts long enough and conditions are bad enough (e.g. unsanitary conditions getting bacteria into the crack; spreading the crack to let them into the foot tissue), it could worsen.

Nice clean sole. No abscesses or other problems. You can faintly see the cracked toenails here.

Gorgeous white cartilage surfaces of the wrist joints. Nice and healthy-looking. A young animal, in this case.

Removing the skin; nice soft whitish connective tissue underneath.

Skinned foot; rear view. The yellowish fat pad is wonderfully visible through the connective tissue sheath.

Skinned foot; front view. The thin, broad extensor tendons that would draw the fingers forward in life are visible here as longitudinal lines along the foot’s surface, running to the toes.

Ahh, my favourite thing! I’ve cut around the prepollex and am pointing at it. It’s almost impossible otherwise to see through all the fatty tissue of the fat pad that surrounds it.

Removing the prepollex. It’s tiny and enmeshed in connective tissue; harder to see than in the first elephant (photos above).

There is the prepollex! Maybe 12cm long. A little bit of cartilage (white) visible where it connected to the foot. These “sesamoid bones” vary tremendously in elephants I’ve inspected. I am still getting my head around that, after >10 years of staring at them in >75 feet!

Gap left by removal of the prepollex, on the median border of the foot; thumb region. Imagine having a little extra thumb growing off the base of your thumb and sticking toward your palm. That’s what elephants have.

Here, removing the slipper/sole of the foot, from the back side forwards. Hard work!

The slipper. Compare with the image above (same orientation). Nothing wrong here that I could see.

Front view of the toes, where they connect to the toenails. This specimen was so fresh that they were surprisingly easy to cut through and remove the foot from the sole.

Looking up at the palm. You can see the bulbous fat pad (yellower tissue) bulging out in the centre of the palm, and segments of it extending between each finger, separated by fibrous tracts. I love this anatomy. I can stare at it for hours and still be fascinated after all these years. So complex!

Looking down onto the inside of the toenails, toes 3 and 4. Healthy, relatively intact tissue; no swelling or bleeding or other pathology.

Skinned foot, oblique front/inside view again, as above.

Fat pad removed, looking up through where it was at the palm of the “hands”, where the tendons and ligaments connect to the five toes. Each arc-like structure is a toe; the “thumb” (first toe) is on the upper left.

Elephant’s-eye-view looking down onto the fat pad, where the palm of the foot in the image below would be placed in life (i.e. the limb would be coming down vertically, perpendicular to the plane of the image). The fat pad of the foot is visibly thicker toward the back of the foot (bottom of the image), as you’d expect, because the toes occupy most of the front parts.

Palmar tendons and muscles; the common digital extensor muscle group, which clenches the toes. Not a small muscle, either!

Tendons of the digital flexor muscle exposed.

I removed the digital flexor muscle so the three major tendons can be seen (the two short side branches to the first and fifth toes have been cut off).

Forefoot with flexor tendons removed, revealing the channels that they coursed through.

Closeup of the glistening channels for the flexor tendons. They are lined with lubricative tissue to help the tendons glide through them. And the tendons do need to be able to glide- although elephant feet look very solid from the outside, and are to an extent, but we’ve done studies showing that they do move if you apply even a moderate load to them in a cadaver, and thus would move in life, too.

Let’s finish off with some osteology, shall we? First the unhealthy Asian elephant, then the healthy African elephant; same front right feet, just the bones (from my CT scans):

Ouch, indeed!

Much better. And that’s the end!

Wow, that was an elephantine post! I wanted to take yet another opportunity to share the amazing anatomy of elephant feet with you. You’re all now qualified experts if you made it this far!

Any questions?

I’m now asked all the time how I’m holding up in light of recent changes in my life, and I have a hard time answering that question, as I am still not sure – except that I am still here, more or less. Over the past year I’ve grown to embrace the notion, reinforced very strongly by my own frequent experiences, that I am disabled (in the medical/legal sense). I’ve had a harder time embracing the idea that I am now part of a minority group (I have strongly accepted that I am a senior, white, male scientist in the upper-middle class; which conflicts with “minority” in every way). Categorization aside, one conclusion I’ve been grappling with is the strong sense that I have been diminished. I can’t think as clearly, my memories are fading and my body is increasingly decrepit in physical and physiological ways that are becoming obvious to me. And yet I struggle to explain these feelings to people. So here I am, writing a blog post that is partly about what it’s like to feel that my personal “glory days” as a human scientist have passed. It’s not very uplifting stuff although there is a surprise of sorts at the end.

Stomach-Churning Rating: 1/10; a medical imaging scan of my disintegrating body, and a cartoon of surgery.

Before I go into my sob story, I should reinforce that there’s not just doom and gloom here. There is a heady, very complex mix of feelings. I’ve still got a great family (save the demise of all of my close relatives from my parental generation and before) and friends. Much of the time I’m still able to smile and have some fun. I’m not a Syrian refugee clinging to life in a tent while the world turns its back on me, or an Indonesian orangutan aloft in a tree watching the forest burn around it while the palm oil plantations spring up in the distance. All is relative. I know my life best and that’s what I blog about, so here is that infinitesimal perspective on life.

At work, I am buoyed by a fantastic team of scientists; some of the best I’ve ever worked with. They churn away at the science while I try to lead them. We’re doing some very hard science lately; some of the most challenging work I’ve been involved in. And my declined health hasn’t helped me to lead them, so sometimes they’ve had to rely on each other for spans of time. It’s not the best analogy but I often feel like we are in the open sea and I am swimming in front of our boat full of precious science, navigating while I barely keep my head above water and they struggle with the oars and their own exhaustion. In real life, it’s seeing their smiling faces and the wonderful science they show me on a regular basis that helps me keep afloat, personally.

Indeed, one take-home message of this post is that, while feel myself diminish, struggling with normal ageing and major new health problems, I see those I mentor grow and I get a vicarious thrill and pride from it. This is something that I know many research scientists experience to varying degrees, and often in conjunction with the too-often-metaphorized(?) experience of parenting and having the joy of seeing one’s offspring mature while one feels old age encroaching. As many research managers witness, I see my team’s collective research expand and build new levels of coolness in our little domain, I get wiser by reflecting on the successes and failures, and one could say I enjoy some credit from my team’s work by navigating our general course of research while they do the daily technical work and I help mentor them through their careers.

But first, a content cat.

At the same time, as my collaborations and range of projects broaden, following my increasingly integrative interests, I see my relative expertise decreasing. It seems a long way now from my postdoc years, just over a decade ago, when I could run most or all of the software and hardware I needed to do the science. I am increasingly uncomfortable with that. However, I still learn new skills and knowledge so I am far from static as a scientist, and I am pushing myself more and more to learn more, wrestling with my age/health-imposed difficulties in learning. Furthermore, as a human being I feel far more aware of the world and the broader issues at stake than ever before (thanks in part to social media, I should add; but also thanks to my curiosity about life beyond my research). Improving my mind is still a goal of mine. The “diminishing” label I apply here is not that fair perhaps, but it’s how I feel about myself and I am sure there is some truth to it. It is the foe I grapple with.

So I get bemused reactions when I’m asked how it’s going and I respond, somewhat glumly, that I’m “hanging in there”. Many know I’m having health problems and tell me they are inspired by how I’ve held up and how well my (team’s) research and science communication and other work seems to be going, from the outside. Indeed, we’re cranking out more papers and surprising amounts of funding (see below) than ever before, so on paper it does look very good. It helps a little to hear those comments of how impressed some friends and colleagues are, but I don’t feel very impressed with myself. I feel lucky to have a great team of scientists and to have a great job in an insanely good laboratory environment, because otherwise things would be very different for me. I’m starkly aware of my privilege and feel vastly fortunate for having it.

My personal experience in work/life doesn’t reflect the joy of “success” that might seem to spring forth from my CV or the image that the outside world might get of me. I’m seesawing back and forth between those intermittent joys (and other happiness that comes from life away from work!) and a sense of hopelessness. I see the grim state of humanity and the broader world, and I look within and see my own decrepitude advancing, and I feel sad. It’s not a clinically manic-depressive seesaw but I can see some similarities when I apply my scientific detachment skills and look at myself from a quasi-objective perspective. I’m not the naïve, “everything is excellent” optimistic grad student I was—I just see flickers of that person these days. Sometimes I like to see him.

Much of the torques applied to the seesaw come from my oscillating health status- I alternate between good and bad days, with hints of a broader weekly rhythm that my physicians and I are still trying to grasp. Those oscillations determine everything for me: I can be bursting with energy and make strong inroads on my “to do” list, or I can be utterly drained and unable to do much more than stare vacantly or maybe fire off some emails to make incremental progress on work. I tend to be lingering somewhere in the middle, with far less vitality on average than I had two or so years ago. I look back on those past years and feel like I am looking up at the peak of my life and career. Time will tell if that’s “true” in some way or not.

Regardless, over the past 18 months there have been huge “valleys” from when I end up in hospital after major epileptic attacks, with a couple of weeks of recovery afterwards. Overall, my capacity to do what I used to be able to do has been halved. At best, I feel like I can operate at maybe 90% of my peak capacity and that never lasts long. Some of this is the inevitable decline that comes with entering one’s mid-forties, but some is a new step-change that has hit me over the past 18+ months since I became an epileptic suffering from tonic-clonic (“grand mal”) seizures every 2-3 months. Why is this suddenly happening and why haven’t the doctors resolved it yet? Well, the short answers are that my brain had damage (I told that story here) that can lead to epilepsy later in life, and that medicine still isn’t perfect. Epilepsy that cannot be entirely suppressed by existing medication is still common. We’re still experimenting with medications for me but it’s too soon to tell if we’ve found a solution, and we might never.

I heard some wise words a while ago that “we’re more content to blame ourselves than to accept that some things are beyond our control” and I’ve taken that to heart. Life is scary and short and it’s true that a lot is out of our control, especially the end of life. In reflection, I’ve been tempted to look back on choices I made in life and try to blame myself for what damage that has wrought on me (or others), but in terms of health I question that assumption. I may just be the victim of bad luck (genes, etc), but some people find bad luck too hard to accept, implying an indifferent universe rather than free will leading to misfortune/fortune. I’m not out of hope but I’ve accepted that the current state of my life might be just how it will be, and that’s been a hard lesson, but one I’ve learned again and again with my many chronic health problems over 20+ years. I don’t blame myself (much) for all that. More than ever, I appreciate the other wise words that “everyone is fighting a struggle you know nothing about”. I might look to an external observer like I’m kicking ass, but I feel anything but that kind of triumphant, fist-pumping jubilation.

I feel lucky to still be here, and eager to keep it that way, but I am so, so tired. Intellectually, physically, emotionally, it’s like a vampire has been paying me regular visits. And so I have to sigh, more than I used to, when confronted with bullshit like excessive paperwork or petty politics or something else I wish I didn’t have to endure, deeply feeling life slipping past as I do endure it, but that’s life for you. And at work, as a senior research manager, that’s often my job to endure it, in ways I’d never experienced as a junior researcher. I just have to cope with being pummelled by waves of difficulties and not grow weaker if I can avoid it. Coupled with life’s other burdens, the diminishing scientist faces a different beast of challenges and can often feel very alone. It’s a strange new place I’ve found myself in, far more complex than the worries I had as a postdoc, with harder choices to make and vast grey areas to traverse.

Nonetheless, as welfare science likes to term it, it’s entirely “a life worth living”. I have to pick my battles more than I used to, and I’ve had to learn to take more time to get exercise, rest, and avoid the stresses (or even unpleasant people) that can cause my health to take rapid downward spirals. I’m more fragile in many ways, such as having to stop doing karate because my shoulders have weakened. Here’s some interesting anatomy for you from a recent MRI scan of my right shoulder:

My left shoulder in top cross-sectional view, with the missing parts of my humeral head crudely outlined in red. There’s more amiss here, too.

My seizures cause my shoulder flexors to spasm, raising my arms up and crushing my humerus against my glenoid cavity of my scapula and causing occasional dislocations that abrade the humerus against the rim of the glenoid. The result, after numerous seizures, has been the wearing away of the articular cartilage of my shoulder and then the crumbling of the bony head of my humerus. Thus, once my NHS surgeon is ready to in coming months, I am due to have my coracoid process of my scapula cut off and moved, with its attached muscles and ligaments, to be screwed into the front of my glenoid cavity, bracing my humeral head more tightly against the glenoid and thereby resisting future dislocations. Luckily that operation can be done with several small incisions and endoscopy; invasive as the surgery is; thus recovery time won’t be so long.

Latarjet surgery (view of right shoulder joint [glenoid] from front): coracoid process moved posteroventrally. More details (w/videos) here.

A year from now all of my major funding and most or all of my research team were due to finish or be finishing. Over the past year, I was thinking forward to this eventuality and truly looking forward to having a smaller, quieter team, with less pressures on me. Many of those pressures are self-imposed because I am still ambitious and love doing science. I can still feel that youthful passion welling up inside me sometimes, so strong that I imagine it to be a tidal wave that could consume the world. It fuels my drive to try to do more, better science, but is dampened now by the problems I’ve lamented above, but it’s still there. So that passion and drive led me to, on a whim, resubmit an EU grant that was rejected a couple of years ago. I didn’t take it super seriously and so writing the grant didn’t stress me out. But a week after submitting it, I was back in hospital anyway, in bad shape. Over the following nine months, I grew to hope that the grant wasn’t awarded and expected that it wouldn’t (given <20% funding rate especially as a young Advanced Investigator in that ERC funding programme; https://goo.gl/Ps0Rhd if you want to know what that means). A big part of me still wanted to have that smaller team and less (or no) funding. I’d even contemplated leaving academia. I dream sometimes of retiring early to a quiet life with my family or wandering off into some jungle for a foolish adventure, but neither is realistic.

Yet a few weeks ago, the email from the EU came with an answer. I got the grant: 2.5 million Euros for 5 years of research on dinosaur evolution and biomechanics. More about that later. The funding details are still in negotiation but I now am on course to be advertising (in ~August) 4 new jobs to work with me for up to 5 years on this project, beginning in October. My reaction has puzzled those colleagues I’ve told about the grant, although I have kept that news quiet (until now) while I finish the paperwork for the grant award. I feel mixed about getting a large grant at this time in my life. It’s a helluva lot of work and five years seems a very, very long time to me, and to focus on one major theme—and to study dinosaurs.

I had also looked forward to moving away from dinosaur research—but, like Al says in the video above, their siren call can drag us back to the Mesozoic era with questions that entice us and with spectacular fossils that are a riot of fun to study. In this case, we’re going to be looking back on the “locomotor superiority” hypothesis that has been bounced around for >40 years as a possible explanation for why dinosaurs flourished whereas other archosaurs (except crocodylomorphs) didn’t, and how much bipedality relates to that, in terms of various behaviours and motions. Can these questions even be answered? We shall see.

Yes, boo hoo! Poor me, getting a coveted grant and all that! I am not surprised if that is hard for others to understand, and I still am figuring out how I feel about it all. Professionally, this is a wonderful thing; no question. Personally, it’s pressure I didn’t need to put my disabled, diminished self through. Irony and conundrum aside, I want to do it and I should try. Regardless, off I go, with a new-team-to-come and my research focus dominated by one main project, the largest grant I’ve ever managed (by a long shot!). It’s interesting times for me ahead. Life has come full circle, returning me back to science-ing the dinosaurs/archosaurs I’d focused on in my PhD work. But I am not the same person, and so it will be a very different experience. Somehow I have to balance this challenging project with the struggles in my life in general, and that will test me in diverse ways. I’m sure there will be many surprises in my work and personal life during the next five years, and I’ll be sharing them here on this blog when I can.

I’ve tried to express my own journey through the big ups and downs I’ve seen over two years. Maybe it will help others who are quietly, or noisily, struggling. I’m curious to hear from others that have experienced feelings of themselves declining as their careers/lives (in science/elsewhere) move along in some direction.

Goodbye Pedro (?/?/2014-23/4/2016). We had too little time together. What we shared was so lovely. Parting has been terrible sorrow.

I hadn’t been feeling very well for several weeks and then last night it happened. This post is a description of what it’s like to be an epileptic, written simply to document my experience. My goal here is to do that, almost in a dispassionate scientific way, and if it helps others going through similar experiences — feedback I often receive from such posts — that’s wonderful. My post is not a call for sympathy or help, although those are understandable and kind responses, and it’s not a complaint either. It just is, because what I am is what it is.

I’ve realized that my blog has become about not just documenting how amazing, freakish and immensely fallible that anatomy can be in other species, but also about my own experiences with my anatomy (and physiology) failing, as per these two prior posts about my shoulder and brain (more links therein). Sharing these experiences gives me strength and clarity, even if some of that emerges from partly detaching myself from the emotional nature of the experience and trying to look at it from outside of myself. I can be a private person, so feeling like I can discuss something uncomfortable and vulnerable makes me feel like I am growing, much as I innately resist that.

Stomach-Churning Rating: 1/10; no fun events described, but no images either.

I’ve had enough experience now as an epileptic that I look back on my seizures with disappointment (“Oh damn, not again.”) but also familiarity (“OK that happened; I know how things will go now.”). They are terrifying at the time, especially for my family, and my disorientation when emerging from unconsciousness with strangers around and with a gap in my memory is nightmarish.

I was watching a documentary about the Jutland battle in WWI while my daughter was put to bed. Then… I woke up, maybe 20 minutes later, unsure what was going on. There were two “first responders” (emergency non-paramedics) present, one of whom I eventually recognized from my prior emergency experiences in recent months, trying to talk to me with my wife. I was impressed to later hear that they’d come within 5 minutes of being called; not bad for life in a small English town. I came to realize that my right shoulder hurt again (from violent spasms), reducing it to almost a one-degree-of-freedom joint (mostly able to move fore and aft; almost zero pronation/supination without intense pain), reminscent of Ichthyostega‘s. I was surrounded by tissues wet with blood from my lip, where I’d again bitten myself during my fit. I could sense my racing heartbeat and fluctuating temperature, other hallmarks of my pre- and post-seizure symptoms. My vision was blurry, with my eyes usually becoming dilated during a seizure.

But the predominant feeling that takes an uncomfortably long time to pass is the “post-ictal state“, a mind clouded by confusion, slowly becoming aware that my neurons are misfiring but are beginning to sort themselves out. I sometimes irrationally want to just go back to sleep and not talk, and need some rational insistence from carers that we can’t do that right now. It is this vacillation between consciousness and unconsciousness, in a grey area in between, that I find most disturbing, as I cannot completely trust my own mind, disbelieving what is happening (“Is this real?”), and sometimes I lapse back into seizure(s) again. This is a powerful example of the frightfulness of uncertainty. As a scientist, so reliant on my mind, it is horrifying to feel like it is out of control. It also conjures up memories of observing my mother’s mind declining with Alzheimer’s syndrome, and those are vastly painful.

As I became able to put words together semi-coherently, and as the medics poked and prodded me to do tests on my symptoms (I had a cannula in my left arm’s blood vessel by now), discussion turned to whether to take me to the hospital once the paramedics arrived with the ambulance. In the past, there was no question of the need for a trip to Accident & Emergency (A&E in the UK; same as the ER in the USA).

Yet now, with almost 2 years of experiences behind me, I (and my carers) have come to know my better seizures from my worst ones. And given that A&E normally involves >4 hours of lying around in a noisy room, constantly disturbed by checkups or screaming patients, it is far from restful and rest is what I tend to need most. After an hour of vigilance, my symptoms faded and I became more able to answer queries, even to talk over options. We agreed that I could stay home, try to rest, and go to A&E if I had another seizure.

I am glad to say that I got a full night of rest and I feel a lot better today. That I am able to think clearly enough to write this post gives me reassurance. After past seizures, I’d often be unable to do much except take naps and gawk slack-jawed at the TV screen, with my vision still blurred (one eye even seemed to change shape post-seizure once, and I began seeing things in the corner of my field of view that are not truly there). So the bright side of this post is, maybe my medications are working better now, and maybe we will get this epilepsy under control, but I keep saying that every 2-3 months and then being proven wrong by another seizure, so a lot of uncertainty looms.

Nonetheless, seizures involve a “refractory period” that makes further seizures less likely for some time period, so odds are good that I can feel more secure while I recover from this event, which usually takes two weeks or so to get my brain feeling closer to “normal”. Even so, my mind remains clouded by these post-ictal feelings, weighting me down with fatigue that is the most chronic challenge I struggle against now as an epileptic. It leaves me unable to do as much as I once could, with a backlog of work growing behind me like never before. This is the “diminishing” that I lamented before; it is not just old age.

That’s what one experience was like for me, and I’m glad that it was far from the worst “neural storms” I’ve suffered. I hope that readers find it interesting. Now that my battle is over for now, I’ll take some time to find out how that Jutland battle turned out.

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

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-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.

2. 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:

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:

3. 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:

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…

4. 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…

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

5. 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!

6. 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!

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.

Back in November 2016 I got an exciting email from colleague Dr. Richard Thomas, who was building a team of experts for a proposed documentary on Jumbo the elephant; the famed proboscidean of the Victorian era (and arguably most famous elephant of all time, first international celebrity animal, etc.). I knew him from social media and from our mutual interests in chicken anatomy and evolution. And that exciting email, for once, worked out! Over coming months I chatted with the film producers and they could see a place for me in the programme, contributing my expertise in elephant (postcranial) anatomy, locomotion, health/welfare etc. Lo and behold, in May 2017 I met Sir David Attenborough at Heathrow and we flew out to New York City to film with the skeleton at the American Museum of Natural History. And to cap it off, I got to meet another childhood science communication hero: Professor David Suzuki of CBC’s “The Nature of Things“– my adrenaline levels were sky high!

Brooklyn neighborhood by our hotel. Lots to do!

The show has aired in the UK and is coming very soon to Canada and the world (details below). Here’s my part of the story.

Stomach-Churning Rating: 3/10– bad bones but no blood.

We filmed from 15-19 May 2017 at the AMNH’s warehouse of mammalian skeletal remains, which is housed deep in the Brooklyn Army Terminal; a picturesque site in and of itself. And it is a site with a lot of history— WWI and II, Elvis and more.

It was a hectic week of the usual documentary stuff: repeat the same lines and motions again and again from different angles and with different paces and intonations (I cannot help in these cases but think about the Simpsons “Fallout Boy” episode), from ~9am-5pm, with plenty of downtime watching setup or other bits being filmed. I’m used to all that. But having the time to peer around the collection and chat to Richard and colleague Dr. Holly Miller (handling the tissue isotopes side of the story) about Jumbo’s skeleton was a lot of fun during downtime and filming itself. Not to mention the utter joy of studying one of the most famous museum specimens ever, and an animal widely held to be one of the largest of its kind, with much mystery surrounding its history despite its fame. (Wikipedia does a fair job of summarizing some of this)

Here are some photos to tell the story:

Photo of the team, courtesy of Infield Fly Productions (CBC production, “Jumbo: The Life of An Elephant Superstar”.

The Brooklyn Army Terminal, with a view of the harbour beyond.

Inside the terminal: old army staging area and an evocative wooden Liberty/tank artwork.

Army terminal cat. Shipping still comes through the terminal so I guess there are plenty of rats and handouts from cat-lovers to keep it going. I miss our cats when I travel so this moment was appreciated.

Whale skulls and other specimens inside the AMNH warehouse.

First view of Jumbo’s remains.

Photo opp with Sir David.

Photo opp with Prof Suzuki.

That’s the setup. I’ve done ~15 other documentary episodes/shows but this was like nothing else– simply an awesome experience.

Now the delivery: we set to studying those bones. We’d seen photos before, and Henry Fairfield Osborn had illustrated the specimen as his type of “Elephas africanus rothschildi” (Sudanese elephant; no longer valid but those were different times– it’s now just a nicely preserved Loxodonta africana africana), so we knew some of what to expect.

Looking at Osborn’s classic monograph. Oddly he didn’t address the GLARING MASSIVE PROBLEMS WITH THE TEETH!

Skull with terrible tooth pathologies– and let’s play spot Mumbo, my daughter’s toy elephant! He might even appear in some TV footage!

We had noted some serious issues with some bones (pathologies). I won’t spoil the message here but will show some images. I know some experts have voiced issues with how the tooth pathologies/growth were explained in some footage but I can’t address that here; it’s not my expertise. The important point to me is that the teeth are incredibly messed up and that can easily be linked to bad diet and other management/health issues, as the documentary explains.

Jumbo’s torso in left side view. Glorious preservation.

Right forelimb, showing that the “growth plates” (epiphyses”) were not all fused, consistent with Jumbo still growing– as expected for an African male elephant in his 20’s.

Right elbow with some pathologies consistent with degenerative joint disease.

Surprisingly, Jumbo’s feet were not in nasty condition in terms of pathologies. I’d expected to see that. They’d been painted and drilled for mounting, but were not riddled with arthritic changes that I could see.

Strange bony plaque on the left pelvis (hip) region; something I’d never seen before in any elephant (and I’ve seen many). Why? The programme offers a reasonable explanation.

Jumbo’s right hip, with bad erosion of the bone and thus presumably the overlying cartilage. Ouch!

Strange extra prong on one right rib in Jumbo- we didn’t figure that out. It could conceivably be natural variation.

So, poor Jumbo suffered some jumbo-sized problems, and in complex ways. That’s just scratching the surface of what his skeleton tells us, and there’s plenty more in the show plus plenty more we can say later– there’s real science that came out of this programme! I was surprised to find how little had been stated anywhere in the scientific literature about Jumbo’s pathologies.

Sad as Jumbo’s skeletal story is, the broader story of his life and death is sadder still. For purposes of time I don’t think any of the three versions of the show will get to delve into how Jumbo’s mother may have been slashed to death by a broadsword, as the story below describes was the ancient practice:

I’d hate to be “so pestered by a popinjay”, too.

Adding insult to injury, we can reflect on how Jumbo was taken from the Sudan to the east (across the Suez), then on boat to Italy and then overground to Paris, where he lived for a little while until the zoological garden sold him to London. Luckily Jumbo avoided becoming a meal to starving Parisians during the Prussian siege of 1870-1. So he did not become elephant consommé like some of his co-captives did. The more one learns about Jumbo’s life and the life of elephants in captivity in the 1800s, the more harrowing the tale becomes.

Jumbo is THE celebrity elephant. His name has come to mean ‘big’ and ‘bombastic’, from applications to jumbo jets to hot dogs and other (darkly ironic) forms of consumption and extravagance. He has had a jumbo effect on Western culture, but also symbolizes the complex human-elephant relationship, such as the inspiration for “Dumbo’s” own sad story. We love elephants but our fascination with them can also be their undoing, such as poaching for the ivory trade or mistreatment in captivity. Jumbo’s story writ large is also the story of elephants, and our story to learn from. If anything comes out of my participation in the Jumbo documentary for the public’s benefit, I hope it is increased empathy for how we interact with elephants. They are like us in many ways (maybe over-emphasized with anthropomorphism in many accounts), but also unlike us (maybe even unfathomable) in not only their size and anatomy but also in aspects of their prodigious intellect, emotions and social structure. Elephants aren’t just jumbo spectacles. They are jumbo responsibilities for humans now that we dominate the planet so much.

Want to catch a version of the Jumbo show? I’ll try to keep this list up to date:

BBC iplayer now: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b09jcxrj/attenborough-and-the-giant-elephant

BBC One: 5:05pm on January 31st

CBC: 8pm on January 7th– trailer is here:

http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1115035715562

And the international version is coming soon, plus the above versions surely will circulate globally in some ways.

Have a jumbo time (in a good way) in the rest of 2017 and onwards into 2018!

-John

Stomach-Churning Rating: 5/10; links show some of my health problems, and discuss them in not-always-so-uplifting detail.

I’ve spent almost 10 years now blogging about my health problems, and it has been nearly 20 years since I had a stroke that changed my life and kickstarted a slow landslide of health issues and declining mental capacity. I have fully integrated being a disabled person into my personal identity. There’s hardly a day that goes by in which I don’t think about how I am struggling with my chronic health problems, and the lack of control involved in them. On the brighter side, I’ve taken up the challenge to wave the flag for this identity. I want to do more; to help others, maybe as a role model or beacon of hope or inspiration (you can move on after disaster, while learning from it), and to show that we’re not all alone even though our problems are unique. I am looking for new ways to reach out to the world and do more good with the badness I’ve endured. I’ve done recent interviews and invited talks on disability and science careers/life, which have been a good start. And another intent is to use this summary to direct others to hear my story, more efficiently disseminating it.

I’ve also thought a lot about what it means to be invisibly disabled and thus minoritised, and as a senior white male of no small privilege. How do those two things balance in determining where I fit into the multidimensional space of equality, diversity, equity and inclusiveness? I haven’t had an epiphany to provide an answer, but things certainly have changed for me. The John of 10 years ago is very different from the one of today. Being visible about being invisible helps me, and can benefit others.

This post is an ongoing summary of my experiences, and a retrospective (in chronological order):

What’s In John’s Brain?– 16 December, 2012: The post that started it all, on the 10th anniversary “Not Dead Yet Day” of my stroke.

The Anatomy of One Career in Science– 26 May, 2014: On success, while dealing with health problems. Little did I know…

Shouldering the Burden of Uncertainty– 9 November, 2014: I feel that this is my finest moment in blogging and being up-front with my problems. And vulnerable. It was a very, very hard time in my life that changed everything. But I am proud that I wrote this. Marvel MCU, I am still available.

Life as a Diminishing Scientist– 22 April, 2016: In which I discuss my acceptance that I am disabled, and what that means for my life.

Epilepsy Epilogue– 1 June, 2016: What it’s like “getting used to” epilepsy.

Year 9.5 of John’s Freezer: Postmortem of a Year That Warped Time– 5 October, 2021: Trapped in my own frail body while trapped at home during the pandemic. It broke me.

Year 10.5 of John’s Freezer: WTF?– 20 August, 2022: Resurgence of health problems during the continued challenges of the pandemic. Another very hard year. But not all bad.

There will be more writings to come! Hopefully with a turn for the better.