There’s no better way to kick things off after a holiday than with a celebration of the Inside Nature’s Giants series, which I had a small part in early on, including these shots I took during the time they spent filming at the RVC >3 years ago (!?!?); most of these animals spent multiple holidays inside The Freezers:

Elephant arriving…

Elephant revealed

Private moment with elephant

Stunning emergence of The Guts

So you are impressed by the guts too, ehh? It was pretty amazing to watch it happen. The tension was intense- the animal had been dead for a while and was rather bloated. So cutting it open was a task gingerly taken…

Bloated elephant

RVC dissector Richard Prior stuck a scalpel in the upper abdomen when the time was right… the piercing whistle and the sulphuric odour silenced the crowd watching… and then quickly out came the guts.

Everyone was pretty amazed by the scale.

The guts just went on and on…

Not a 1-person job by any means.

Spreading them out to see the whole GI tract.

I waited patiently and watched the show filming; what a great, professional crew. Then I got to take the legs away for our research.

But not just elephants, no sirree! The Windfall Films/ING team filmed giraffe, crocodile and big cats episodes (4 total) at the RVC too; a crazy period of a few weeks (including a major blizzard that hit us during the croc filming) in 2009. Some of the stars follow:

Frozen lion waiting for CT scan, shot 1

Frozen lion waiting for CT scan, leg shot

Frozen lion waiting for CT scan, shot 2; eerily contorted pose

Frozen tiger waiting for CT scan, shot 1

Frozen tiger waiting for CT scan, shot 2

Frozen tiger waiting for CT scan, shot 3

…and here is the tiger’s head after scanning

…and I’m rather fond of that tiger’s neck– check out the hyoids (roaring/tongue apparatus in throat; bottom of movie)!

…and here is the adult Nile crocodile’s head after scanning

…and another view of that big Nile croc, just because I like how this reconstruction turned out

…and here’s one of the small (~1m long, 10kg) juvenile Nile crocodiles from the show, with a pilot CT scan showing the skeleton nicely- and possibly a last meal or stomach stone on the left side of the abdomen (bright white blob; I need to check this now that we’ve dissected it)

Foetal giraffe; stillborn; from the show, in process of dissection in our lab to measure its limb anatomy. Trust me, it looked –and smelled– better on the inside than it did from the outside. Eew.

How most of the specimens from the first 4 episodes ended up after all dissection was done (part of my/RVC’s collection of skeletons). Sadly, I did not get great photos of the 3.7m Nile crocodile or the two giraffes before they were reduced to bits, but I do have the skeletons and CT scans.

Giving a tour (including The Freezers) to A Certain Esteemed Visitor.

(Another) Gratuitous shot with one of the sweet old Red Kangaroos at Alma Park Zoo near Brisbane, Australia. Experiments on hopping we did there will be briefly featured in the new Inside Nature’s Giants show on Channel 4, 16 April @2000- details at http://t.co/SkjsMeVC.

Title is so meta?

OK Londoners, and Olympics visitors, and anatomy (or just science/biology) buffs, and those not lucky enough to see other versions of the animal Body Worlds show. You have a mission. And that mission is to go see “Animal Inside Out”, a special (£9 for adults is well worth it!) exhbit at the Natural History Museum, open until September 16. This blog will self destruct, very messily, by turning itself inside out in 5 seconds… Boom.

Hippopotamus attempting to outdo elephant guts.

Anatomy to me is beautiful even when it’s “ugly” (messy, wet, mucosal, intestinal, asymmetrical, unlike human, whatever), and that’s a major theme of this blog. Hence I am embarrassed that I hadn’t yet gone to see this Body Worlds spinoff exhibit until now, but can begin to shake off that shame by means of an almost exclusively effusive gushing of blood love for said exhibit. Wow, wow, wow! I went in with no particular expectations, having seen some pictures and knowing some of what to expect, and having other things on my mind. I came out very pleased; the NHM exhibits folks and von Hagens’s crew have created an inspirational spectacle that could do wonders for anatomical sciences and natural history. More about that at the end.

(Warning: possibility of spoilers, but the exhibit is so visual that I don’t think my descriptions can spoil it)

The entrance

No photos are allowed as usual, so all I have to show you is the entrance and some anatomy pics I’ve interspersed from my team’s research to lighten up the text. I suppose I could have asked for special permission to take photos for review usage but this was a very impromptu visit, and with ~4 months of showing left I may well be back again.

Weighing a hippo; spot on at 1600 kg!

There is a brief panel on homology and why it is the major concept underlying comparative anatomy (and a key part of evolution, co-opted from the not-so-evolutionary ideas of Sir Richard Owen, whom the NHM rightly mentions here). Another panel rightly brings up the issue of ethics, which has plagued Body Worlds before. It comforts the visitors that animals were not slaughtered just for this display and that the NHM applied its strict collections criteria to them. Convincing enough for me, and absolutely necessary to bring up early on.

The entry hall then presents you with about five cephalopods (labelled “squid” and “octopus”—a gripe is that species names/details are not given for most specimens on show) prominently occupying the view. The cephalopods, like basically everything else, are plastinated (by a now US-patented set of procedures, I learned from the exhibit book detailed later). They are stunningly frozen in lifelike poses or with gaping cuts to show their interior anatomy, although there was very little explanation here about cephalopod biology and anatomy (about 1 smallish panel). No mention of Cthulhu. Damn. He’d approve of the Grand Guignol scenery.

Toward the back of the first corridor of specimens and cases, there is a stunning scarlet haze outlining the body of a “shark” (species not given) with its huge liver lying below it. The haze, a technique used repeatedly throughout the exhibit, is some kind of corrosion cast of the circulatory system, I gather. A bunch of cross/longitudinal sections of cephalopods, crocodiles, fish, horse hooves and other animals decorate blank spaces on the walls, some with labels showing basic features and some just hung like paintings. Fair enough, but a missed opportunity for a bit more educational content here.

Gratuitious Melanosuchus (black caiman) shot.

A smallish whole shark confronts you as you turn the corner from the crimson chondrichthyan; again of unknown classification. One would think a museum exhibit would care about classification beyond “shark,” but oh well, I am banging the same drum here too much and missing the point, that the exhibit is really a visual, visceral expose rather than a deep prose-driven intellectual dissection. On one of the shark panels it is noted that sharks have red and white kinds of muscle used for slower and faster swimming, but not clarified that this is a very widespread vertebrate (chordate?) feature. This forms my second gripe, that a truly evolutionary approach, such as that taken by dozens of the museum’s research staff as their major paradigm of phylogenetic systematics, could have helped the public grasp the evolutionary, hierarchical nature of homology and depart with accurate information about what features characterize groups at which levels. I’m not asking for cladograms laid out on the floor as at the American Museum of Natural History, although maybe that could work, but the exhibit tended to fall back on an outmoded “this animal has this feature, and that animal has that feature, and these are cool adaptations” shopping list approach rather than a modern comparative approach. Granted, almost all museum exhibits fall into this trap, for various reasons and some of them justified. But with a spare word or phrase here or there, this could have been done better without drowning the visitors in that dreaded sea of bloodprose.

Passing the sharks, we come to one of several thematic sections about body systems, this first one on the skeleton (later, brain/nerves, circulation, muscles, etc.). A few small skeletal specimens of the type that are seen throughout the museum are presented, with a scallop reminding us that skeletons can come in many types among multicellular organisms. There is a horse skull and a stark white whole skeleton of a young-ish ostrich, which was very nicely mounted. However, I was caught off guard by the pelvis, which lacked the curved, ventral “boot” like connection of the pubic bones that ostriches have—presumably explained by its juvenile status although I wasn’t 100% sure it was even an ostrich pelvis. OK, I am having a serious pelvis-nerd moment here; forgive me as my PhD was on this stuff.

Ostrich in the midst of disassembling.

BUT, once again the small interpretive panel had a moment of Fail. The ostrich was explained to have two toes, in contrast to normal birds which have “five”.  HUH? Birds have three main toes and variably also a fourth, inner (first) toe called the hallux, used for perching and other activities including walking. None have a fifth toe; indeed their dinosaurian forebears lost that feature some 230ish million years ago. Just an embryonic vestige of the base of the fifth toe is visible in bird embryos today. Furthermore, the panel said that two toes in ostriches can grip the ground more strongly than more toes in other birds. I know of no evidence that shows this, and suspect that the contrary might be true. The standard explanation for toe reduction in ostriches is that it is a lightening feature characteristic of “cursorial” (long-legged, sometimes fleet/efficient) animals, to make swinging the long legs easier. These errors really should have been caught by involving experts in polishing the scientific content of the exhibit.

But I don’t want this post to grumble too much; wrong message. There was so much to celebrate in this exhibit, which was felt impressively spacious and full of cool specimens! Visitors pass some plastinated whole sheep and goats, with panels nicely explaining that goats and sheep look quite similar on the inside and are evolutionary relatives. Having “four stomachs” (technically, a four-chambered stomach; not four distinct organs that were duplicated) is attributed as a sheep trait, then being a ruminant is said to be a goat trait; this might get a little confusing for non—anatomists (both are ruminants and have similar stomachs).

I learned that goats have an extra tail muscle that allows them to swing up/down as well as side-to-side. Hey, I teach veterinary anatomy and I don’t know that!? I must tuck my tail between my legs in shame, but I am no goat so I do not think I can (do satyrs count?). But I wasn’t so sure that goats, as described, were the first animals to be domesticated—I thought that was dogs? Ahh, Wikipedia says dogs, then sheep, then pigs, then goats? I’m outside my expertise here, I admit, and resorting to Wikipedia out of ignorant desperation. Anyway, here, another instance of coulda-been-more-phylogenetically-specific presented itself: the forelimb of goats was said to be connected to the thorax by muscles and ligaments, not a joint, but this is a feature common to most Mammalia. Although audience attentions might be wandering at this point, waiting for the next big spectacle (goats and sheep are not a big crowd draw, even plastinated), some more care as to what was written would be good. Some reindeer and horses and other animals join in the fun later on. Good, but mostly ‘filler’ (wise to put these in the middle of the exhibit, after sharks/cephalopods and before climax) unless you’re a big fan of fairly familiar ungulates with fairly homogeneous postcrania. OK, my bias is showing…

Gratuitious image of emu curled up for CT scan.

Next along the path, a longitudinal section of a whole ostrich caught my attention. Wow again! I had no idea that one could make a section like this of such a large animal, all in one plastic sheet like a giant microscope slide! I stared at this for a while, wondering how both legs could be fit in a ~1cm thick panel, and gave up trying to understand the technology. Von Hagens, you got me there; I’m stumped. Were multiple sections glued together somehow to produce a pseudo-2D slice from many thin 3D sections? I could not tell, and felt humbled and deeply impressed by the technical skill shown in the exhibits so far…

And then the punches kept coming, one-two-three! The exhibit approaches its climax with a crescendo of great specimens in the final hall. First, another maroon marvel. A whole ostrich, standing with wings askew, showing off its entire circulatory system (plus a few wing plumes for aesthetics) from head to toes! Gorgeous, technically brilliant, and well worth at least a 5 minute walk around (you can stroll around many of the displays in 360 degrees- very good move!). A plastinated whole ostrich stands next to it, and for a muscular anatomy geek like me, it was nirvana. However, in a churlish moment I had to look away from a panel explaining that an ostrich is “too heavy to fly” (I admit some younger visitors may need reminding of this). But then I looked into the big open space of this main hall, and the climax was before me. I think I’d had my climax a few times since this, but wow this was enormous in so many ways. All the ways. Mind-blowingly, vastly, geektastically kewl.

Gratuitious rhinoceros leg.

Across from the two posed ostriches and flanked by numerous smaller specimens, the elephant and giraffe stand frozen in vigil. There is also a lovingly detailed dissection of a huge male gorilla by the back wall and exit, with a panel reminding us that gorillas are (among) “our closest relatives.” The giraffe is precariously poised on one front toe-tip, in mid-gallop. What a great pose! There is the requisite explanation of how they solve the blood pressure problem in their neck (e.g. arterial valves), but also the statement, news to me, that they are the only animals able to ruminate while running. Who figured that out and how? I really want to know! Must be hard to check. (or was walking intended? Are my notes wrong?) Across from the full-fleshed plastinated giraffe (which I could see with my eyes closed after all our dissections from a month ago), there was another visually arresting and technically monumental giraffe on exhibit: one represented completely by small, reddish cross-sectional slices, from head to toes in a standing pose. That took me a while to absorb, it was so lovely, almost like a hanging mobile of morphological splendour.

There is a panel about genes and variation and inheritance. It is brief. (and it belongs there) Thank you. Let’s celebrate anatomy for anatomy’s sake for once!

“But John,” you might say, “What about the elephant? No love for the elephant? The star of the show?”

Zoinks! I want one! Stoic and triumphant (except against death and plastination), the Asian elephant is the centrepiece of the collection. (The book explains it was “Samba” from Neunkirchen Zoo, Germany, dead of some circulatory problem in 2005 and the first one plastinated, plus the inspiration for the animal show). I was speechless and paralyzed for a moment. I didn’t even know how to start looking at the partly-exploded-to-show-its-insides elephant. I actually avoided it for a while, looking closely at the other specimens, and building up anticipation, before stepping up and taking a long, intense look at this tall drink of water.

Go see the elephant. If you know basic anatomy, look at its leg muscles. Check out the huge triceps, still attached to the elbow; I like to say it is the size of a graduate student. Same for the analogous superficial gluteal and somewhat-fused biceps femoris muscles on the rear end, around the thigh/knee joint. Huge! I’ve never been able to view a standing dissected elephant, so this really impressed me more than a table full of giant muscle slabs like I normally deal with. And best of all, for me, the “false sixth toes”; the prepollex and prehallux; are visible in all four feet (but not noted anywhere, even in the book; too bad, these things were widely known by anatomists before my work on them). So much to marvel at here. It is an anatomical treasure. I wish I had a 3D image of it to use for anatomical studies- it was so easy to identify every single muscle group (except for a few missing around the shoulder/neck), even in the distal limbs. Hmm, photogrammetry might be possible (nugget of idea begins to crawl around John’s brain like a Zimmerian parasite)…

Behold, the triceps muscle of an elephant!

Behind that gorgeous elephant, don’t miss the wall mountings of two cross-sectional slices: through the head/neck of a moderate-sized elephant (How!?!?) and distal leg (no predigits but good features). And definitely don’t miss the stool (non-fecal, furniture form). I almost did. A wooden stool is shaped like a newborn elephant and a cross-section of the body is adhered on top of it. I assume you cannot sit there, and I am very glad that it was not, as I first imagined, an actual plastinated baby elephant turned into a stool. That would be bad taste.

The exhibit is in very good taste, without exception, and although I am gore-desensitized to say the least, it is not gory in my view. The plastination process preserves the reality and even some of the colour faithfully, but renders it just unreal enough (past uncanny valley territory?) that it should not be very disturbing to most viewers.

You can’t leave with your own photographs, but you can be schnookered into buying the exhibit book (£12.99) and a couple of packages of nice colour postcards (£4 for six; excellent quality images and cardstock IMO). The book and postcards show many of the exhibit specimens but not all, and include some others that are not on exhibit. I was saddened that the bear was left out—very cool image of that in the book. I’ve only skimmed the book a bit. I was annoyed by a few mistruths about elephants (25mph running speed, “have no ankle joints, which is one of the reasons why elephants cannot jump”, the bones “do not contain any marrow”—wrong, 15mph and there are ankles, they just are not very flexible (but not immobile either); also the bones do contain marrow (how could a large vertebrate survive entirely without it???) but just not as much of it per unit volume, due to lots of spongy bone). But I am still very happy with the 139 pages chock fulla pretty images, which is all I really wanted. Indeed, the book is a great pictorial anatomical reference- some of the species such as elephants and giraffe lack a really good anatomical resource in the modern, or any, literature! The exhibit shop also sells some good anatomy texts, mostly on humans but I recommend “Animal Anatomy for Artists” very strongly; I use that regularly in my own work.

So, £29.99 of schnookering later (haha, poor victimized me!), I emerged and reflected more on what I’d seen. I’m still a bit giddy about it all. I like the minimalism in most aspects- black backgrounds, minimal signage (but just enough to make it educational—when they got the facts right), focus kept on the specimens. Well done there. The spectacle of the specimens I’ve raved plenty about- it is not at all disappointing. It is AWESOME in every sense. I feel I easily got £9 of value from the ticket, and would (probably will!) pay it again. It is a profound experience to see the rich anatomical detail exposed, and be able to circumnavigate the specimens to absorb multiple perspectives. If you know some anatomy, you’ll be doubly rewarded at least, and if you bring your own phylogenetic perspective that can be trebled.

Baby white rhinoceros. Sad infant mortality.

What makes me happiest after my visit is realizing that we are in an anatomical renaissance for science and public interest therein. Exhibits like this and documentaries like “Inside Nature’s Giants” have tapped a public interest and curiosity in the wonders of basic anatomy. Anatomy is at the core of so many biological sciences and is so immediately accessible to people, because we all have anatomy. Anatomy is at the crossroads of art and science; it is visual, variable and complex, yet concrete, objective and easy to relate to. “Animal Inside Out” is a spectacular blend of art and science. They nail the artistic aspect, and the science is done reasonably well (despite my few gripes)—the exhibit’s science speaks for itself, in a way, although many visitors will need a nudge to grasp that.

I’d like to make a call for a permanent exhibit of the likes of “Animal Inside Out” in the UK. We deserve this! Museum exhibits could use something new, other than lame, quickly broken digital pushbuttons and bland skeletons devoid of soft tissue context (although the latter can be sufficient, e.g. at the Paris NMNH). That’s what makes “Animal Inside Out” (and Body Worlds) such a hit- as Hagens is quoted on the book dustcover, animal anatomy that goes beyond digitized abstractions and dusty bones is able “to sharpen our sense of the extraordinary by looking at the self-evident.” I could not say it better myself. This exhibit is extraordinary; that is self-evident after even a peek. It is a loving tribute to how fantastic the totality of animal structure is. Go! Enjoy. Absorb. Gape. Stare. Thrill. Revel. Think. Question. IT’S BEAUTIFUL.

Impressive hippo mouth says “Farewell for now.”

Edit: @samjamespearson on Twitter has kindly posted some photos (for free NHM/AIO publicity) of the exhibits and here are the links, now that they’re out there– SPOILERS! And thanks, Sam! I don’t think these really spoil the intense visual experience of actually being there and walking around the specimens, not at all.

octopus, whelk, squid, needlefish, scarlet haze of shark, hare brain, cat nerves,  bactrian camel, another camel,  bull (I forgot to mention it; this one was pretty great!)

A quick plug here for BBC Radio 4’s fourth episode of “Just So Science”, playing at 13:45 GMT today (this is the link). I was interviewed a few weeks ago for the show “How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin,” a la the classic Kipling tale. This series is revisiting Kipling’s tales in light of modern evolutionary science and evidence, whereas Kipling only had crude, Lamarckian or early Darwinian insight. Check out their earlier episodes on whales, leopards and armadillos– good stuff, and with real scientists.  Richard Dawkins may appear again (EDIT: yep! Dawkins manifested) in this episode to provide some gravitas and evolution street cred, too.

And Freezersaurus gets a big plug! From the website: ” Rhinos and horses have much in common. John Hutchinson studies both, but just don’t ask to look inside his freezer.” :)  NOTE: I am not a vet (I am a biologist), and definitely not a horse specialist like others in our lab, but I do study horses a little, in a comparative context.

While the original Kipling story focuses on rhino skin, and the producers were interested because of my popular post here on rhino skin, we discussed other issues such as gait, fossil record, feet, and more. I owe thanks to rhino skin expert Dr Tobin Hieronymus for helping me bone up on the unusual skin of rhinos, which has a surprising amount in common with the tough hide of walruses, boars, some water deer, and a few other species. It’s not just normal thickened skin, as Tobin and others have shown. Anyway, I don’t want to give away what’s on the radio programme; afterwards I might embellish this post more with some rhino anatomy and mechanics facts.

Coincidentally, I’m receiving four white rhinoceros feet today from a zoo mortality. So it’s rhino-fest here!

I hope you like the show– please let me know what you think in the comments below! I really enjoyed listening to it, but I’d like to know what you thought.

White rhinoceros forelimb (left side), ready for dissection.

How did the rhinoceros get her foot muscles?

This is a rant, but stick with me and this rant might have a silver lining toward the end, or at least a voice of reason within the roiling cloud of bitter blog-scowling. And there are pictures of cats.

My little tiger.

Like probably almost anyone in the 21st century that does research in a field of biology, I grew up watching nature documentaries on TV, and that influenced me to become a scientist. Doubtless it remains a powerful influence on other people, despite the massive de-science-ification of certain cable channels ostensibly, or at least potentially, dedicated to communicating science and nature (Animal Planet and History Channel, we’re looking at you).

But now I’ve seen behind the curtain. There’s still magic to behold there (e.g. working with early episodes of Inside Nature’s Giants), to be sure. However, some of my experiences have led me to become increasingly discontented with the relationship between TV documentaries and scientists.

Black leopard with glowing motion capture markers and eyes; eerie image from our past studies.

Here’s a common flow of events, and how they sometimes veer into frustration or worse:

Once a month or so, especially concentrated around this time (May-June-ish), I get a call or email from a documentary produced or researcher who is fishing for expert advice as they build a proposal for a documentary. I’m always very happy to talk with them and direct them to the best researchers to speak to, or papers to read, or to aspects of my own work that fit in with their idea for a documentary. Sometimes their idea is a bad one and I’m not afraid to tell them that and try to steer them toward a better idea; on occasion that seems to work, but more often they have their plan already and are reluctant to deviate from it.

About 3/4 of the time, I either never again hear from these nascent documentaries or else hear back maybe one more time (even to meet for coffee or give them a tour of our campus)– presumably, the proposal fails at that stage as it doesn’t excite executives. I’ve easily grown to accept this status quo after some initial disappointments. Much like in science, some ideas just don’t pass the muster of “peer review”, and documentary makers are operating under more of a market economy than science tends to be. Sifting is inevitable, and the time I spend helping people at this stage is quite minimal, plus it’s fun to see the sausage being made in its earliest stages. All fair so far…

Alexis and technician setting up gear for one of our past studies of how cats move.

The frustration naturally ramps up the more one invests in helping documentaries through their gestation period. I’m sure it’s very frustrating and stressful for TV makers, too, to spend days or months on a project and then have the rug pulled out from under them by those on high. Hopefully they are getting paid for their time; all I can speak to is my experience. My experience is that all this early input I regularly provide is pro bono.

I used to mention that my time is not cheap, and I had a policy (after a few disappointments and lost time) that I should get paid around £100/hour for my time, even at the early consulting stage. That fee went straight into my research funds to help send grad students to conferences or buy small consumables; it was definitely worth my effort and felt very fair. Since the 2008 economic downturn, I’ve rapidly abandoned that policy, because it seems clear to me that documentary makers of late tend to be working on more austere budgets. I’m sympathetic to that, and the payoff for a documentary that gets made with my input is often quite substantial in terms of personal satisfaction, PR/science communication, happy university/grant funders, etc. On rare occasions, I still do get paid for my time (albeit essentially never by the BBC); Inside Nature’s Giants was generous in that regard, for example.

How the leopard got glowy spots: motion capture markers from our past studies.

But at some point a line needs to be drawn, where the helpful relationship between scientists and documentary makers veers from mutualism into parasitism, or just careless disregard. I’ve been featured in roughly eight different TV documentaries since 2004, but there were almost as many (six or so) other documentary spots that went beyond the proposal stage into actual filming (easily 8+ hours of time) and never aired; either being cancelled entirely or having my scenes cut. All too frequently, I don’t hear about this cutting/cancellation until very late and after my inquiries like “Any news about the air date for your programme?”

Several times I’ve heard nothing at all from a documentary after filming, only to watch the programme and reach the end credits to find no sign of me or my team’s research (in one embarrassing case that really soured my attitude, the RVC had broadcast to the college to watch the show to see me in action, and upon watching we found out I was cut. Ouch!). At that point I really do wonder, is it all worth it? Hours or days invested in calls, emails, paperwork, travel, arranging and replicating an experiment, repeating filmed scenes and lines, working to TV producers’ scripts and demanding timetables. All that is totally worth it if the show gets made. But if the odds are ~60/40 or so that I get cut, I think I have cause to do more than shrug. The people I’ve worked with on documentaries can be wonderfully kind and full of thanks and other approbations, and they often impress me with their enthusiasm for the programme and their very hard, tenacious work making it all happen. It is jarring, then, to find out “Oh, you’ve been cut from the show, I’m so very sorry, the executives made that decision and it was a bitter pill for us to swallow, believe me– take care and I hope we can work together again.”

Above: Performance art illustrating what it’s like to have your science filmed for a documentary, then cut; graciously acted out by a cat (R.I.P.).

My aggravation has resurfaced after filming with BBC Horizon’s new documentary on “The Secret Life of the Cat,” airing right now. Alan Wilson’s team, from our lab, is featured prominently there, so that is fantastic for the Structure & Motion Lab (also check out his purrfectly timed Nature paper on cheetah agility vs speed, also from this week!). It’s hopefully going to be a nifty show; I’ve seen some of the behind-the-scenes stuff develop. (EDIT: I’ve seen it now and it was pretty good in terms of imagery and showing off Alan’s team’s technology, but the science was pretty weakly portrayed– even laypeople I’ve spoken to said “Cats avoid each other… duh!” and the evolutionary storytelling didn’t convince me as much as I’d like; it came across as arm-waving, which is a shame if the two featured cat researchers actually have built a scientifically reasonable case for it. One could not tell if the “changes” in 1 village’s cats evidenced by 1 week’s observation were happening within a cat’s lifetime or were truly evolutionary and recent. I don’t think I’ll watch the 2nd segment.)

I was filmed for a segment which probably would have been in the 2nd part of the show airing on Friday night, but I found out last week that it got cut with a week left before airing. I will be watching the show anyway, of course. I’m not that bitter. The segment featuring my team’s research was about how cats of different sizes do not do what other land mammals do, which is to straighten their legs as size increases across evolutionary spans. This helps support their body weight more effectively, but I explained in the filming segment that in cats, the lack of a change of posture in size may have other benefits despite the cost in weight support: it can make them more stealthy, more agile/maneuverable (segue to the cheetah paper cited above!), or even better able to negotiate rough terrain. Hence a domestic cat is in a biomechanical sense in many ways much more like a tiger than it should be for a “typical mammal”– an athlete, specialized for the hunt. And smaller cats are relatively much more athletic than bigger ones because they don’t suffer from the reduced ability to support body weight that bigger cats do. This may be, for example, why cheetahs are not very large compared with tigers or lions; they are at a “happy medium” size for agility and speed. But this all got cut, I am told.

Random cat that sidled up to us during some research into cat movements; so meta!

For my would-be-part in the show, we recreated experiments that I did with then-postdoc Alexis Wiktorowicz Conroy and others (a paper yet to be published, but hopefully coming very soon) that showed how cats large and small use such similar mechanisms in terms of postures as well as forces and moments (rotational forces). In these recreations, I got an RVC clinician to bring her cat Rocket (?IIRC) Ricochet over to be filmed walking over forceplates with high-speed video recording it. The cat didn’t do much for us; it probably found our huge lab a bit overwhelming; but it did give us at least one good video and force trace for the programme. Next we did the same thing with two tigers at Colchester Zoo, and got some excellent footage, including a tiger launching itself out of its indoor enclosure to come outside, while rapidly making a turn past the camera. The latter tiger “ate” (well, ripped to shreds, literally) the rubber mat that covered my pressure pad, too, which was mostly funny — and the film crew has reimbursed me for that as well as for the drive to/from the zoo. The filming experience was good; the people were nice; but the end result was a bummer.

Advantage of visiting Colchester Zoo for research:  going behind the scenes and meeting a baby aardvark (that’s not a cat).

My segment, as far as I could tell, had cool footage and added a nice extra (if intellectual) context to the “secret life of cats” theme, so it’s a shame that it got cut. I heard that famed Toxoplasma-and-cat-behaviour researcher Prof. Joanne Webster‘s segment also got cut, so at least I’m in good company. I don’t have those cool videos of slo-mo cats and tigers with me now but will put them up early next week on my Youtube channel; stay tuned. They won’t ever show up on a documentary anyway; typically when footage gets cut it just vanishes into TV-land’s bowels.

So I’m not happy. Not at all. Bitter? Yeah, a bit. Spoiled brat scientist? I’d say that would be an overly cynical perspective on it. I do recognize that I am lucky that the research I do has a strong public appeal sometimes; many scientists will never be in a documentary or get much PR of any kind. But I think anyone has a right to examine their situation in life and ask, applying basic logic, whether it is fair treatment under the circumstances. Hence I have become disillusioned and angry about the relationship of documentary makers and scientists. Not just me, but us scientists in general. We’re unpaid actors playing sizeable roles and with major expertise. We give documentaries some sci-cred, too, simply by appearing onscreen with “Professor Snugglebunny from Smoochbridge University” in the caption. Supposedly, and often truly, we get good PR for it, when our segments don’t get cut or are not edited to obliterate the context or due credit. But it’s those latter instances that raise the question of fairness. If the segment gets cut, we simply have wasted our time. And to a busy scientist, that is like jabbing me with a hot poker.

Serenity now!

[Aside: I'm waiting to hear what has happened to another documentary I was filmed for, and again spent ~2 days on, Channel 5's "Nature Shock: Giraffe Feast" which should be airing soon... no word yet if I've made the final cut but the show's airing has been delayed; hopefully not a bad sign. I am crossing my fingers... it seemed like a great show with a cool idea, and my segment raised some fun anatomical and biomechanical issues about giraffes.]

I know I’m not alone. I’m going to end my rant and see what feedback it draws.

But don’t get me wrong– it’s not all sour grapes, not by any means. I’ve still had eight-ish pretty good TV documentary experiences (cough, Dino Gangs, cough!).  I’ve had great experiences working with documentaries; indeed, Inside Nature’s Giants was one of the best experiences of my career to date. And I’m sure many other scientists have had positive experiences. In answer to my provocative “Why bother?” in the headline, there are plenty of good reasons to bother working with documentaries if you are a scientist whose research they want to feature… but only if you have some assurance that it will be worth your while, perhaps? How much of a gamble should we be bothering with? That brings me to my main point, a general query–

But what about the bad? And is it all worth it, in your views, given the risks of wasting time? Do we deserve some scientists’ bill-of-media-rights or something; a documentary-actor-scientists’ guild (90% joking here)? What should our rights be and should we push harder for them? Or do we just sit back and take the good with the bad, biting our lips? (I’m obviously not the type…)

I’d like to hear from not only the seasoned veterans who’ve experienced various ups and downs, but also from anyone that has views, anecdotes; whatever. I’m not aware of anyone collecting horror stories of documentary mishaps and mistreatments experienced by scientists, but that could start here. Please do share; even if you just got a call wondering if you’d want to help a documentary and then never heard back. Who knows where it would lead, but I think it’s helpful to bring these issues to the fore and discuss them openly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hola from Barcelona, where 500ish of us are telling each other about the latest research in the field of morphology (like anatomy, but broader, deeper, more explanatory; but if you prefer to think of it as anatomy that’s OK by me)!

#ICVM and #ICVM2013 (favoured) are the hashtags, and http://icvm2013.com/ is the website, and there’s Facebook and all that too! You can read the full programme and abstracts here. It’s the best damn conference in the universe and I am not remotely biased. It happens every 3 years somewhere in the world and is always chock full of 5 days of glorious new information on animal form and function and much more, with just too many interesting talks to ever be able to take it all in.

I am speaking a few times and want to share a talk that is about sharing the glory of morphology in public.

Morphology research, that is; please put your clothing back on!

It’s a text-heavier talk than my rules-of-conference-talks normally would allow, but I’m going for it, as that makes it better for sharing because my dulcet tones will not accompany the version I am sharing online. Someday in the future, at a conference venue  that is better set up for reliably live-broadcasting a talk (this is NO FAULT of the excellent organizing committee of ICVM/ISVM!), I would just do it live, but not today, not here.

The point of the talk should be obvious from the first slide (as in my last post). But I’ll presage it by saying that another subtext, which might not come through so strongly in the slides as opposed to my spoken words, is that we need to tell people that we’re doing morphology/anatomy research! We should not be shy of that label because deans or geneticists or conventional wisdom or what/whomever might say (very, very wrongly!) that it is a dead or obsolete science.

While natural history, evolution, palaeontology and other fields allied to morphology do pretty well in the public eye, I don’t see people often reminded that what they are being told about in science communication is a NEW DISCOVERY IN ORGANISMAL MORPHOLOGY and that we are still discovering such new things about morphology all the freaking time! (e.g. my team’s research on elephant false sixth toes, or Nick Pyenson‘s team’s research on whale chin sense organs to name just 2 such studies, both published on the same day in Science!)

Indeed, many of those discoveries such as new fossils/exotic living things with cool features, cool developmental mechanisms that produced complex structures, or insights into how organisms are able to do amazing things are implicitly morphological discoveries, but the fanfare too often goes to natural history, palaeontology, evo-devo or some other area rather than explicitly to morphology.

In contrast, I too often hear people poo-pooing anatomical research as yesterday’s science.

Vesalius’s classic skeleton (from Wikipedia), which is great but to me also conjures misleading connotations of anatomy as a defunct discipline that old dead dudes did.

We need to sell ourselves better not only in that regard, of a renaissance of discoveries and insights in our field, but also in the sense of being in a renaissance that is driven by TOTALLY AWESOME TECHNOLOGICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL ADVANCES, especially computerized tools. We’re just as fancy in terms of techy stuff as any other biologists, but we don’t shout it from the rooftops as much as other disciplines do.

We’re not just primitive scientists armed only with scalpels and maybe a ruler now and then, although that simple approach still has its sublime merits. We’re building finite element models, running dynamic computer simulations, taking high-resolution CT or synchotron scans, manipulating embryos, digging up fossils, sequencing genes– you name it, morphologists may be doing it! (For similar views see Marvalee Wake’s recent review of herpetology & morphology; I’m by far not the first person to make the arguments I’m making in my talk, but I am putting a personal spin on them)

And of course, as the talk is being delivered by me, you might rightly expect that I’ll say that we need to do more of this kind of cheerleading where we have maximal visibility and interaction, which includes online via social media, etc. I’ll discuss one other venue which has featured prominently here on this blog, too: documentaries. Oh I’m not done with that hobby horse, no sirree, not by a long shot!!

Anyway I should get back to preparing my talk but here is the link to the slideshow (props to Anne Osterrieder for the inspiration to put my slides up here):

Please discuss anything related to this topic in the Comments– I’d love to hear what you think!

I am happy to clarify what my shorthand notes in the slide text mean if needed. There are links in the talk to other sites, which you can click and explore.

Yesterday I encountered the question that, as a scientist who has studied a certain chunky Cretaceous carnivore a lot, most deflates me and makes me want to go study cancer therapeutic methods or energy sources that are alternatives to fossil fuels (but I’d be useless at either). I will explain why this is at the end of the post.

The question stems from a new discovery, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and thus expected to be one of the more important or exciting studies this year (no, I’m not going to get into the issue here of whether these “high impact” journals include the best scientific research or the most superficial or hyped “tabloid” science; they publish both, and not in mutual exclusivity). It’s a broken Tyrannosaurus rex tooth embedded in a duckbill dinosaur’s tail bone, which healed after the injury, showing that the animal survived the attack.

If you’re with me so far, you might be making the logical leap that this fossil find is then linked to the hotbed of furious controversy that still leaves palaeontology in crisis almost 100 years after Lambe suggested it for the tyrannosaur Gorgosaurus. If the hadrosaur survived an attack from a T. rex, then T. rex was a habitual predator and OMG JACK HORNER AND OTHERS BEFORE HIM WERE WRONG!

And you’d be right.

My encounter with the question stemmed from an email from a science journalist (Matt Kaplan) that, as is normal practice, shared a copy of the unpublished paper and asked for comments from me to potentially use in an article he was writing for the science journal Nature’s news site. Here, then, was my off-the-cuff response:

“Ooh. I do have a pretty strong opinion on this. Not sure if you’d want to use it but here goes. I may regret it, but this hits my hot buttons for One of the Worst Questions in All of Palaeobiology!

The T. rex “predator vs. scavenger” so-called controversy has sadly distracted the public from vastly more important, real controversies in palaeontology since it was most strongly voiced by Dr Jack Horner in the 1990s. I find this very unfortunate. It is not like scientists sit around scratching their heads in befuddlement over the question, or debate it endlessly in scientific meetings. Virtually any palaeontologist who knows about the biology of extant meat-eaters and the fossil evidence of Late Cretaceous dinosaurs accepts that T. rex was both a predator and scavenger; it was a carnivore like virtually any other kind that has ever been known to exist.

While the discovery is nice evidence, it is not particularly exciting in a scientific sense and is only one isolated element from species that lived for hundreds of thousands of years, which to me changes nothing and allows no generalizations about the biology of any species, only the statement that at one point in time a Tyrannosaurus bit a hadrosaur that survived the encounter. There is no real substance to the controversy that T. rex was “either” a predator or scavenger. It is just something that scientists drum up now and then to get media attention. I hope that soon we can move on to more pressing questions about the biology of extinct animals, but the media needs to recognize that this is just hype and they are being played in a rather foolish way; likewise scientists that still feel this is an exciting question need to move on. Maybe this specimen will allow that. But somehow my cynical side leads me to suspect that this “controversy” will just persist because people want it to, regardless of logic or evidence. (bold font added; see below)

Great galloping lizards, I am so tired of this nonsense. Maybe there is educational value in showing how science deals with provocative half-baked ideas about celebrity species, but scientists in the community need to speak up and say what the real science is about. It’s not about this “controversy”. Modern palaeontology is so much better than this.

Sorry for the rant. Maybe it’s too extreme but I’m just fed up with this non-issue! I suspect a huge proportion of our field feels similarly, however.”

(I later redacted a bit of it where I got a little too excited and used the word “curmudgeon”; a mistake, as that could be seen as ad hominem rather than a term of endearment, and this issue is about the science and not the people, per se. That bit is redacted here, too. I’ve also redacted a sentence in which I made an opinion on whether the paper should have been published in PNAS; that is mostly irrelevant here. I was not a reviewer, and authors/reviewers/editors have to make that decision. This would be a massive tangent away from what this blog post is intended to be about! I know some of the authors and don’t want to offend them, but this is about the science and how it is represented to the world, not about these particular authors or even this paper itself.)

Importantly, Kaplan’s story did include my skeptical quote at the end. I am curious to see how many other news stories covering this paper go that far.

Would a T. rex prey on, or just scavenge — or have a great time racing — a giant chicken? (art by Luis Rey)

I will stop right here and acknowledge that I’ve published a lot on a somewhat related topic: how fast a T. rex could run or if it could run at all. To me, that’s a great scientific question that has consequences not only for the predator/scavenger false dichotomy, but also for general theories of locomotor biomechanics (can an animal the size of a large elephant run as well as or better than said elephant? What are the thresholds of size and maximal running/jumping/other athletic abilities and how do they vary in different evolutionary lineages? And so on.). I’ll defend the validity of that question to the bitter end, even if it’s a question I’ve grown a little (but only a little) tired of and generally feel is about as well settled as these things can be in palaeontology (see my review here). I’ll also defend that it has been a real controversy (I have plenty of old emails, formal rebuttals submitted by colleagues, and other discourse as evidence of this) since I tackled it starting in 2002 and sort of finishing by 2011. I am sensitive about the issue of hyping my research up– this is something I’ve been careful about. I set a reasonable bar of how much is too much, check myself continuously with reflective thought, and I do not feel I have ever really crossed that bar, away from science-promotion into darker realms. This is partly why I’ve stopped addressing this issue in my current work. I feel like the science we’ve done on this is enough for now, and to keep beating the same drum would be excessive, unless we discovered a surprising new way to address the questions better, or a very different and more compelling answer to them.

“T. rex: scavenger or predator?” was controversial back  in 1994 when Horner published “The Complete T. rex”, where he laid out his arguments. Brian Switek covered this quite well in his post on it, so I will not review that history. There was a big Museum of the Rockies exhibit about it that toured the USA, and other media attention surrounding it, so Horner’s name became attached to the idea as a result. Other such as Lambe and Colinvaux had addressed it before, but their ideas never seemed to gain as much currency as Horner’s did. But this post is not about that.

What this post is about is a consideration of why this is still an issue that the media report on (and scientists publish on; the two are synergistic of course), if most scientists aware of past debates are in good agreement that a T. rex was like most other carnivores and was opportunistic as a switch-hitting scavenger-predator, not a remarkably stupid animal that would turn down a proper meal that was dead/alive. Indeed, the Nature news piece has a juicy quote from Horner that implies (although I do not know if it was edited or if important context is missing) that he has been in favour of the opportunistic predator-scavenger conclusion for some time. Thus, as Switek’s article notes, even the strongest advocates of the obligate scavenger hypothesis(?) have changed their minds; indeed, that 2011 blog post intimates that this had already happened at least 2 years ago.

For many years, nothing has been published in the main peer-reviewed literature that favours that extreme “obligate scavenger” hypothesis. If I am wrong and there is a scientific debate, where are the recent papers (say within the past 5 years) that are strong, respectable arguments in favour of it? I contend that it is a dead issue. And if it is just about the middle ground; i.e. what percent of its time did a T. rex spend hunting vs. scavenging; we have no clue and may never know, and it’s not a very interesting question.

But who then is feeding off of this moribund equine; this defunct tyranno-parrot?

In thinking about my reply to the journalist over the past 2 days, I am reminded again of my general feeling that this is no longer a question of scientific evidence; the important bit in bold font above. Maybe we just like this “hypothesis” or the “controversy”, or maybe we’re lazy and don’t want to have to hunt for real debates in science.

But who are “the people?” I do not feel that The Public should be blamed; they are the people that The Scientists and The Media ostensibly are seeking to inform about what the state of modern knowledge and uncertainty is in science. So when I get asked about the controversy after a public lecture, I always try to go into detail about it. I don’t sigh and say “go Google it”. Nor do I do this to a journalist. Indeed, I’ve generally headed this issue off at the pass and added a blurb to press releases/webpages explaining my T. rex research to explain how it relates to the non-controversy; example here.

I have to begin turning my finger of accusation away from scientists and toward some of the media, because they must play a huge role in the shennanigans. Yes, scientists should know better then to play this up as a valid, heated, modern controversy. That is true. Yet I have a feeling that the balance of blame should also fall heavily on the side of media (general and science news) that continue to report on this issue uncritically as a real controversy. Thus the general public thinks it still is, and scientists/journals keep issuing papers/press releases that it is, leading to more reporting on this “controversy”, and the beast refuses to die. Switek’s article is a good counter-example of balanced coverage with clear application of critical thinking.

This is trivially different from other non-controversies in palaeontology such as whether birds evolved from a subgroup of theropod dinosaurs and hence are dinosaurs by virtue of descent (consensus = yes). So it is reflective of a broader problem of not calling a spade a spade.

And it’s embarassing, to a scientist, as my quote above expressed, to see dead controversies trotted out again and again, feeding the public perception that they are not dead.

That’s what leaves me frustrated. When do the shennanigans end?

I am reminded of a quote from a Seinfeld episode:

“Breaking up is like knocking over a Coke machine. You can’t do it in one push. You gotta rock it back and forth a few times, and then it goes over.”- Jerry, from the episode “The Voice”.

But this predator/scavenger relationship-from-hell leaves me, as a specialist working in this general area, feeling like I am trapped under that fridge. Help!

That’s why I started off this long post talking about feeling deflated, or disappointed, when asked this question. I do feel that way. I have to admit, I sometimes even feel that way when a sweet young kid asks me that question. Deep inside, I wish they wondered about something else. I wish that science had reached them with a deeper, more contemporary question. But when a journalist asks me how I feel about a new paper that revisits the “controversy”, I feel embarassed for palaeontology. Can’t we get past this? It makes us look so petty, mired in trivial questions for decades. But we’re not like that. This is a dynamic, exciting, modern field, but every news story about non-issues in palaeontology just perpetuate bad elements of palaeontology’s image.

To the scientists– why don’t we put our foot down more and say enough is enough, this is a dead issue? We have a role not only in peer review, but also in communicating our views about published work to the media when asked (AND when not asked, as in this blog post). But if you call them on it, do they listen? Which brings me to…

To the media (science/general journalists etc; I know this is a huge category and please don’t think I am blaming 100% of journalists or assuming they are all the same; they are not!)– if scientists tell you that a “controversy” is not such, at what point do you accept their judgement and kill the story, or at least use that quote? Does that ever happen? In what way are you at the mercy of senior editors/others in such issues? What power do you have? Is a shift in the balance of editorial power needed, or even achievable, in your case or in good exemplar cases? I’d really like to hear your experiences/thoughts. I am sure there is a lot I am not understanding, and I know many journalists are in a tough situation.

To the public– You’re often being misinformed; you are the losers in this issue. How do you feel about all it? (While this post focuses on a very tiny issue, the T. rex scavenger/predator unending drama, it is also about a broader issue of how the media perpetuates controversies in science after they have already gone extinct.)

What did this post have to do with freezers? Nothing. I’m just (H)ornery. Although I was once filmed for a planned Discovery Channel film about scientists who find a frozen tyrannosaur in polar regions and have to decide what to do with it before it slips into a chasm and is lost forever. Probably better that this never aired; it was cancelled. Segue to this post.

The Berkeley cast of the Wankel (MOR555) specimen of T. rex. Will we ever see the end of the predator/scavenger non-issue?

This post was just published yesterday in a shorter, edited form in The Conversation UK, with the addition of some of my latest thoughts and the application of the editor’s keen scalpel. Check that out, but check this out too if you really like the topic and want the raw original version! I’ve changed some images, just for fun. The text here is about 2/3 longer.

Recently, the anatomy of animals comes up a lot, at least implicitly, in science news stories or internet blogs. Anatomy, if you look for it, is everywhere in organismal and evolutionary biology. The study of anatomy has undergone a renaissance lately, in a dynamic phase energized by new technologies that enable new discoveries and spark renewed interest. It is the zombie science, risen from what some had assumed was its eternal grave!

Stomach-Churning Rating: 4/10; there’s a dead elephant but no gore.

My own team has re-discovered how elephants have a false “sixth toe” that has been a mystery since it was first mentioned in 1710, and we’ve illuminated how that odd bit of bone evolved in the elephant lineage. This “sixth toe” is a modified sesamoid kind of bone; a small, tendon-anchoring lever. Typical mammals just have a little nubbin of sesamoid bone around their ankles and wrists that is easily overlooked by anatomists, but evolution sometimes co-opts as raw material to turn into false fingers or toes. In several groups of mammals, these sesamoids lost their role as a tendon’s lever and gained a new function, more like that of a finger, by becoming drastically enlarged and elongated during evolution. Giant pandas use similar structures to grasp bamboo, and moles use them to dig. We’ve shown that elephants evolved these giant toe-like structures as they became larger and more terrestrial, starting to stand up on tip-toe, supported by “high-heels” made of fat. Those fatty heels benefit from a stiff, toe-like structure that helps control and support them, while the fatty pads spread out elephants’ ponderous weight.

Crocodile lung anatomy and air flow, by Emma Schachner.

I’ve also helped colleagues at the University of Utah (Drs. Emma Schachner and Colleen Farmer) reveal, to much astonishment, that crocodiles have remarkably “bird-like” lungs in which air flows in a one-way loop rather than tidally back and forth as in mammalian lungs. They originally discovered this by questioning what the real anatomy of crocodile lungs was like- was it just a simple sac-like structure, perhaps more like the fractal pattern in mammalian lungs, and how did it work? This question bears directly on how birds evolved their remarkable system of lungs and air sacs that in many ways move air around more effectively than mammalian lungs do. Crocodile lungs indicate that “avian” hallmarks of lung form and function, including one-way air flow, were already present in the distant ancestors of dinosaurs; these traits were thus inherited by birds and crocodiles. Those same colleagues have gone on to show that this feature also exists in monitor lizards, raising the question (almost unthinkable 10-20 years ago) of whether those bird-like lungs are actually a very ancient and common feature for land animals.

Speaking of monitor lizards, anatomy has revealed how they (and some other lizards) all have venom glands that make their bites even nastier, and these organs probably were inherited by snakes. For decades, scientists had thought that some monitor lizards, especially the huge Komodo dragons, drooled bacteria-laden saliva that killed their victims with septic shock. Detailed anatomical and molecular investigations showed instead that modified salivary glands produced highly effective venom, and in many species of lizards, not just the big Komodos. So the victims of numerous toothy lizard species die not only from vicious wounds, but also from worsened bleeding and other circulatory problems promoted by the venomous saliva. And furthermore, this would mean that venom did not evolve separately in the two known venomous lizards (Gila monster and beaded lizard) and snakes, but was inherited from their common ancestor and became more enhanced in those more venomous species—an inference that general lizard anatomy supports, but which came as a big surprise when revealed by Bryan Fry and colleagues in 2005.

There’s so much more. Anatomy has recently uncovered how lunge-feeding whales have a special sense organ in their chin that helps them detect how expansive their gape is, aiding them to engulf vast amounts of food. Scientists have discovered tiny gears in the legs of leafhoppers that help them make astounding and precise leaps. Who knew that crocodilians have tiny sense organs in the outer skin of their jaws (and other parts of their bodies) that help them detect vibrations in the water, probably aiding in communication and feeding? Science knows, thanks to anatomy.

Just two decades or so ago, when I was starting my PhD studies at the University of California in Berkeley, there was talk about the death of anatomy as a research subject; both among scientists and the general public. What happened? Why did anatomy “die” and what has resuscitated it?

TH Huxley, anatomist extraordinaire, caricatured in a lecture about “bones and stones, and such-like things” (source)

Anatomy’s Legacy

In the 16th through 19th centuries, the field of gross anatomy as applied to humans or other organisms was one of the premier sciences. Doctor-anatomist Jean Francois Fernel, who invented the word “physiology”, wrote in 1542 that (translation) “Anatomy is to physiology as geography is to history; it describes the theatre of events.” This theatric analogy justified the study of anatomy for many early scientists, some of whom also sought to understand it to bring them closer to understanding the nature of God. Anatomy gained impetus, even catapulting scientists like Thomas Henry Huxley (“Darwin’s bulldog”) into celebrity status, from the realisation that organisms had a common evolutionary history and thus their anatomy did too. Thus comparative anatomy became a central focus of evolutionary biology.

But then something happened to anatomical research that can be hard to put a finger on. Gradually, anatomy became a field that was scoffed at as outmoded, irrelevant, or just “solved”; nothing important being left to discover. As a graduate student in the 1990s, I remember encountering this attitude. This apparent eclipse of anatomy accelerated with the ascent of genetics, with anatomy reaching its nadir in the 1950s-1970s as techniques to study molecular and cellular biology (especially DNA) flourished.

One could argue that molecular and cellular biology are anatomy to some degree, especially for single-celled organisms and viruses. Yet today anatomy at the whole organ, organism or lineage level revels in a renaissance that deserves inspection and reflection on its own terms.

Anatomy’s Rise

Surely, we now know the anatomy of humans and some other species quite well, but even with these species scientists continue to learn new things and rediscover old aspects of anatomy that laid forgotten in classic studies. For example, last year Belgian scientists re-discovered the anterolateral ligament of the human knee, overlooked since 1879. They described it, and its importance for how our knees function, in novel detail, and a lot of media attention was drawn to this realisation that there are some things we still don’t understand about our own bodies.

A huge part of this resurgence of anatomical science is technology, especially imaging techniques- we are no longer simply limited to the dissecting knife and light microscope as tools, but armed with digital technology such as 3-D computer graphics, computed tomography (series of x-rays) and other imaging modalities. Do you have a spare particle accelerator? Well then you can do amazing synchrotron imaging studies of micro-anatomy, even in fairly large specimens. Last year, my co-worker Stephanie Pierce and colleagues (including myself) used this synchrotron approach to substantially rewrite our understanding of how the backbone evolved in early land animals (tetrapods). We found that the four individual bones that made up the vertebrae of Devonian tetrapods (such as the iconic Ichthyostega) had been misunderstood by the previous 100+ years of anatomical research. Parts that were thought to lie at the front of the vertebra actually lay at the rear, and vice versa. We also discovered that, hidden inside the ribcage of one gorgeous specimen of Ichthyostega, there was the first evidence of a sternum, or breastbone; a structure that would have been important for supporting the chest of the first land vertebrates when they ventured out of water.

Recently, anatomists have become very excited by the realization that a standard tissue staining solution, “Lugol’s” or potassium iodide iodine, can be used to reveal soft tissue details in CT scans. Prior to this recognition, CT scans were mainly used in anatomical research to study bone morphology, because the density contrast within calcified tissues and between them and soft tissues gives clearer images. To study soft tissue anatomy, you typically needed an MRI scanner, which is less commonly accessible, often slower and more expensive, and sometimes lower resolution than a CT scanner. But now we can turn our CT scanners into soft tissue scanners by soaking our specimens in this contrast solution, allowing highly detailed studies of muscles and bones, completely intact and in 3D. Colleagues at Bristol just published a gorgeous study of the head of a common buzzard, sharing 3D pdf files of the gross anatomy of this raptorial bird and promoting a new way to study and illustrate anatomy via digital dissections- you can view their beautiful results here. Or below (by Stephan Lautenschlager et al.)!

These examples show how anatomy has been transformed as a field because we now can peer inside the bodies of organisms in unprecedented detail, sharing and preserve those data in high-resolution digital formats. We can do this without the concern that a unique new species from Brazilian rainforests or exciting fossil discovery from the Cambrian period would be destroyed if we probed certain questions about its anatomy that are not visible from the outside– a perspective in which science had often remained trapped for centuries. These tools became rapidly more diverse and accessible from the 1990s onward, so as a young scientist I got to see some of the “before” and “after” influences on anatomical research—these have been very exciting times!

When I started my PhD in 1995, it was an amazing luxury to first get a digital camera to use to take photographs for research, and then a small laser scanner for making 3D digital models of fossils, with intermittent access to a CT scanner in 2001 and now full-time access to one since 2003. These stepwise improvements in technology have totally transformed the way I study anatomy. In the 1990s, you dissected a specimen and it was reduced to little scraps; at best you might have some decent two-dimensional photographs of the dissection and some beetle-cleaned bones as a museum specimen. Now, we CT or MRI scan specimens as routine practice, preserving many mega- or gigabytes of data on its internal and external, three-dimensional anatomy in lush detail, before scalpel ever touches skin. Computational power, too, has grown to the point where incredibly detailed 3D digital models produced from imaging real specimens can be manipulated with ease, so science can better address what anatomy means for animal physiology, behaviour, biomechanics and evolution. We’re at the point now where anatomical research seems no longer impeded by technology– the kinds of questions we can ask are more limited by access to good anatomical data (such as rare specimens) than by the ways we acquire and use those data.

My experience mirrors my colleagues’. Larry Witmer at Ohio University in the USA, past president of the International Society for Vertebrate Morphologists, has gone from dissecting bird heads in the 1990s to becoming a master of digital head anatomy, having collected 3D digital scans of hundreds of specimens, fossil and otherwise. His team has used these data to great success, for example revealing how dinosaurs’ fleshy nostrils were located in the front of their snouts (not high up on the skull, as some anatomists had speculated based on external bony anatomy alone). They have also contributed new, gorgeous data on the 3D anatomy of living animals such as opossums, ostriches, iguanas and us, freely available on their “Visible Interactive Animal” anatomy website. Witmer comments on the changes of anatomical techniques and practice: “For extinct animals like dinosaurs, these approaches are finally putting the exploration of the evolution of function and behavior on a sound scientific footing.”

I write an anatomy-based blog called “What’s in John’s Freezer?” (haha, so meta!), in which I recount the studies of animal form and function that my research team and others conduct, often using valuable specimens stored in our lab’s many freezers. I started this blog almost two years ago because I noticed a keen interest, or even hunger for, stories about anatomy amongst the general public; and yet few blogs explicitly were about anatomy for its own sake. This interest became very clear to me when I was a consultant for the BAFTA award-winning documentary series “Inside Nature’s Giants” in 2009, and I was noticing more documentaries and other programmes presenting anatomy in explicit detail that would have been considered too risky 10 years earlier. So not only is anatomy a vigorous, rigorous science today, but people want to hear about it. Just in recent weeks, the UK has had “Dissected” as two 1-hour documentaries and “Secrets of Bones” as back-to-back six 30-minute episodes, all very explicitly about anatomy, and on PRIME TIME television! And PBS in the USA has had “Your Inner Fish,” chock full of anatomy. I. Love. This.

Before the scalpel: the elephant from Inside Nature’s Giants

There are many ways to hear about anatomy on the internet these days, reinforcing the notion that it enjoys strong public engagement. Anatomical illustrators play a vital role now much as they did in the dawn of anatomical sciences– conveying anatomy clearly requires good artistic sensibilities, so it is foolish to undervalue these skills. The internet age has made disseminating such imagery routine and high-resolution, but we can all be better about giving due credit (and payment) to artists who create the images that make our work so much more accessible. Social media groups on the internet have sprung up to celebrate new discoveries- watch the Facebook or Twitter feeds of “I F@*%$ing Love Science” or “The Featured Creature,” to name but two popular venues, and you’ll see a lot of fascinating comparative animal anatomy there, even if the word “anatomy” isn’t necessarily used. I’d be remiss not to cite Emily Graslie’s popular, unflinchingly fun social media-based explorations of gooey animal anatomy in “The Brain Scoop”. I’d like to celebrate that these three highly successful disseminators of (at least partly) anatomical outreach are all run by women—anatomical science can (and should!) defy the hackneyed stereotype that only boys like messy stuff like dissections. There are many more such examples. Anatomy is for everyone! It is easy to relate to, because we all live in fleshy anatomical bodies that rouse our curiosity from an early age, and everywhere in nature there are surprising parallels with — as well as bizarre differences from — our anatomical body-plans.

Anatomy’s Relevance

What good is anatomical knowledge? A great example comes from gecko toes, but I could pick many others. Millions of fine filaments, modified toe scales called setae, use micro-molecular forces called van der Waals interactions to help geckos cling to seemingly un-clingable surfaces like smooth glass. Gecko setae have been studied in such detail that we can now create their anatomy in sufficient detail to make revolutionary super-adhesives, such as the product “Geckskin”, 16 square inches of which can currently suspend 700 pounds aloft. This is perhaps the most famous example from recent applications of anatomy, but Robert Full’s Poly-Pedal laboratory at Berkeley, among many other research groups excelling at bio-inspired innovation in robotics and other fields of engineering and design, regularly spins off new ideas from the principle that “diversity enables discovery”, as applied to the sundry forms and functions found in organisms. By studying the humble cockroach, they have created new ways of building legged robots that can scour earthquake wreckage for survivors or explore faraway planets. By asking “how does a lizard use its big tail during leaping?” they have discovered principles that they then use to construct robots that can jump over or between obstacles. Much of this research relates to how anatomical traits determine the behaviours that a whole, living, dynamic organism is capable of performing.

Whereas when I was a graduate student, anatomists and molecular biologists butted heads more often than was healthy for either of them, competing for importance (and funding!), today the scene is changing. With the rise of “evo devo”, evolutionary developmental biology, and the ubiquity of genomic data as well as epigenetic perspectives, scientists want to explain “the phenotype”—what the genome helps to produce via seemingly endless developmental and genetic mechanisms. Phenotypes often are simply anatomy, and so anatomists now have new relevance, often collaborating with those skilled in molecular techniques or other methods such as computational biology. One example of a hot topic in this field is, “how do turtles build their shells and how did that shell evolve?” To resolve this still controversial issue, we need to know what a shell is made of, what features in fossils could have been precursors to a modern shell, how turtles are related to other living and extinct animals, how a living turtle makes its shell, and how the molecular signals involved are composed and used in animals that have or lack shells. The first three questions require a lot of anatomical data, and the others involve their fair share, too.

Questions like these draw scientists from disparate disciplines closer together, and thanks to that proximity we’re inching closer to an answer to this longstanding question in evolutionary biology and anatomy, illustrated above in the video.  As a consequence, the lines between anatomists and molecular/cellular biologists increasingly are becoming blurred, and that synthesis of people, techniques and perspectives seems to be a healthy (and inevitable?) trend for science. But there’s still a long way to go in finding a happy marriage between anatomists and the molecular/cellular biologists whose work eclipsed theirs in past decades. Old controversies like “should we use molecules or morphology to figure out how animals are related to each other?” are slowly dying out, as the answer becomes evident to be “Yes. Both.” (especially when fossils can be included!) Such dwindling controversies contribute to the healing of disciplinary rifts and the unruffling of parochial feathers.

Yet many anatomists would point to lingering obstacles that give them concern for their future; funding is but one of them (few would argue that gross anatomical research is as well off in provision of funding as genetics is, for example). There are clear mismatches between the hefty importance, vitality, popularity and rigour of anatomical science and its perception or its role in academia.

Romane 1892, covering Haeckel’s classic, early evo-devo work (probably partly faked, but still hugely influential) (source)

Anatomy’s Future

One worry the trend that anatomy as a scientific discipline is clearly flourishing in research while it dwindles in teaching. Fewer and fewer universities seem to be teaching the basics of comparative anatomy that were a mainstay of biology programmes a century ago. Yet anatomy is everywhere now in biology, and in the public eye. It inspires us with its beauty and wonder—when you marvel at the glory of beholding a newly discovered species, you are captivated by its phenotypic pulchritude. Anatomy is still the theatre in which function and physiology are enacted, and the physical encapsulation of the phenotype that evolution moulds through interactions with the environment. But there is cause for concern that biology students are not learning much about that theatre, or that medical schools increasingly seem to eschew hands-on anatomical dissection in favour of digital learning. Would you want a doctor to treat you if they mainly knew human anatomy from a CGI version on an LCD screen in medical school, and hence were less aware of all the complexity and variation that a real body can house?

Anatomy has an identity problem, too, stemming from decades of (Western?) cultural attitudes (e.g. the “dead science” meme) and from its own success—by being so integral to so many aspects of biology, anatomy seems to have integrated itself toward academic oblivion, feeding the perception of its own obsolescence.  I myself struggled with what label to apply to myself as an early career researcher- I was afraid that calling myself an “anatomist” would render me quaint or unambitious in the eyes of faculty job interview panels, and I know that many of my peers felt the same. I resolved that inner crisis years ago and came to love identifying myself at least partly as an anatomist. I settled on the label “evolutionary biomechanist” as the best term for my speciality. In order to reconstruct evolution or how animals work (biomechanics), we first often need to describe key aspects of anatomy, and we still discover new, awesome things about anatomy in the process. I still openly cheer on anatomy as a discipline because its importance is so fundamental to what I do, and I am far from alone in that attitude. Other colleagues that do anatomical research use other labels for themselves like “biomechanist”, “physiologist,” or “palaeontologist”, because those words better capture the wide range of research and teaching that they do, but I bet also because some of them likely still fear the perceived stigma of the word “anatomy” among judgemental scientists, or even the public. At the same time, many of us get hired at medical, veterinary or biology schools/departments because we can teach anatomy-based courses, so there is still hope.

Few would now agree with Honoré de Balzac’s 19th century opinion that “No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman”, but we should hearken back to what classical scientists knew well: it is to the benefit of science, humanity and the world to treasure the anatomy that is all around us. We inherit that treasure through teaching; to abscond this duty is to abandon this trove. With millions of species around today and countless more in the past, there should always be a wealth of anatomy for everyone to learn from, teach about, and rejoice.

X-ray technology has revolutionized anatomical studies; what’s next? Ponder that as this ostrich wing x-ray waves goodbye.

Like this post? You might also find my Slideshare talk on the popularity of anatomy interesting- see my old post here for info!

SupraHoloNet Transmission

Year 277 ABY, Fourth Imperial Age

Hoth System (location classified)

From: Dr. Zhonav Diphyryzas, Imperial Corps for Yesterday’s Misplaced Information; Knowledge Harvesters Unit; New Imperial Science Department

To: Dr. John of the Freezers, Unaligned World Contact #1314, Terran system

Subject: Functional Anatomy of Tatooine Megafauna

Dear Terran Science-Invigilator Dr. Freezers,

I write to you with the detailed correspondence I promised for your “blog carnival“, whatever that is, and in honour of our Fourth Empire’s glorious leader Empress Syrrhosyx—may her inestimably wise and orderly rulership soon grace your distant world as it has our not-so-far-away galaxy. I hope that my Galactic translator continues to function properly with your crude technology. Our Empire’s embrace would grant your culture midi-chlorian-powered devices that would make our dialogue far simpler via intermental transmission, with minimal apparent side effects for you. You need not worry about the apocryphal stories that your people told about our first Imperial Age. That Skywalker kid was a terrorist, pure and simple. However, our inside sources reveal that the “documentary” in progress by the Terran named Jjabrams includes a rather accurate portrayal of the perfidious giant muromorph race from planet Dis’snai. “Baby steps”, as you say.

Our communications continue to be crippled by the mynock infestation that has plagued my orbital facility, and moreso by your own barbarian apparati. Thus the resolution of my images included here is a pale reflection of what our holo-imaging can achieve. But your readers can click the images to enhance their magnitude.

As the subject indicates, the transmission concerns my recent visit to the desert world of Tatooine, stimulated by investigations I conducted in the Corellian Science Museum. In that museum I found rare skeletal remains of the little-studied, reportedly extinct arthroreptile the Krayt Dragon (Tyrannodraconis tatooinensis by your archaic nomenclature). I’ll revisit this further below, because a subsequent discovery changed everything for me. I just wanted to whet your appetite, and this image of museum specimens of krayt dragons may do so:

Two fragmentary skeletons of small Krayt Dragons, from the Corellian Science Museum. (Image source here) Note their short necks and quadrupedal limbs.

With growing fascination for the large land vertebratomorphs that are so startlingly diverse on Tatooine, I secured Imperial funding for an expedition to Tatooine, to survey the exotic megafauna and search for fossils of Tyrannodraconis that might further illuminate their evolution. My ensuing report summarizes my trilogy of investigations and discoveries from this “holiday in the suns”:

Stormtrooper on a Dewback in the Eastern Dune Sea (image source here). Note how gracile the limbs are below the elbows/knees.

Investigation 1. Dissection of a Dewback, Mos Eisley

My ample funding (I’m sure you’re jealous) secured and stocked a laboratory for me in the colourful Mos Eisley spaceport, which has seen unprecedented commercial influx in recent years and now largely serves as an adventure park for hyperspace tourists (funded in part by the muromorphs of planet Dis’snai). With coliseum seating for a gathered host of some 1.6 million curiously slavering punters and drunken local yokels, I completed a full dissection of a fresh adult dewback (Iguanomorphus homoplasticus) specimen, illustrated below at its climax: exposure of the great fat body of the tail and the large caudofemoral muscle in the left thigh.  (curse this infernal Jawa 37C-H4 sketching droid’s malfunctions!)

Jawa 37C-H4 sketching droid illustration: My dissection of a common dewback, showing (ventral view) the caudofemoral muscle and tendon, tail fat body (obscured by the nearby muscle), and fibrous pads used while resting on the sand.

My main observations support those of prior scholars, even from the Rebel Alliance era (bucking the trend of having to correct all their mistakes!): dewbacks have earned their moniker well by the characteristic water-condensing tissues on their dorsal surfaces. Microdroid explorations of these tissues, which lie within a dimpled midline ridge, house a high density of capillaries in a countercurrent network that surrounds a large number of specialised pores, or stomata, which smooth muscular rings contract to pull open when humidity, temperature and shade are best suited to cooling the surrounding air (via air currents encouraged by the stomata, and by local cooling via the capillary rete).

Previous scholars overlooked this mechanism, which conducts excessive warmth to the heat-emanative fat bodies in the bulky tail and the neck hump (my dissections nicely revealed these; similar tissues are concentrated in the foot pads and sternal pad). The mechanism also allows the body to be up to 20% cooler than the ambient air; an analogous adaptation to that seen in the banthas (below). My peers also failed to realize that the social nature of the dewback is key to its water conservation: while the stomatal rete can draw in some condensed water, it is far more effectively ingested by licking the backs of fellow dewbacks. Lone dewbacks thus are more prone to dehydration. The night-time group-huddling habits of dewbacks to conserve heat that they would otherwise too easily shed in the cool night air is yet another testament to the benefits of their sociality.

As ectotherms, dewbacks are slaves to the hot-cool cycles of the Tatooine wastes, but their sociality liberates them. Further escape comes from their large size (>800 kilograms of Terran mass units), which renders them mostly homeothermic, but never endothermic like some of your otherwise unimpressive Terran reptiles of past or present.

A laser-histology trek by microdroids showed the “scaled” hide around the rest of the body to be composed of siliceous material embedded in the thickly fibrous connective tissue of the skin, forming stereotyped arrowhead-shaped “siliceoderms”, as I term them, shown below.

Curious microstructure of the small “siliceoderms” from dewback skin that I have described– single ‘derm on the left, multiple ‘derms surrounding a stoma on the right. To see these structures, one must view the “scales” at high magnification, ideally with microdroids.

I surmise that: (1) these siliceoderms are formed of fused Tatooine sand grains; (2) the grains become embedded into the soft, pliable skin as dewbacks grow, giving them insulation and physical protection; (3) young dewbacks display a previously mysterious behaviour of “sand-rolling” that encourages this embedding during the maturation of a dewback; and (4) the high strength and stiffness of this composite skin not only armours dewbacks but also pressurizes them, ensuring that blood can circulate through their large bodies without backflow or clotting issues, particularly in their gracile lower limbs, which are themselves passively supported by their skin tissues.

With your interest in animal locomotion, you may be curious about tales of how dewbacks can outrun landspeeders, especially in poor weather or terrain conditions. The skin-stiffening agents noted above surely play an important role in this. Indeed, much like your terrestrial varanid lizards, dewbacks do not follow the usual trend of straightening their limbs to support their body more effectively at larger body sizes (improving “effective mechanical advantage” as your field terms it), but they do draw them more closely under the body rather than remain sprawling. I revisit the matter of limb posture toward the end of my transmission.

Furthermore, the huge caudofemoral muscle shown above is able to transmit force from the tail to the thigh, and then its thick tendon transmits the force down the limb to the feet, acting as one strong limb extensor that powers and supports locomotion. No Terran animal does it so well. Banish any thoughts of how the dewback’s wrists and ankles seem implausibly thin– they are pressurized cylinders of dense tendon and bone, more like a Terran horse’s distal limbs than any lizard’s, and linked to far larger tail-to-thigh muscles. The expansive foot pads and reversed first toe (hallux; as in your Terran birds but with no association to arboreality) likewise give dewbacks a stable base of support and spread out their weight over the treacherous desert sands, reducing the work otherwise lost to deforming the sand’s surface and also keeping pressures on their feet at safe levels. Thus dewbacks have many features that explain their reputation for bursts of fast speed (~14 Terran meters/second or 50 kph/30 mph).

Yet whilst during the daytime and over short distances dewbacks can outpace banthas or humanoids on foot, their ectothermic nature causes them to accumulate fatigue too quickly, and thus they must rest. So sans cybernetic enhancements, dewbacks will never be winning any podraces. Nonetheless, I am sure you are awed by how Tatooine’s native reptiliforms, the dewbacks, exceed any living Terran reptile in their size and extreme adaptations to aridity. I have not even described the variations seen in feral, grizzled, cannibal or mountain dewback species, which can surpass the common desert dewback’s. Toward the end of my transmission I will show you animals that exceed even the greatest dinosaurs in sheer glory and ferocity.

Unlike the durable Tauntauns of my home system’s ice planet Hoth, however, dewbacks are ill-suited to cold climates because they are adapted to shed heat, not gain it. But the insulation of the next animal shows a more versatile performance…

Convincing image of a Bantha being ridden by a Tusken Raider/Sand-Person, from your world’s Rebel propaganda film “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope”, by Lucasfilm/Twentieth Century Fox.

Investigation 2. Field Dissection of a Bantha Bull

My anatomical study of a large male bantha (Megalingua feteoclunis) was hastened by not only the merciless heat but also by the imminent arrival of a horde of ravenous womp rats. Some quick incisions with my relict lightsaber sped my work. I focused my attention on three issues of scholarly interest: its marvellous tongue and glossopharyngeal adaptations (how does such a tall animal eat in a world that is far below it?), its hirsute integumentary system (what lies under that thick fur and how do banthas cope with the heat while wearing many wookies worth of wooly warmth?) and its peculiar, pillar-like limbs. The spiralling horns that add rings as the bantha grows, the nuchal ligament that supports the heavy head and neck, and the convoluted, multi-partitioned digestive tract that wrenches every last bit of nutrition from the lichens and other flora hidden beneath Tatooine sands are better understood. And with this bull I had no opportunity to study where the famous blue bantha milk comes from, but I have heard stories and no Terran mammal-esque udders are involved, let me tell you that much…

Anatomy of the oral apparatus of the Bantha, which I correct in my report although it is largely right (but how, Terran authors Terryl Whitlatch and Bob Carrau?). (source)

I don’t know how your Terran science-invigilators managed to get accurate information on bantha tongue anatomy (above) but I have to credit them, they almost got it right. With your can-do attitudes combined with your bungling mistakes, you’d make good Fourth Rebel Alliance members, but don’t get any new hopes. However, as the illustration below shows (and I had to leave the guts in the picture for their sheer impressiveness!), the tongue-projection mechanism extends not around the rear of the skull (occiput) and into the eyes or sinuses, but far back along the giant, spar-like breastbone (sternum) to the hips (pelvis, or propubis).

That mechanism’s powerful projection can extend the tongue as far as 3 Terran meters (10 feet). The tongue is expelled by stretching and then releasing (slowly for precise control, or quickly for a catapult action) a fibrous sac that surrounds the base of the tongue, and this sac then recoils elastically when released to withdraw the tongue. I’ve studied your Terran elephant and chameleon and it combines aspects of both of these, with the tongue having several layers of fine muscle fibres as in the former animal, and the “power amplifier” catch mechanism of the latter, thus providing a superior combination of control and speed. All of these are rightly called muscular hydrostats, but the bantha’s is the best.  You might mention your Terran pangolin as a counter-example, but does that little creature have the spiracle-bearing, ultrasensitive chemosensory tongue and majestic size of the bantha? No. I rest my case.

Jawa 37C-H4 sketching droid illustration: My dissection of a bantha, showing the tongue attachments (note the distal bifurcation), digestive tract and foot structure. The colour variations in the digestive tract seem to be produced by commensal arthroreptiles.

A naïve Terran like yourself might wonder why, of all things, a giant desert mammal such as the bantha would evolve to be clothed in thick fur. Here you would reveal your feeble way of grasping about the diversity of pangalactic Nature. First of all, banthas are not mammals as you know them; a Terran word like pseudomammal would suffice. They lack the diagnostic traits of mammary glands, true hair, and inner ear bones that diagnose the Mammalia of your homeworld, but evolution at a giant size in a hot, dry clime has chastened them to become at least superficially similar to a Terran mammal such as an elephant or mammoth. One might be so naïve, even, to think that a bantha is merely a proboscidean in hairy disguise, but drive such thoughts from your rickety cerebral-implant-deprived mind.

Behold, the true nature of bantha fur, as I have seen with microdroid holo-imaging: it is a second, external circulatory system of sorts. Simply put, the hairs have a thermo-conductive submolecular structure that deflects heat (and even, to a degree, the energy of a blaster) and traps cooler air near the body with an intricate network of cross-linking of barbed fibers more like a Terran bird’s feathers than mammalian hair. In this cooler locale, tracts of spongy skin tissue collect condensed water and direct it to absorbent epithelial beds on the chin and lips, belly, and toes, where the bantha imbibes it, or simply sheds it off to carry further heat away. Thus here we have a fascinating case of convergent evolution with the reptiliform dewbacks, but surpassing even that animal’s adaptation and evolving what you would likely call an air-conditioning system. Banthas cool themselves by circulating a slick of cool water around their body inside a heat-resistant fluffy outer mesh. Whether their horn tissues or tails contribute to this system is yet to be investigated.

Lastly, I have conducted holo-viewings of the biomechanics of bantha gaits from numerous remote studies of wild and Sand People-ridden animals, in light of my own dissections of this bull. What strikes me is the phenomenal convergence with giant quadrupeds on your homeworld: like sauropods, elephants and other species, banthas have evolved “graviportal” or weight-bearing adaptations: (1) limbs that are proportionately longest above the elbow and knee, not distally elongated as in “cursorial” animals; (2) heavy, robust bones that lack much of a marrow space; (3) short, thickly padded feet ending in bulky claws or hooves (three toes in the case of banthas); (4) an emphasis on lateral sequence (left hind-left front-right hind-right front) footfalls when walking, extended to a slightly bouncing, rolling “amble” at faster speeds; (5) strongly vertical limbs when walking, using the limbs more like pillars to support the weight more effectively; and (6) slow maximal speeds, limited to ~7 Terran meters/second (24 kph/15mph) at best.

At around 4000 kg of typical body mass, banthas overlap with the masses of your planet’s erstwhile giants that have such features. I did not uncover any “predigits” supporting the feet of banthas as you had in elephants; rather, their “heels” involve dense fibro-elastic cartilage, which works analogously to give shock-absorbing and resilient properties to the feet. This suite of graviportal features reinforces an idea that is now recognized pan-galactically: At huge sizes, land animals must act relatively more constrained by gravity, becoming forced to adapt more aspects of their biology to resist its pull, lest they strain muscles, break bones, snap tendons, or fall and injure themselves. Thus the convergent evolution of banthas and elephants is no surprise. But is there another way to be an imposing giant? Perhaps…

Investigation 3. On some remains of the “extinct” Krayt Dragon

Ever since I left my home system, thoughts kept tumbling through my mind like rocks in an asteroid field, concerning the krayt dragon bones I had viewed in the museum on Corellia. With the krayt (Tyrannodraconis sp.) lineage reported extinct since at least the year 22 ABY, following much publicity of its awesome nature, its menace seemed now but a phantom. Consequently I could only fantasize of deeper study. That is, until a rumour came to me while resupplying in the well-preserved city of Bestine: not far off on the edge of the Jundland Wastes, a stormtrooper patrol had taken down a strange, enormous, multi-legged arthroreptile that had gone after their dewback mounts. A quick skyhopper flight and I was there, giddy with the adrenaline of impending discovery.

Another Terran artist (one of Terryl Whitlatch and Bob Carrau) renders a compelling illustration, of a Greater Krayt Dragon in life. Where indeed do they get their information from? Bothan spies, I suspect. (Source)

It was a magnificent carcass. Sandworms and scurriers were already attempting to scavenge it, but with little luck and easily driven off with a few shots from my carbine. No stormtroopers remained (alive, anyway), so I didn’t get any details of the fracas that led to this well-timed demise, but the blast points on its body were too precise for sandpeople, and characteristic dewback tracks were everywhere. Even my antique lightsaber seemed poorly up to the task of dissecting this titan: it was over 30 meters (100 feet) long and surely 100 tons of Terran mass if not more; on the scale of your sauropods, but so vastly different in other ways. Right away, from its tracks I could see it had a peculiar mode of movement in life: it had slid up to some rocky cover in these badlands, dragging its belly and bulk along with ten limbs that were slender in comparison to its body, but still each as big as a large bantha’s. I took a deep breath and cut into what was the first Greater Krayt Dragon seen in some 255 years.

Jawa 37C-H4 sketching droid illustration: My dissection of the Greater Krayt Dragon, to extract the Dragon Pearl. The stormtrooper shown forgot the tale that Krayts take 1 hour to die, and so got too close too soon.

If the bantha dissection was a rush job, this one was a sprint. Pockets of gas were forming and erupting while I sliced my way toward the bones and other organs of most interest, with the forces of decomposition slowly winning a race against my science. Oh, if only I’d had a Jawa sandcrawler to repurpose as a mobile freezer! And the sandworms and scurriers were still lurking about, with far nastier things surely soon to be drawn by the carnage out in these remote wastes. Those two days blurred exhaustion and inquiry and disgust and elation into a mire in my mind more pernicious than any on Dagobah. I’m no longer sure of what I saw– you’re probably wondering if I found the fabled krayt dragon pearl in the gizzard, and yes, there was one but I lost it somehow. Same with the venom sacs. Maybe I sipped from one of those; that would explain a lot. I made a sketch that I reproduce here, but then in a crazed, diaphonic state of dehydration and euphoria and frustration I am pretty sure I cut my sketching droid to pieces too, so this is all that remains to bolster my frazzled memories.

Now that I’ve recovered and ruminated, I have come to some conclusions. First, I am left doubting all the little we know about krayt dragons. It is said that they existed in canyon, normal and greater species, and the immense variation of curved horns, clawed limbs and flanged tails lent this taxonomy much credibility in the past. But, call it chronic heatstroke or inspiration as you may, what if all krayt “species” are just stages of a long and repeatedly metamorphic developmental sequence? As my graph below shows, and this is admittedly pieced together from what few museum specimens and documents I have since marshalled to test my hypothesis, krayt traits change uniformly with their body size. As they get bigger, krayt dragons get more multi-legged and longer-necked, diverging from the form of their relatives (in the evolutionary sense of your sciences, sister group or outgroup) from Ruutan, the Kell dragons. The genus Tyrannodraconis, more so than the Kell, betrays its arthroreptile ancestry with their spines, exoskeletal plates, and tendency for polypedality. Their sternum also elongates to support their chest as they change from lumbering, bantha-chasing quadrupeds to slithering, sarlacc-snatching octa- or decapedal behemoths.

Although based on little concrete data, my analysis of known Krayt and related specimens suggests that they change continuously during ontogeny, although leg number may shift more suddenly (I predict this happens during their first metamorphosis at sexual maturity). Strong allometric scaling of neck and total length is evident- if the two lengths scaled as body mass^0.33 they would be maintaining shape across the proposed growth series. But they don’t.

I return to the best-documented krayt dragon remains: those that even Terrans have seen in the Rebel propaganda film you call “Episode IV”. Dr. Freezers, even your fellow blog-invigilators at SV-POW! discussed it. Witness the large size and long neck of the typical Krayt; whether horns existed or not in that form from the film is uncertain, and I note that these could even be a sexually dimorphic feature, but this is beside the point. Remnants of the body and limbs were never found. But this specimen fits well with my idea that all krayts are one species, or two at most—and how many top predatory megafaunal species could coexist on a desolate arid planet like Tatooine anyway?

What still strikes me is the phenotypic variation in krayts: some large or small varieties have from two to four toes, and different scythe-like horns on their tail tips. This leads me to heap speculation atop my precarious pile of hypotheses: what if krayts are simply phenotypically labile, varying their traits almost stochastically between individuals due to relatively flexible ontogenetic programming, but still following strong overall trends as size increase, like those I have plotted above? Those stronger trends might be more tightly regulated by homeobox-like genes similar to those that have shaped so much of your Terran metazoan diversity, influencing features along the body axis like those I have mentioned (neck, limbs) across growth? I like this idea too much for it to be true, I admit. But if one krayt dragon existed just a short time ago, it is not simply fodder for the cryptoxenozoologists. And so, sooner or later, someone will answer my scientific salvo. I predict that burrows where the krayt dragons metamorphose between life stages, growing new legs and longer bodies, will be found in due time.

However, I have a stronger inference that I present to you as part of our common interest. On Terra and Tatooine alike, larger animals tend to adopt more straight-legged limb poses to improve their leverage, as I outlined with the dewbacks above. I plot existing data for Terran animals with my best estimates (for dewbacks and banthas, quite reliable; for krayts, my guesses) for this “effective mechanical advantage” below. What this shows is that dewbacks and Banthas both fall below the “normal” curve for Terran land mammals, as I explain:

In the case of dewbacks, this decrease of limb leverage seems offset by passive support from their pressurized scaly legs and enlarged whole-limb extensor muscles of their hindlegs, so they are overall about as well adapted to bursts of speed as large mammals from your world, such as buffalo or large antelope, even if their endurance suffers (a tradeoff, perhaps, for their reptile-like adaptations to desert life).

In the case of banthas, they do no better or worse than elephants; all are slow due to their size and “graviportal” focus of adaptations. Like elephants, but unlike dewbacks, banthas do not “invest” more body mass into supportive leg muscle, and so they are slower than they might otherwise be.

Effective mechanical advantage (EMA) of the limbs, with Terran data for mammals (red+blue) (source 1 and source 2), and my new data for Tatooine megafauna (green). Past a moderate size, EMA either declines or remains constant. Once the limbs are fairly straight (near the size of a Terran horse, or Tatooine eopie; vertical dashed line), EMA cannot be much improved.

But the krayts (young or smaller species aside) suffer more from their size than other Tatooine megafauna, as they do not increase their limbs’ mechanical advantage any more than the others do, and so they must become slower as they grow. This explains, however, why their ecology shifts from being a mobile predator when smaller (feeding on dewback, then bantha-sized prey) to being more of an ambush predator or specialist on slow/immobile prey like sarlaccs as they attain titanic sizes. Their limbs, despite becoming more numerous, must become less able to support them as size increases, as in other Terran and Tatooine megafauna, and thus they are destined to benefit from giant size (in many ways, including near-invulnerability and capacity to take the largest prey) at a cost of athleticism (but with prey like sarlaccs, who needs it?). In the greater, or fully mature, krayt dragons, I suggest that the limbs each become less supportive and more of a stabilizer to prevent their slug-like bulk from rolling over, or a set of “oars” to help them navigate through sandy environments like the Dune Seas. They support their weight not so much with limbs and levers, but with a larger, cuirass-like breastbone system, rings of muscles and fibrous tissue, and their whole elongate body.

The ultimate implications of my biomechanical research are summarized below—I am sure you will agree with my reasoning.

Maximal speed vs. body mass data from (black) Terran animals (source), and (green) Tatooine megafauna (plus non-native Kell dragons for comparison). As size increases past ~100 kg mass (when EMA in the other graph above is already maximal), speed inevitably declines.

As for those that have said that Greater Krayt Dragons and such are thereby confined to a life as scavengers and nothing more, I would welcome them to explore the Jundland Wastes locales armoured by all the security that this foolish notion provides. I, for one, would enjoy viewing such a visit, but only remotely via a probe droid’s holo-feed.

One of your Terran artists (jeddibub on deviantart) produced a provocative imagining of a Greater Krayt Dragon facing a Jedi. I’d wager for the former.

I submit this report in honour of Empress Syrrhosyx and the Fourth Empire– may you find the contents enlightening and may her rule grace your benighted homeworld before you, too, have nothing left of your megafauna but stories of dragons.

I welcome your comments, and perhaps some of your lauded “freezerinos” would care to comment below—but they must behave themselves, lest I find cause to deposit them in carbonite for hyperspace shipping to a lonely suffering on a lonely planet!

I shall shortly return this “blog” to your control, when the mood strikes me. That is the deal for this correspondence. Pray I don’t alter it any further.

Enjoy your little blog carnival, Terrans…

Pangalactically,

- Dr. Zhonav Diphyryzas

A very short post here to plug BBC Radio 4’s excellent second series of “Just So Science”. These are 15 minute stories involving a reading of parts of Rudyard Kipling’s great British/natural history stories, and then examining how the science of today informs us about the real lives of animals, without resorting to just-so stories a la Kipling (co-opted as a term in evolutionary biology, too!). I was featured last year on rhinos.

I’m featured this year on kangaroos (now available online) and elephants (also available online now). I just listened to the kangaroo episode and it was good fun. I’ve studied the biomechanics of kangaroos a bit, in as-yet unpublished work featured here in a BBC News story (video from that work is below), and we’ve done other work on their bone morphology and how it relates to body size that is sure to come out in not too long.

Don’t blink! Or, for your enjoyment, a looping GIF:

My freezers feature heavily in one bit, in which you can hear me vent my frustrations about an unlabelled bag and stacks of specimens– where is the wallaby? And what’s that crinkling noise?

Best beloved, it is the sound of science. Just so. Enjoy!

[This is the original, unedited text of my shorter, tighter (and I think actually better) News & Views piece for Nature, on the paper described below)

Ambitious experimental and morphological studies of a modern fish show how a flexible phenotype may have helped early “fishapods” to make the long transition from finned aquatic animals into tetrapods able to walk on land.

Stomach-Churning Rating: 1/10. Cute fish. Good science. Happy stomachs!

Photo by Antoine Morin, showing Polypterus on land.

Napoleon Bonaparte’s military excursions into Egypt in 1798-1799 led a young French naturalist, Ètienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, to cross paths with a strange fish that had paired lungs and could “walk” across land on its stubby, lobelike fins. In 1802, he dubbed this fish “Polyptère bichir”¹, today known as the Nile bichir, Polypterus bichir La Cepède 1803. The bichir’s mélange of primitive and advanced traits helped to catapult Geoffroy into scholarly conflict with the reigning naturalist Georges Cuvier back in France and to establish Ètienne as a leading anatomist, embryologist and early evolutionary researcher of repute even today². Now, on their own excursion under the very “evo-devo” flag that the discoverer of Polypterus helped raise, Canadian scientists Standen et al.³ suggest how the remarkable plasticity of the skeleton of Polypterus (the smaller west African relative of P. bichir, P. senegalus or “Cuvier’s bichir”) reveals a key part of the mechanism that might have facilitated the gradual transition from water to land and thus from “fishapods” to tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates).

In a bold experiment, the authors raised 149 young bichirs on land and in water for eight months, then studied how they moved on land vs. in water, and also how the ultimate shape of the skeletal elements of the paired front fin bases differed between the land- and water-raised bichirs. Standen et al.³ discovered that both the form and function of the fins’ foundations transformed to better satisfy the constraints of moving on land. Land-acclimated bichirs took faster steps on land, their fins slipped across the substrate less, they held their fins closer to their body, their noses stayed more aloft and their tails undulated less, with less variable motions overall—behaviours that the authors had predicted should appear to enhance walking abilities on land. In turn, the bones of the neck and shoulder region altered their shape to produce a more mobile fin base with greater independence of fin from neck motion, along with improved bracing of the ventral “collarbone” region. These environmentally-induced traits should have fostered the locomotor changes observed in “terrestrialized” fish and aided the animals in resisting gravity, and they represent a common biological phenomenon termed developmental plasticity^4,5. Interestingly, the land-reared fish could still swim about as well as the wholly aquatic cohort, so there was not a clear trade-off between being a good swimmer and a good walker, which is surprising.

Considered alone, the developmental plasticity of bichir form and function shows how impressive these amphibious fish are. But Standen et al.’s study³  ventured further, to apply the lessons learned from bichir ontogeny to a phylogenetic context and macroevolutionary question. The phenotypic plasticity during bichir development, they infer, could have been harnessed during the evolutionary transformation of fins for swimming into limbs for walking, in the “fishapod” ancestors of tetrapods. Indeed, bichirs are close to the base of the family tree of fishes⁶, and other living relatives of tetrapods have reduced or lost their fins (lungfishes) or adapted to strange deep-sea swimming lifestyles, never walking on land (coelacanths). Thus perhaps bichirs and the “fishapod” lineage share what Geoffroy would have called “unity of type”, today termed homology, of their developmental plasticity in response to a land environment. Surveying the fossil record of early “fishapods” and tetrapods, Standen et al.³ found that the macroevolutionary changes of neck and shoulder anatomy in these gradually more land-adapted animals parallel those they observed in terrestrialized Polypterus, providing ancillary support for their hypothesis.

A further test of the application of Polypterus’s plasticity to fossil tetrapods is naturally difficult. However, the “fishapod” lineage has some exceptional examples of fossil preservation. With sufficient sample sizes (e.g. fossil beds that reveal growth series, such as the Late Devonian Miguasha site in Canada⁷) and palaeoenvironmental gradients in fish or tetrapods, one could imagine performing a rigorous indirect test. Even small samples could be helpful– for example, the early tetrapod Ichthyostega exhibits some developmental changes in its forelimb suggesting that it became more terrestrial as it grew, whereas the related Acanthostega does not evidence such changes⁸– this hints at some developmental plasticity in the former animal.

During the Devonian period (~360-420 million years ago), were the “fishapod” ancestors of tetrapods floundering about on land now and then, gradually shifting from anatomy and behaviours that were more developmentally plastic (as in bichirs) to ones that were more canalized into the terrestrialized forms and functions that more land-adapted tetrapods retained? An attractive possibility is that the developmental plasticity could have led to fixation (reduction of plasticity), an evolutionary phenomenon called genetic assimilation, which another intellectual descendant of Geoffroy, Conrad Hal Waddington, promoted from the 1950s onwards⁹, a concept that now enjoys numerous cases of empirical support¹⁰ that this one may eventually join.

The nature of the genetic and developmental mechanism that bichirs use to achieve the observed developmental plasticity is still unclear. If it has a high enough degree of heritability, then it could be selected for in cross-generational experiments with bichirs. With sufficient time and luck raising these unusual fish, the hypothesis that their plastic response to a terrestrial environment can become genetically assimilated could be directly tested. This study could thus become an epic exemplar of how genetic assimilation can contribute not only to microevolutionary change but also to major macroevolutionary events, as was presciently suggested in a seminal review of developmental plasticity⁴.

This genetic assimilation is the Polypterus study’s reasonable speculation, and one that Geoffroy likely would have applauded, all the more for involving his beloved bichirs. Much as Napoleon’s landfall in Egypt was not a lasting success, bichirs never left wholly terrestrial descendants despite their malleable locomotor system. But the same type of plastic developmental mechanism that bichirs use today to make tentative, floppy incursions of the terrestrial realm might have been harnessed by our own “fishapod” forebears, leaving a far more revolutionary dynasty upon the Earth.

References

1.  Geoffroy, E. (1802). Histoire naturelle et description anatomique d’un nouveau genre de poisson du Nil, nommé polyptère. Annales du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle 1:57-68.
2. Le Guyader, H., & Grene, M. (2004) Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: A Visionary Naturalist. Univ. Chicago Press.
3. Standen, E. M., Du, T. Y., & Larsson, H. C. E. (2014). Developmental plasticity and the origin of tetrapods. Nature, published online.
4. West-Eberhard, M. J. (1989). Phenotypic plasticity and the origins of diversity. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 20:249-278.
5. Pigliucci, M., Murren, C. J., & Schlichting, C. D. (2006). Phenotypic plasticity and evolution by genetic assimilation. Journal of Experimental Biology 209(12):2362-2367.
6. Near, T. J., Dornburg, A., Tokita, M., Suzuki, D., Brandley, M. C., & Friedman, M. (2014). Boom and bust: ancient and recent diversification in bichirs (Polypteridae: Actinopterygii), a relictual lineage of ray‐finned fishes. Evolution 68:1014-1026.
7. Cloutier, R. (2013). Great Canadian Lagerstätten 4. The Devonian Miguasha Biota (Québec): UNESCO World Heritage Site and a Time Capsule in the Early History of Vertebrates.Geoscience Canada40:149-163.
8. Callier, V., Clack, J. A., & Ahlberg, P. E. (2009). Contrasting developmental trajectories in the earliest known tetrapod forelimbs.Science324:364-367.
9. Waddington, C. H. (1953). Genetic assimilation of an acquired character. Evolution 7:118-126.
10. Crispo, E. (2007). The Baldwin effect and genetic assimilation: revisiting two mechanisms of evolutionary change mediated by phenotypic plasticity. Evolution 61:2469-2479.

Goat morphology is cool! (from work with local artist)

Morphology in biology, to me, is about the science of the relationship of anatomical form to function (including biomechanics), evolution, development and other areas of organismal biology. It thus encompasses the more descriptive, form-focused area of anatomy. But in common parlance I use the two terms interchangeably, because many scientists and the general public do know what anatomy is but get confused by the word “morphology”. Not wishing to wage a semantic skirmish or get into what linguistic or other morphology is, I shall move on. But as the title betrays, this post is about morphology and how we should be proud of it as scientists who study it. This is a companion post to my earlier post on Anatomy, which was aimed at a more general audience than at my colleagues. Yet general audience, stick around. You might find this interesting.

I’m a morphologist at heart. What interests me most about organisms is how their form is not only beautiful and amazing itself but tells us profound things about other aspects of biology, as I stated in the first sentence above. I tend to call myself an evolutionary biomechanist, but morphology is in there too, at the heart of what I do, and biomechanical evolutionary morphologist — while more accurate — just does not roll off the lingual apparatus. I’ll dodge that semantic minefield of branding issues now. I’ll instead move on to my more important point that many (but not all) morphologists go through a phase in their career in which they have some strong feelings of being looked down on by other biologists/scientists as doing outmoded or inferior science. I explained in my Anatomy post that this “inferiority” is not the case today, moreso than ever; that the field is in a dynamic renaissance; so if you want some talking points go there. Regardless, these feelings of being almost stigmatized can exacerbate Imposter Syndrome, especially early in a scientific career.

Lizard morphology is cool! And museums exist to house morphological specimens like these.

I can think of one such case of bad feelings in my not-too-distant memory: at a conference dinner, one colleague sitting to my right said to my colleague to my left “What do you think about anatomy? Should students even do any research on it?” and went on with a bit of diatribe about the why-bother-ness of anatomy relative to other areas such as biomechanics. They both knew of my interests in this area, I’m quite sure, so it was as if I was not there sitting in between them. I was so appalled I was stunned into silence, but seething, and the colleague to my left didn’t defend the field either, even though they did a fair amount of research in it. It took a long time for me to cool down, and I still feel a bit offended and shocked that my colleague would say something so awkward and obliquely confrontational. Similar situations occurred during my PhD work at Berkeley, where biomechanics was having a heyday and anatomy was just beginning to rise from the ashes. It’s odd to me when biomechanists devalue morphology, because so much of mechanics depends on and relates to it, but to each their own. In many biological fields there are reductionist schisms that think they can divorce organisms from other aspects of their biology without losing something, so I’m not surprised, but maybe I am falling into my own trap of condescension here…

Anyway, I had those feelings of being on the receiving end of collegial condescension for a long time myself, and maybe that’s part of why I settled on calling my speciality something other than morphology. Shame on me, and double shame for getting back to that branding issue. But maybe not– maybe it IS important to talk about branding. I’ve been thinking a lot about my career and morphology in recent years, and keep returning to the thought that I need to embrace morphology in an even tighter love-hug. This blog has long been intended as a step in that direction (my Pinterest “Mucho Morphology” page is another step), but I could do more. Speaking of morphologists generally, perhaps we all could. Morphology still has some PR issues, most of us would probably agree, despite its arguable renaissance.

Fetal whale morphology is cool! (at Queen Mary UofL)

Thus my point of this post is simple: let’s try using the words morphology or anatomy more often in our scientific communications. Put those words out there and say them with pride. Let’s keep name-dropping morphology everywhere we can, within reason, and defending its value if challenged. To do this, we’ll need to know how we individually feel about morphology, and ensure we’re well informed to defend it. So think about those things, too, if you join this cause. By waging a PR battle against the forces of anti-morphology condescension, be they waxing or waning, we can get others to give our field its due credit. Fly that flayed banner of morphology high.

See a cool picture of an animal and want to post it on social media? Emphasize that it doesn’t just look cool but has amazing anatomy. Publish a cool new paper showing how a novel adaptation evolved? Remind readers of the morphological (or at least phenotypic) basis of that adaptation and how it interacts with the environment. Summarizing your research interests and discipline to a colleague or on a website/CV? Put morphology in there. Stand up straight when you do, too. Morphology, morphology, morphology. Learn to love that word and it will serve us all well. Branding and PR are only part of the struggle that needs to happen, but much as they may be to our distaste they can help. Doing great morphology-based science is the most important thing, but as social human beings the PR issue cannot be ignored.

Cat shoulder morphology is cool! (RVC teaching collection)

This was a short_ish post for me but it’s something I feel strongly about. My feelings have been magnified by taking on the role of Chair-Elect of the Division of Vertebrate Morphology at SICB, assisting the awesome current Chair Dr. Callum Ross and wise past-Chair Alice Gibb in addition the the rest of the committee and division, and as an Executive Committee member in the International Society of Vertebrate Morphology. I now have some extra responsibility to do something. Complaining about the state of affairs doesn’t help much– doing something can. If you’re a vertebrate morphologist, you should join these professional societies/divisions, attend their superb meetings and join their increasing presence on social media like Facebook (and soon Twitter?). Speak up and join in, please, these societies exist to help you and morphology!

Did you notice I didn’t use the title of the post as a lead-in to altered lyrics from a certain hit U2 song? Well I did. Maybe you’ll appreciate me resisting the temptation here. My Xmas song about our three new morphology papers didn’t exactly evoke angelic choruses.

What do you think, morphologists and non-morphologists? I am sure there are analogous situations in other fields. I’m curious how other morphologists or fields deal with or have struggled with this kind of image problem before. Especially under situations where the science itself is vigorous and rigorous, but the perception may be otherwise.

I am reposting a blog post that I co-authored with Anne Osterrieder in 2012. I’ve always liked this post and been proud that we did it. A colleague brought it up to me yesterday, and I was sad to hear that the blog had been killed by hackers, with the original post lost, but Anne and I reconstructed it and I’ve decided to put it up on my blog, as I still feel strongly about its main points and Anne concurred.

Stomach-Churning Rating: 1/10; just words and ideas.

This blog is about freezer-promotion.

Here we present two views on public engagement (PE) or public relations (PR) and the thorny issue of “self promotion” in scientific research, from two scientists who might on the surface seem to be as different as scientists can be in regards to PE/PR. Yet we hope to convey the common ground that lies between these “extremes” and use it to explore, and spark discussion in, what self-promotion is and when it is a good vs. bad thing for scientists. Similar points came up in another blog post at around the same time, linked here.

Professor John R. Hutchinson (here, simply John will do!) does research on dinosaurs and elephants and other “celebrity species” (well, some of them anyway; some others aren’t so sexy but he doesn’t care). Thus getting PE/PR is often all too easy. It is often said that “dinosaur” (or fossil) is among the “holy trinity” of media story subjects; space and health being two others. That status lubricates the gears of a science PE/PR machine. Sometimes, even, the problem is keeping a lid on the “sexy” research until it is “thoroughly cooked” and ready for PE/PR, rather than releasing it prematurely. A flip side to this issue is that this easy success with PE/PR means that almost everyone is doing it, albeit with varying aplomb. So it takes some extra effort to achieve relative excellence at PE/PR in John’s line of research, but he’s not complaining. In contrast, many (indeed, most!) scientists might not have it so easy getting PE/PR and hence need to actively engage in it to draw audiences in. However, when they are successful at PE/PR it might be easier for them to then stand out from the crowd.

Dr. Anne Osterrieder (again, let’s stick with Anne for short) is a Research and Science Communication Fellow, doing research on plant cells – – hello? Hello?! Are you still there? Nine out of ten people will react to this revelation with the question: ‘Why do you work on plants? Plants are boring, they don’t really do anything, do they?’ Most plant scientists agree that the apathy or even contempt displayed towards our poor plants stems from a lack of proper engagement, starting with the way plants are taught in schools. As such plant scientists need to make a conscious effort to engage the public with current plant research and highly topical issues such as food security or plant pathology. Cells have a higher ‘fascination potential’, as the huge success of BBC’s ‘The Hidden Life of the Cell’ showed. Communicating current cell biology becomes more challenging however the deeper we go.

With those introductions done, let’s see what our two scientists think about self-promotion and PE/PR:

You might have spotted John and collaborator James Proffitt on the BBC or in the New Yorker lately, engaging in penguin-promotion.

John:

While self-promotion among scientific researchers could be a slippery slope that leads to a spiral of egomaniacal aggrandizements and delusions of grandeur, how justifiable is this seemingly common perception? In extreme instances, namely the stereotyped – but perhaps relatively rare– “media whore” or “press hound” committing the faux pas of science-by-press-release, perhaps it is. But more commonly among scientists it may just be healthy behaviour. Almost every scientist probably does research because it brings them profound joy and satisfaction, indulging their curiosity. Is it selfish to share that positive, personal message? By turning the issue around like this, one might instead wonder, what’s the problem? Put it all out there, fly your science banner high! Screw the cynics.

But as in much of life, there probably is a happy medium of moderation: a middle ground, because both selfish and generous reasons might underlie “self promotion”. Such reasons can and probably do coexist not only in perfectly non-pathological, but highly PE/PR-committed, researchers, but perhaps even in most scientists. The problem is, self-promotion has taken on bad connotations to some, or even many, scientists. It can frequently be seen couched as “shameless self-promotion” when a person promotes their science, as if to apologize for the promotion and commit it in one fell swoop. Why apologize? Just do it?! If you’re having fun with it, someone else probably will too, and that’s reason enough.

And a second issue is what kind of self-promotion is being performed– is it about the individual and their self-perceived, self-appointed glory? Or is it about the science, even in a detached third person view? Or is not even self-promotion, but team-promotion, if we consider that so many scientists these days are vital parts of a team, not lone wolves? Such a distinction of self “vs.” science is too artificial a dichotomy because scientists, as human beings, tend to feel personally enmeshed in their research. Without it, they would lack the drive to do it, even though every good supervisor is “supposed” to warn us to stay objective as researchers. And the subtext behind that “stay objective” is to stay impersonal; i.e. detached, inhuman, drained of character, passive voice and all that. Boring! But there is still some merit in considering both (and other?) sides of the matter, because it is not unreasonable to predict that the first kind of promotion (selfish; aggrandizing) is more dangerous than the second (generous; celebratory), because it is the ego taking the stage rather than the science. At the same time, we need both sides: the human, fallible, witty, emotive ego and the dry, objective, methodical, taciturn science. Without the former; warts and all; science could be too frigid to be fun.

Many researchers probably find it healthy to reflect on how much self-promotion is too much, whatever the reasons (and to some degree the reasons may not matter!). But it is not just the promoters who deserve introspection about their own practice. Those perceiving others’ “self-promotion”, especially in a negative light, could benefit from scrutiny of their own perceptions. What makes them presume that the motivation behind self-promotion is a malignant one, or not? And is the reasoning behind their judgement as sound as they’d apply to other scientific judgements they make on a daily basis– what behaviour are they reading into and how?

Alternatively, why worry about it? Isn’t a good scientist one who celebrates good science, yours, your team’s, or someone else’s? Again, this comes back to how much self-promotion is too much, but from an external perspective. Researchers are likely to judge others’ promotional activities by their own standards, not those of the promoter. They may be making value judgements with no objective basis, or (with colleagues that are not well known to the individual, all too common on the internet) no empirical evidence to go by except a brief press release, blog post, tweet or news article. Indeed, a case could be made that there is no objective basis to such a value judgement, by definition. Semantics and slippery slopes toward postmodernism aside, perhaps there is even no point to judging others’ self-promotions– and why does one wish to judge? An inward look at our own motivations for judging others’ can be salutary.

A major point here is: it is easy to conflate or confuse selfish promotion and unselfish sharing-the-joy-of-science, and to a degree it does not matter. This is because inevitably it is what is presented that matters: the content, not so much as the intent, in addition to the feedback one gets from engaging the public with research. That content-with-feedback is what almost everyone outside of academia says we should be doing—who are we to argue? Maybe we should try harder to put self esteem and other internal issues aside, and enjoy good science promotion for what it is, not what we might fear it could be. Whether a scientist is a lone wolf or team wolf, there’s no big bad wolf’s huffing and puffing to fear from good self-promotion of science. Let’s focus on building a strong house of science, brick by brick; one that lasts, and one that people hear of and care about.

Anne’s great Vacuole Song; plant organnelle-promotion!

Anne:

Whenever I write something about science communication, I feel like I am treading on an extra-slippery slope. Science communication, outreach, public engagement, PR and promotion all can have very different meanings depending on who you talk to. When I was a full-time researcher, I’d never even have thought about that they could mean different things. To me they all were synonyms of ‘Hey, let’s tell the world how amazing our research and science is!’ Since I became involved in science communication, I have realised that promoting our research isn’t necessarily the same as engaging non-expert audiences. While promotion certainly has its place and benefits (for example institutions highlighting their groups’ research achievements in external newsletter and online), real engagement is not so much broadcasting but two-way communication. I would like to point to an excellent article by Steve Cross, Head of Public Engagement at University College London in a recent issue of British Science Association magazine ‘People & Science’.  Steve writes: ‘I don’t tell members of the public that ‘science is fun’ or that ‘science has the answers’. I don’t even treat science as one great big unified thing. Instead I help researchers to share what they do. The message is less ‘We’re great!’ and more ‘Here’s what we’re doing. What do you think?’

Participating in this dialogue-centred way of public engagement means however that, invariably, our specific research project will be the centre of attention. Most likely our person would be as well, since science isn’t (yet) carried out by autonomously working nano-robots. I would be very surprised if our audience saw such activities as self-promotion. I predict that they’d rather appreciate researchers ‘stepping out of the tower’ into the public and interact with non-experts. Would our peers see it as self-promotion? Probably not. What if we promoted our activities beforehand on Twitter and other online or offline channels? What if we wrote a summary of the event and reflections on it afterwards? What if we posted links to our content at different times during the day to make sure that different audiences saw it? What if we had several projects running in parallel and did this for all of them? The problem becomes apparent now and I am certain that at this point some peers would drop cynic remarks about ‘self-promotion’ or ‘attention whores’.

So, self-promotion is frowned upon. But if you think about it, our wole current academic system is based on self-promotion. When we submit a manuscript, we need to state in the cover letter why our research is novel and interesting. Even though scientific conferences are supposed to be about disseminating scientific results and initiate collaborations, they also serve the purpose of self-promotion. I don’t recall many talks with mainly negative, confusing or boring results (except maybe if a well established principal investigator was talking about their newest project and asking for feedback). Most early-career scientists would rather not submit an abstract if they haven’t got good data and wait until they can show nice results. Fact is, conferences are a big job interview for PhD students and post-docs. What about grants? Each proposal has dedicated sections for promoting yourself, your research group and your institute to increase your chances of getting a grant. Early-career researchers quickly have to learn how to write these bits, as otherwise they quickly will be at a disadvantage compared to those who can sell themselves well. I believe that there is a certain double standard around the issue of self-promotion in academia. On the one hand researchers accept it as a necessity to climb up the career ladder. On the other hand they might sneer at peers who put all of their Nature and Science references on slides in their talk. ‘What a complete showoff!’

If I follow someone on Twitter whose work I admire, say science writer Ed Yong or blogger Prof. Athene Donald, or who does cool research I am interested in, I want to read everything they publish. I appreciate them linking to their articles and papers, repeatedly, since I am bound to miss it otherwise. I loved seeing John’s BBC clip of rhino foot pressure experiments because I wanted to learn more about his research – and I loved seeing him talk about it in ‘real life’ rather than only reading his words! But if someone at my professional level, who I am competing with for fellowships or grants, was constantly posting links to their achievements, I would probably be less tolerable of them. I’d roll my eyes and think “show-off”! But I admit honestly that this would be based on a less-than-noble notions: envy, feeling threatened and insecurity about my own achievements being sufficient to succeed.

When I talked about Twitter and enhancing your online profile at our departmental Away Day someone said: “Our generation has been brought up as being humble, as not showing off, as not shouting out our achievements. So where is the border between self-promotion and being a complete d***?”  I don’t think that this is a generational thing, as many senior academics have no difficulties promoting themselves. At that time I bounced the question back to the audience and asked: ‘What do the younger ones think?’ There was silence and one PhD student said: ‘I think it’s OK. You have to do it – who else would do it otherwise?’ I suspect that being willing and able to sell yourself might be a personality rather than an age thing and that the line between ‘selling yourself’ and ‘showing off’ subjectively lies in the eye of the beholder. Whatever you think, times have changed and academic positions are getting scarce. Maybe we need another motto next to ‘publish or perish’ – ‘self-promote or perish?’ Having a decent publication record won’t guarantee a research job anymore, as the competition is fierce. ‘Getting your name out there’, enhancing your profile, building a network and being engaged however will make you stand out of the crowd – as long as your self-promotion activities build upon solid achievements and not on hot air. In that case, you might deserve eye-rolling.

Self-promotion is often frowned upon in academic circles. Generally it seems to be all right to promote ‘science’ or a whole field. Numerous times I have seen blogging scientists state – defend themselves! – that in many years of writing they never blogged about their own paper. But why not? If we follow the two-way model of public engagement described above, it would be perfectly fine to write a non-expert summary about one’s latest publication and say: ‘This is what I just published, and the story behind it. What do you think?’ Similarly, the benefit of open access papers embedded in a social media site structure is that it allows discussions with non-experts. This will work significantly quicker and efficient if the authors alert and direct potential audiences to their paper through as many communication channels as possible- an act that again can be seen as self-promotion. Is our academic culture with its subtle or open contempt of self-promotion maybe inadvertently hindering effective engagement?

What do you think? Chime in on the poll below.

If the poll does not show up above in your browser, click the link here to go directly to it (new window):

http://poll.fm/57siz

Conclusion:

Some context, first. As we finished this post together, Anne and John reflected on what got us working on it, back in August 2012:

Anne: “You wrote that you had these thoughts on self-promotion after you returned from the [British] Science Festival. Was there a specific incident that raised these thoughts, or just general thinking?

John: “I often think about what I tweet and the amount of it, and whether “me-tweeting” is such a bad thing as some on Twitter say it is. I was me-tweeting a bunch of responses to my BSF talk and I thought I should, much as I do the same when people post stories about my research papers etc. But in particular this BSF event, which was heavy PE, got me thinking on the train ride home about why some people would (cynically, in my view) see that as PR and shameful self-promotion.”

While the two views we presented above are from different backgrounds and perspectives and such, our thoughts reveal many elements common to both. Perhaps these commonalities apply to most scientists, but, but… There is a hulking science-gorilla in the room: cultural similarities and differences. We cannot neglect the HUGE issue of Western scientific culture that John and Anne and others have in common! In other cultures, self-promotion might be seen very differently; indeed in UK it seems to sneered at more than in the USA, as Brits tend to be less comfortable tooting their own horn (easy, now!). Some other cultures might have no problem with it at all. Others might find it abominable. However, how culture factors into self-promotion and PE/PR perceptions is a huge kettle of fish that we’re not quite ready to tackle, so we will turn that over for discussion in the comments here! How does your culture, whether very local (department?) or very broad (country/ethnicity) factor into this?

Or, if you prefer, please contribute your thoughts on how you handle or perceive the self-promotion vs. science-promotion (false) dichotomy as a scientist, science communicator and/or layperson? How do you determine what is a tolerable level of promotion?

P.T. Barnum said: “Without promotion something terrible happens… Nothing!

When does a science story “end”? Never, probably. Science keeps voyaging on eternally in search of truth, and few if any stories in science truly “end”. But as science communicators of any stripe, we routinely have to make decisions about when a certain story has run its course; when the PR ship has sailed and the news cycle has ended. As scientists, we’re lucky if we have to consider this and should be grateful if and when our science even attracts media/science communication attention. But the point of today’s post; perhaps an obvious one but to my mind worthy of reflection on; is that scientists are not slaves to the PR machine– as a flip side to the previous self/science-promotion post, at some point we may have to say “This story about our research is done (for now).”

I routinely reflect on this when the media covers my research; I always have. My recent experience with New Yorker and BBC coverage of our penguin gait research (with James Proffitt and Emily Sparkes as well as Dr. Julia Clarke) got me thinking about this issue a lot, and talking about it quite a bit with James. This morning, over coffee, this blog post was born from my thoughts on that experience.

Stomach-Churning Rating: 7/10 for some mushy penguin specimens; PR officers might also get queasy.

I was waiting for a call from BBC radio one night almost three weeks ago, to do a recorded interview about our penguin research-in-progress, when I woke up surrounded by paramedics and was whisked off to the hospital. I never did that interview or any further ones. I won’t go into what went wrong but it relates to this old story. I’m OK now anyway. But for me, the penguin story had mostly ended before it began. However, I’d already agreed with James that we’d try to avoid doing further media stories beyond the New Yorker one and the BBC one, which was due out the next day and for which James (fortuitously instead of me!) was doing a live appearance on BBC Breakfast (TV). I got a few emails and calls about this story while recuperating in my hospital bed, including the one below, and turned down interview invitations for obvious reasons, with no arguments from anyone– at first.

For Jerry, the story never should have started, apparently. We all have our opinions on what stories are worth covering. A “kind” email to receive in one’s hospital bed…

Then, after I recovered and got back to work, we kept getting a trickle of other interview/story invitations, and we declined them. Our PR office had suggested that we do a press release but we had already decided in advance not to, because we saw the story as just work-in-progress and I don’t like to do press releases about that kind of thing– except under extraordinary circumstances.

Finally, over a week after the BBC story aired, a major news agency wanted to film an interview with me about the story, which would get us (more) global coverage. They prefaced the invitation with the admission that they were latecomers to the story. Again I firmly said no; they could use existing footage but I could not do new interviews (these would inevitably take a half day or so of my time and energy). They wrote back saying they were going to go forward with the story anyway, and the journalist scolded me for not participating, saying that the story would have been so much better with a new film sequence of me in it. Maybe, but (1) I felt the story had run its course, (2) I’d had my hospitalization and a tragic death in the family, and (3) I was just returning, very jetlagged, from a short trip to the USA for other work. Enough already! I had other things to do. I didn’t follow up on what happened with that story. Maybe it didn’t even get published. I wasn’t left feeling very sympathetic.

Above: The BBC story

I kept thinking about being pressured and scolded by journalists, once in a while, for not joining in their news stories when they contradicted my own threshold for how much media coverage is enough. This reaching of a personal threshold had first happened to me 13 years ago when I published my first big paper, in Nature, on “Tyrannosaurus was not a fast runner.” After ~3 weeks of insane amounts of media coverage, I was exhausted and pulled the plug, refusing more interviews. It felt good to exert control over the process, and I learned a lot from learning to wield that control. I still use it routinely.

But… I am of course passionate about science communication, I feel it is a great thing for science to be in the public eye, and I actually love doing science communication stories about research-in-progress– too much science is shown as an endpoint, not a process. Indeed, that’s why I do this blog and other social media, most of which is science-in-progress and my thoughts about it. So I was and still am thrilled that we got such positive, broad, good quality media attention for our penguin work, but it was plenty.

More sphenisciform science in progress: Penguin bodies awaiting dissection for our latest work. Unfortunately, years of formalin, freezers and thawing cycles had rendered most of the soft tissues useless for our work. Photos here and below are of Natural History Museum (Tring) specimens from the ornithology collection; most collected in Antarctica ~50 yrs ago.

Probably to many seasoned science communicators and scientists, my post’s message is blindingly obvious. Of course, scientists have rights — and responsbilities– in deciding how and when their research is covered. This is a negotiation process between their research team, their university, PR officers, journalists/media, funders and others involved– including the public. But less experienced scientists, and perhaps the public, might not realize how much control scientists do have over the amount of media attention they get. It’s easy to get caught up in a media frenzy surrounding one’s science (if you’re lucky enough to generate it at all) and feel the wind in one’s sails, thereby forgetting that you’re at the helm– you can decide when the journey is over (just be sure you communicate it diplomatically with others involved!).

This penguin did not survive the preservation process well; for whatever reason it had turned to mush, fit only for skeletonization. Gag. Its journey was definitely over.

As scientists, we have to balance enormous pressures and priorities: not just science communication and PR, but also our current main research, teaching, admin, personal lives, health, and so on. So we have to make hard decisions about how to balance these things. We should all reflect on what our dynamically shifting thresholds are for how much attention is enough, what priority level a given story has in our lives, and when the timing is right for any media attention. And as collaborative teams; more and more the norm in science; we should be discussing this issue and agreeing on it before it’s too late for us to exert much control.

One of our penguin chicks from the Natural History Museum, in a better state of preservation than the adults. Photo by James Proffitt.

Penguin chick’s right leg musculature in side view, exposing some decent muscles that gave us some useful data. Photo by James Proffitt.

Much like an over-played hit song, it’s not pretty when a science story gets over-milked and becomes too familiar and tedious, perhaps drawing attention away from other science that deserves attention. And we all will have our opinions on where that threshold of “too much attention” is. If we, as scientists, don’t think about those thresholds, we may end up rudderless or even wrecked on lonely islands of hype. I’ve seen scientists ostracized by their peers for over-hyping their work. It’s not fun. “Hey everybody, John is having a celery stick with peanut butter on it!” Celebrity culture doesn’t mean that everything scientists do deserves attention, and any amount of attention is deserved and good.

A great thing about science is that, in principle, it is eternal– a good science story can live forever while other science is built upon it. Each chapter in that story needs an ending, but there’s always the next chapter waiting for us, and that’s what keeps science vital and riveting. As scientists, we’re all authors of that story, with a lot of power over its narrative. We can decide when to save parts of that narrative for later, when the time is right. With our penguin story, we’ve only just begun and I’m incredibly excited about where it goes next.

How about other scientists, journalists and other afficionados of science? What examples of scientists taking charge of how their research gets covered do you find particularly instructive?

This week was a great week for me and giant dinosaurs in many ways, so I’m sharing that experience via photos and a bit of backstory. I hope you like it.

Stomach-Churning Rating: 1/10. Big birds and bones but no barfing.

First, I attended the filming of a new documentary, “T. rex Autopsy” (due for release on 7 June on NatGeo TV, just in time to steal the thunder of get you excited for Jurassic World), on the edge of London. I’m allowed to post these two photos of it. Expect much, much more information later– and I think you will like that information when it comes! Not quite a 50′ tall bird, but… So. Damn. Cool.

Second, my team and I dissected a big animal I’ve mentioned here before. For various reasons, I won’t/can’t post images or details of it right now, but I hope to soon. It’s not a dinosaur, but it was giant as its kind goes, so I’m wedging it in here.

Third, and this is the main impetus for my post, I finally got to see the giant chicken! No, not this one that I recall from my childhood…

But this one! A 50’/13m tall chicken made by teacher Ben Frimet’s team of students and teachers at the City of London Academy!

Shortly after my first encounter. I’m still in a state of awed shock. And shadow.

The megachicken was unveiled at a “Chickenfest” event celebrating the sculpture’s completion. Chickenfest also prominently involved members of the “Chicken Coop” team who have drawn together scientists, humanities scholars, artists and more to investigate “Cultural & Scientific Perceptions of Human-Chicken Interactions” — more details here. Their theme helped unite the event’s various displays and lectures as well as some of the City of London Academy’s teaching topics, which inspired students to look at chickens from many angles. The event was so fun and truly integrative that it had me clucking with joy, but the anatomically accurate giant chicken art piece stole the show (as intended). Enjoy the photo tour below.

Pelvic/thigh region! (no patella, but hey)

Great views from up to 3 storeys around it.

Little chickens made of fast-food forks and stuff. Very clever.

One of our research chickens, a 30-day-old broiler, skeletonized by the Chicken Coop team and brought to the event. Chunky and funky!

Our RVC chicken research team (postdocs/fellows Drs. Heather Paxton, Jeffery Rankin, Diego Pereira Neves) presented a stall with motion capture demos and chicken bones, like this fun identification display.

What will happen to that giant chicken art piece? This is yet to be determined, and was the question asked of the lecture panel (including me, who gave a lame answer involving King’s Cross’s birdcage). It was unanimous that it must not be destroyed– as long as it does not go on a destructive rampage through London…

One of my favourite films of my teenage years, Beastmaster, lends me a phrase I’ll throw out here like a razor-edged boomerang-thing: “Life is a circle. We will meet again.” And so, at the Chickenfest event, past and present worlds collided. I happened to be there presenting a talk just before Luis Rey. Almost exactly 13 years ago, Luis had done this classic T. rex vs. giant chicken race for my “T. rex was not a fast runner” paper in Nature. He likewise has blogged about the Chickenfest event, so check that out!

Coincidentally, there was ANOTHER 50′ tall bird placed not far from that giant chicken in southeast London this week, for a very different reason- a huge Norwegian Blue parrot in celebration of the Monty Python reunion! And I’ve been a Monty Python fan since age ~11, so that rocks my world two times over.

IMAGE: FLICKR USER TAYLOR HERRING

Two giant birds in London in one week. It doesn’t get any better than that– unless there were three such birds– if I missed one, chime in in the Comments!

(Edit: British friends tell me I must refer to an Alan Partridge skit here, so I am doing so. I know when to do as I’m told.)

In early 2011, I got a fun email from a producer at National Geographic TV about a new project they were planning, which involved dissecting a full-scale model of a Tyrannosaurus rex in a documentary to be called “T. rex Autopsy.” Things fell silent for some months, then I got another email saying they were moving forward, then things fell silent again. Three and a half years later I got another email, this time from a producer at Impossible Factual films (working with NatGeo), saying that the show was finally moving forward for real. (This sort of thing is normal for documentaries; time scales can be long and unpredictable, or very fast-paced) This email invited me to be a primary scientific consultant in the design of the creature and show. Of course, anatomical dissection and T. rex are what I’m about as a scientist; two of my major research areas; so bringing them together was like a dream come true and I leapt into that dream with enthusiasm.

(Meanwhile, circa 2010-11, another TV channel filmed me for a different programme in which a whole, fresh-ish T. rex was found weathering out of an Alaskan cliffside and scientists had ~2 days to study it before it fell into an abyss– it’s probably best that that show never happened… there were fundamental flaws.)

Stomach-Churning Rating: 0/10. Merciful. No images here, just text descriptions, for various reasons. The TV show is not for small children, though. I am guessing that the final programme will be about a 7/10 SCR because of gooey, seemingly rancid, but rubbery (so it doesn’t look overly real, but still looks great) dinosaur vital organs. For pictures, see the links to tweets, trailers and news stories below.

I introduced T. rex Autopsy to you in the previous post, I’ve been tweeting and retweeting extensively since then, and one of my later posts will be a “postmortem” of the show, which airs June 7 worldwide. My feeling is that, if what I’ve seen so far is indicative of the whole show, it will be a landmark moment in palaeontological documentary history. T. rex Autopsy fuses the best aspects of “Inside Nature’s Giants” with “Walking With Dinosaurs”, and without “Alien Autopsy” pseudoscience. Indeed, it seems to be a very science-based documentary (once you get past the requisite conceit that scientists could actually find a very fresh T. rex body– that’s the only sci-fi bit of the show, quickly dispensed with!). T. rex Autopsy is packed with evidence-based palaeobiology, and has consistently been so since I first spoke to producers, which was a great comfort to me.

This post is about my role in the show, my perspective on it, and an attempt at a spoiler-free prelude. I’m willing to go out on a limb a bit and urge people to watch it, because I’m already proud of what was attempted in the show– it was a bold vision by NatGeo and laborious execution by everyone involved. I especially want to give a big shout of respect out to creature designers Crawley Creatures (led by Jez Crawley, who helped create Jabba the Hutt and the Dark Crystal beings, among others). Around 14 people on Jez’s team worked full time for ~4 months to make the T. rex. The designers based the proportions on the Field Museum’s scans of “Sue”, which I helped them get access to (I’d used them for our PLOS ONE paper in 2011). That, and numerous comments on their draft dinosaur’s body proportions and limb positions (e.g. avoiding “bunny hands“), was some of my first major involvement in the programme.

Over 200 emails (I was curious; I counted them!) and a bunch of phone calls and 7 months later, my input on the T. rex Autopsy film shoot and production was finishing. Just last week, I sent what supposedly was my last email of input on the show, about predatory habits (NOT the dumb scavenger debate we’re all tired of; more about ambush vs. pursuit habits). I’d spent many hours going over drafts of T. rex‘s anatomy and function and behaviour from head to tail with the superb Impossible Factual film production team (mainly Assistant Producer Cressida Kinnear). Very often, to their credit, they’d already done a lot of literature searching and speaking with key experts on dinosaur jaws or brains or breathing, so I just had to check the fine details, but in some cases I had to recommend experts to speak to and/or do my own sleuthing and educate myself about aspects of T. rex biology I’d never pondered much.

For example, how big was T. rex‘s heart? I’d been asked the same question about sauropods lately for another show so I had references and an Excel spreadsheet ready to go, and plugged in some values, but the estimates I got seemed too small relative to the thoracic cavity (mediastinum if you must). I had some interesting back-and-forth discussions with the producers and we settled on one size that seemed “right”. No one that I knew of had tried to scientifically estimate the size of a T. rex‘s heart, probably because there hadn’t been a good reason to try. Sauropods get all the dino-love in regards to blood pressure issues and heart size, for good reasons- for them, it should have been a serious biomechanical challenge to pump blood up the long neck to the brain. For an elephant-sized T. rex, it doesn’t boggle the scientific mind so much that blood pressure wasn’t such a major evolutionary design constraint. See the show and find out more about what the intrepid team of dissectors found…

Did T. rex have feathers? This was important to get right, I felt, and not just show T. rex as a leathery or scaly beast, which is outdated. As I put it, it’s more speculative to show T. rex without any feathery thingies than to show it with some. We passed around draft images and thoughts and agreed on a slightly fuzzy, bristly body, especially in some regions of the head/neck, arms and tail tip. I encouraged the design team to go for more colour (I wrote to the designers “Skin colouring: go nuts! Feathery things should be colourful. Big animals tend to be more drab in colour but that doesn’t mean a boring grey/green, and certainly there should be some regional patterning. I like the idea of there being brightly coloured areas on the face”). We can be confident that dinosaurs could see colour like most land animals (except many mammals!) can. All of this is pretty familiar to palaeo-artists and fans of modern dinosaur reconstructions, so I won’t belabour it more. I’m glad that much of this made it into the final design. It’s not your overly familiar Jurassic Park T. rex.

Cheeks, eye pupils, brain/senses, how big a mouthful of meat it could swallow, furcula (wishbone), gastralia (belly ribs- I gave a lot of detailed criticism here), reproductive anatomy and biology, eggs, body fat, growth, air sacs, stomach, and excretory system, among other things: we covered them all in discussing the dino’s design, and I learned a lot along the way.

A memorable part of my discussions with the designers, in early March, was about the intestines and cloaca (rear-end opening): they initially put the cloaca too far forward on the body, I got them to move it backward, then I later realized in a panic that, making a neophyte error, I’d missed a key anatomical feature in the hips that clearly would put the “vent” even further backward, so I send them a hasty email apologizing that I’d missed this and urging that they fix their graphics and animations. I felt bad about this as it was late in the design phase and I’m sure I stressed out the team to make this change, but I thought it would be embarrassing to get the position of that hole wrong. Yet it was also funny to me to be scrutinizing where the “poop hole” of a dinosaur should go, and worrying so much about getting it right… my scatological sense of humour was in overdrive. By the middle of March they had this detail right. Phew!

There is another dinosaur that makes an appearance in the documentary but I don’t want to spoil it. Suffice it to say that one dinosaur from another time period and continent was initially chosen, and I (echoed by Dave Hone, I know) urged them not to do that, choosing a more appropriate Hell Creek Formation dinosaur. Phew! Perhaps more about that later.

Finally, of course we talked about legs and muscles and locomotion. I was filmed at the RVC discussing this, and it looks like it will be a cool segment, including an explanation of how the bones reveal the anatomy of the soft tissues of limbs and other parts of the body (i.e. bread-and-butter from my PhD thesis work). I hope that makes the final cut! (Edit: I’m told it has; yay!) There may even be footage of me dissecting a chicken and talking about enlarged and reduced leg muscles in birds, in any “making of” side-programme.

But I was not one of the four people doing the T. rex dissections in the show. That arduous job (2 looooooong days of filming!) fell to vet Luke Gamble and palaeontologists Tori Herridge, Steve Brusatte and Matthew Mossbrucker, with a crew of assistants including some from Crawley Creatures. The clever idea the producers had, as they explained it to me, was to keep my and others’ scientific input on the show’s design separate from the dissectors’ knowledge, so that when the dissection team arrived and cut into the dinosaur, they’d be discovering things without much advance inside knowledge of what to expect to find. We’ll see how that worked when the programme airs– I’ve only seen the trailer and behind-the-scences footage, as well as the first day of filming. Scientists like me aren’t Shakespearean actors so it’s hard to act surprised when you sort of know what’s coming and have to redo takes of that same surprise. But if you come to T. rex Autopsy expecting Oscar-worthy theatrics, you’ve missed the point. :-)

A taxi drove me to Pinewood Studios (west of London; site of filming many blockbusters) on a Sunday morning in late April. I walked into the giant studio where a 12+ meter long T. rex carcass lay in dramatic lighting. Cue the freezing of my giant grin in place and my eyes wide open. I was stunned! It was gorgeous, and the scale of the carcass left me gobsmacked. I’d only seen various incarnations of it during the design phase, from wire mesh scale models to clay sculptures to full-on foam casts and CGI representations; and all of these just as digital files emailed to me. But to see “Edwina,” as she was called, in the pseudo-flesh, was a moment I may never forget. Emailed JPGs definitely didn’t prepare me for that visual splendour. Crawley’s team were still inserting some of the last ~20,000 goose feathers as bristles into the hide, one by one…

I was at Pinewood to spend a day hobnobbing with VIPs and international press visitors as a “tour guide” to the Edwina autopsy event, and then for a day to watch the initial half of filming with the press in a room overlooking the studio. I got excellent hospitality, was called the “on-screen talent” in documents, which felt really weird to me (I’d never been called that in >10 shows before), and I spent a lot of time explaining the show and dinosaur science to that receptive, inquisitive audience. And gawking at the unfolding spectacle before and during filming. And cracking jokes with journalists during long breaks between actual filming of the documentary. It was a surreal, awesome experience and I loved it. (And, as I’ve insisted scientists in documentaries are, I got paid for it.)

This documentary was a blast to be involved in and challenged all my skills as a dinosaur expert and biologist as well as a fan of documentaries, monster movies and anatomical artistry! I give a big hat-tip to NatGeo for taking the plunge on this adventure in the first place, to the amazing creature creators, to the film and production crew, to the many jovial journalists I met, and to the four faux-bloodied, surely exhausted dissectors starring in the show– and to Edwina. This was an impressive collaboration drawing together the best that the media, monster-makers and an international team of scientists (aside from the ones I’ve mentioned already, many others too!) can do together. I feel lucky to have been involved, and I think I’ll be looking back on this event as a highlight of my career, especially as a science communicator; much like consulting on Inside Nature’s Giants is a highlight.

I’m as excited as anyone to see how it turns out. Just 2.5 weeks to go — are you excited too? What would you want to see in a T. rex dissection? Where would your first cut be if you did the dissection? “Jurassic World”, what’s that?

EDIT: The first 5 minutes of the show are here!  https://www.yahoo.com/tv/t-rex-autopsy-watch-the-first-5-minutes-who-119918868060.html 

Well, that was an eventful week for me, although today’s post will focus on one event: the debut of the film Jurassic World. Briefly though, the awesome “T. rex Autopsy” documentary debuted (I was going to post more about it but all I’d have left to say is that I was very pleased with the result), I also showed up briefly in “Top 10 Biggest Beasts Ever” talking about the giant rhinocerotoid Paraceratherium and the stresses on its feet, our paper on ostrich musculoskeletal modelling was published (more in a future post) after ~12 years of me diddling around with it, and much more happened. Then to cap it all off, very shortly after I hit the “publish” button on my last post, I had four tonic clonic seizures in a row and spent a hazy night in the hospital, then the past week recovering from the damage. Nothing like another near-death (no exaggeration there, I’m afraid) experience to cap off an exciting week. But strangely, what I feel more interested in talking about is, like I said, Jurassic World, but this is not a review, as you will see here.

Stomach-Churning Rating: 0/10; just SPOILERS if you haven’t seen the film yet!

I guess I have to give a brief review of the film and say that I was entertained, to a degree, but it was not a great piece of film-making. It was a far cry from the original but then so were the sequels, and maybe it was better than them. The mosa-star was the most novel, memorable bit. I didn’t care for the Indominus villain, but then when you bring genetic engineering into a film like this, you’ve basically thrown out the rulebook and can make your dinosaurs as magical as you want; we’re already in “X-Men” territory here and almost in “Pacific Rim”-land.

Chris Pratt has signed on for at least another sequel to Jurassic World and the ending of the film already started that ball rolling. So I find it fun to speculate wildly, and certainly incorrectly, on what the sequel might do. What does the Jurassic future have in store?

First of all, who survived to re-appear in the next film? We’re left with the Bryce Dallas Howard character, who probably will return with Pratt to further develop their rather uninteresting social/romantic dynamic, rather than start afresh with someone else. The kids of course survived, as always, and as always they won’t return, as that’s not interesting and they didn’t have much to do except scream and (highly implausibly) hotwire an old car. Much as I’d like the parents from my hometown of Madison, WI to return, they won’t either for the same reasons. But we really only need Pratt and his high-heeled sweetie for the next film. Everyone else memorable(?) seems to have died, although it would be wonderful to bring Goldblum back for some smarmy wit (please!).

Second of all, the next film can’t be set in Jurassic World. There’s not much left to do there (JW already spent much of its time hearkening back to JP), and there’s no way the park would re-open. We need something new. I think by now we’re (very) tired of characters running around islands full of dinosaurs and the Blackfish parallel was milked dry in the latest movie. We need to spend a film with the dinosaurs amongst humanity (as Lost World briefly did), and much as I’d love to see the crazy drug lord/kidnapping plot happen, it won’t. But JW did set one thing up that has to happen now in its sequel: the paramilitary role of engineered, trained dinosaurs. We now know they can sort of train their dinosaurs and they can forge them to be anything they want to in terms of geno/phenotypes. They’ll learn from some mistakes of JW and engineer (or already did by the end of JW, at some remote site) some more compliant, deadlier animals, having largely given up on the public exhibition angle. The naked raptors and T. rex probably have to re-appear (sigh), but enough already of the giant uber-theropods like Spinosaurus and Indominus. The latter was already enough of a reprise of the former (plus psychic talents and chameleon powers etc.). Something truly novel is needed.

Unless they engineer a hyper-aggressive, intelligent sauropod or ceratopsian, which would admittedly be neat, I have this prediction (which is probably wrong but hey!): they have shown they can hybridize anything. There must be fewer and fewer “normal” (1990s…) dinosaurs now in the JW universe. So the next big step, which someone in the JW universe surely would do, is to hybridize dinosaurs and humans. Maybe some raptor-human hybrids, maybe also saving a tyranno-human hybrid for a surprise late appearance. But this is the sensible next step because it allows them to play with the (tired) Frankenstein monster trope but also touch on the hot topic of human cloning and human GM.

Abandoned concept art from JP4; from here

And by unleashing dino-human hybrids, or at least some freaky clicker-trained and engineered super-dinos, they could also explore the military theme, which the JW universe still hasn’t delved into much. What if those hyper-smart, deadly hybrid dinos, led by Pratt and Howard’s expert training, were used to combat an ISIS-analogue terrorist threat? Dino-Avengers in the badlands of Afghanistan or Iraq? Too predictable perhaps, but that’s a film that the public will want to see. Yeah there’s plenty of stupid there, but there’s no turning back– each film ups the ante, as JW ironically reminds us several times. We’re already in firmly in stupid-land, and the science has largely advanced to the point of magic. My idea is too uncomfortably close to the abandoned John Sayles plot, true. Darn. And (groan) kids have to be involved in some way to make it a family film so it rakes in the $$$ again, so either they get caught in the middle of the paramilitary mess or they are the ones that have to be saved… or the hybrid dinos are cute-ish kids themselves that Pratt and Howard must manage… (shades of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Kick-Ass?) I’ve found that more fun to think about than dwelling on the flaws of the movie, which is frankly too easy.

(Another good theme that Vivian Allen suggested to me would be climate change and invasive species—i.e. planet warms, dinos are already loose and go feral in waterlogged Central America, ecological disaster is looming and something must be done to round up the dinos… could work in some other bits like ecotourists or drug runners?)

That’s as far as my wildly speculative ruminating has taken me, but I wanted to turn it over to you, Freezerinos. If you were to make the next film (will it be “Jurassic World 2”? “Jurassic Army”? or as I’ve proffered in the post’s title, “Jurassic Future”?), what would it be (A) in your ideal world where you call all the shots (yes, lots of colourful feathery dinos, I know), vs. (B) in a more likely (less daring, more Hollywood) reality, along the lines of what I’ve tried to do here? (but I surely will be wrong, although we’ll see in 2-5 years!)

I posted the above photo once before, but didn’t explain any of the fun details of artist-designer Thomas Thwaites‘s visit to the RVC to dissect a goat with us. Now his show has just finished in London, celebrating the end of his project and the near-completion of his book about his experience trying to live life as a goat. This week, I went to his east side gallery and had some time to chat with Thomas about his transhuman experiences. Because the project has a strong biomechanics, anatomy, art and science theme to it, I’m posting a photo-blog post about all of that. It’s goat to be seen to be believed! I for one wouldn’t mind being a goat right now; I could use a break from my decrepit body…

Stomach-Churning Rating: Too late, there’s the goat pic above and more like it below. I’d give those a 8/10; no kidding. The puns make it worse, too.

The context. Thomas never did get to gallop (sorry, spoiler!) but he did manage a trot, and some other capricious behaviours. I forgot to ask him if he’d tried the Goat Simulator. I have; it’s good for an hour of fun hircosity.

Starting the dissection at the RVC, to get inside a goat.

Hide.

Fore- and hindlimbs; comparative design for inspiring prosthetics.

Dissections on display!

Prototype goat-suits. Their mobility was too limited.

The prototype in the foreground could not move without falling down.

Inhabited-goat-suit shots.

The final Goat-Suit: custom prosthetics, a helmet, and some form-fitting casts.

Thomas Thwaites with the goat-suit.

The forelimb prosthesis. I was worried it would hurt his wrists but apparently it transferred the loads mainly to the forearms. It was made by a prosthetics clinic up in Salford.

Photos from rambling around the Swiss Alps in the goat-suit with goats.

Trip-trap-trip-trap… (but no trolls)

Goat-suit in action! With Goat-Pro camera, I see.

Acceptance?

And the goat that we had dissected, skeletonized at RVC and re-articulated by Thomas:

Do goats wish they were human?

What are you looking at?

Close-up of goat head and shoulders.

Goat hooves-on-hips; a gruff pose.

So like us.

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?

Greetings Freezerinos, and Happy New Year! I have been quiet on this blog for health and other reasons but those will pass and there will be new posts in 2016. However, behind the scenes there have been super-cool things afoot. I am very happy to bring one of them to you now:

(but first: Stomach-Churning Rating: 6/10; video below shows a dissected sea turtle foot in motion)

We have just debuted our new social media “presence” (for lack of a better word) that is a sister blog to this one. It is called Anatomy To You (http://anatomytoyou.com/), as its intent is to bring a wide array of science about animal anatomy to “you”, the general public. This John’s Freezer blog will continue with it’s style of rambling longer posts targeted at a fairly geeky scientifically literate audience and focusing on my team’s research and my own disparate thoughts about science and related issues. Anatomy To You will bring you shorter posts, even just images, completely focused on celebrating the structure of organisms, and not just presenting my team’s research but also a wide array of anatomical science from around the globe. It will also be much more regular and frequent in its posts. We’ll welcome guest posts and I encourage you to get in touch with us if you want to jump on the bandwagon early, or have us feature your research for you!

More about the ATY blog is here, but there is also a Twitter feed and Facebook account. Our first major posts are on what skeletons are, and on a dissection of some sea turtles. Please follow us and join in the celebration of anatomy! My team’s scientific communicator/technician Dr. Lauren Sumner-Rooney is spearheading this ATY effort with me, so please follow her too!

Anatomy To You will continue to evolve over this coming year, so please stay with us and give us feedback; join in the morphological conversations with us. I am SUPER excited to see where this goes– it is an experiment that has a lot of potential, we think.

Sea turtle from our ATY dissection, foot muscles in action (found dead in the wild; don’t be ridiculous, we don’t kill sea turtles for our research)