Link: Anatomical models
The Age has an article describing the work of two anatomists who want to bring new high-fidelity plastic models into medical anatomy training: “Buster, the p...
The Age has an article describing the work of two anatomists who want to bring new high-fidelity plastic models into medical anatomy training: “Buster, the p...
Doing some reading on supraorbital torus anatomy today, ran across this snarky passage from Mary Doria Russell’s (1985) paper, “The Supraorbital Torus: A Mos...
Alik Huseynov and colleagues have a data-rich paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examining age-related changes in the human pelvis:...
Aidan Ruth and colleagues in the Journal of Human Evolution have an interesting paper with the seemingly counter-intuitive result that foramen magnum orienta...
Notable paper: Green, David J., Ted A. Spiewak, Brielle Seitelman and Philipp Gunz. 2016. Scapular shape of extant hominoids and the African ape/modern human...
Last year I published an essay in Nautilus, titled “Are humans the greatest things created by the human hand?”. The article has been making the rounds on soc...
Neil Roach and colleagues have written a paper in Nature this week about the role of elastic energy storage in human throwing Roach:elastic:2013. I like the ...
The bones that make up the shoulder are the scapula, clavicle and humerus.
Your task in the first laboratory inquiry assignment is to develop a hypothesis about the anatomy of the common ancestor of two species of anthropoid primate...
The diversification of the first primates from other early mammals took place partly because the ancestors of the primates came to inhabit a unique environme...
In this course, you will be working extensively with skeletal anatomy. The skeleton provides the primary evidence about our evolutionary history. Skeletal ev...
When talking about bones and teeth, we will need to use several terms to orient ourselves. Some of the terms are obvious, like right and left. Other intuitiv...
Mike Taylor from Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week shows how anatomists get creative with their measurement instruments: “How to measure necks using Dupl...
Many of the differences between Neandertals and modern humans can be found in the face and jaw. Neandertals had relatively tall faces, and substantial progna...
For anthropologists, Africa was a point of exceptional diversity between 2 million and 1.5 million years ago. In both East and South Africa, the fossil recor...
The hominid pelvis is much shorter than ape pelves, with muscle attachments reoriented for effective walking.
Ferris Jabr has begun a series called “Know your neurons”, which will be a tour of the types of neurons. The first installment (“Know Your Neurons: The Disco...
Jonathan Jones muses on two exhibitions of Leonardo’s work, one on paintings and the other on anatomical drawings (“Is Leonardo da Vinci a great artist or a ...
Carl Zimmer profiles anatomist Joy Reidenberg, who has scored a coup for public communication of science on the BBC show, Inside Nature’s Giants: “From Insid...
At this station, you’ll find some articulated human feet. “Articulated” means that the bones are assembled together at their joints – two bones that articula...
A study by Di Vincenzo, Steven Churchill and Giorgio Manzi has fallen into the early drawer of the Journal of Human Evolution: “The Vindija Neanderthal scapu...
Neandertals were very robustly built. This means that they had relatively thick bones, with thick layers of cortical bone. It also means they had relatively ...
The Neandertals were Late Pleistocene inhabitants of Europe, and their skeletal remains were among the first fossil humans that scientists recognized as repr...
By the end of the Middle Pleistocene, people throughout the inhabited world had attained brain sizes in the range of living people. Technology had ad- vanced...
Individuals whose ancestry derives mostly from different parts of the world sometimes have different cranial features. Forensic anthropologists have studied ...
Determining sex from human mandibles (as you will do in another part of this lab) depends on a series of characteristics that tend to differ between male and...
The mandible can provide important evidence in assessment of sex from skeletal remains. Male mandibles are generally heavier and larger than female mandibles...
The cranium has a very distinctive shape, which varies between people to some extent. Some features that vary between individuals in their size or shape are...
The cranium includes all the bones of the head. Altogether, there are 26 cranial bones plus the mandible. Except for the mandible, these bones mostly are fus...
The cranium includes all the bones of the head. Altogether, there are 26 cranial bones plus the mandible. Except for the mandible, these bones mostly are fus...
The pelvis is a complex made of three bones: the sacrum and the left and right os coxae, also called “innominate” bones. The sacrum forms the posterior part ...
The pelvis is the most accurate indicator of sex in the human skeleton. Its central role in the birth process means that the pelvis has several shape differe...
The premolars are directly distal to (behind) the canines. Generally there are two premolars in each quadrant. Counting backward from the front of the jaw, t...
Different kinds of primates have different numbers of premolars in their dentitions. The ancestral number of premolars in primates is three in each quadrant ...
The most distal teeth are molars. Most humans have three molars, but many — especially in America — have their third molars (called wisdom teeth) extracted. ...
The robust australopithecines existed between 2.5 and 1.5 million years ago. At this station are skeletal remains from two kinds of robust australopithecine....
The cranium includes all the bones of the head. Altogether, there are 26 cranial bones plus the mandible. Except for the mandible, these bones mostly are fus...
This is a very simple lab station. The size of the opening for the ear canal, called the external auditory meatus, is larger in humans than in most other kin...
The form of the earlobes varies in humans. At one extreme, the lowest point on the earlobe is attached to the flesh of the cheek. If not, the earlobe is to v...
The radius and ulna are the two bones of the lower arm. Rotation of the wrist is actually accomplished by a rotation of the radius around the ulna. The radiu...
The spine extends from the head to the sacrum, and in most people consists of 24 vertebrae. The vertebral column can be divided into three segments:
Each vertebra has several parts. The most important are:
Between the skull and the sacrum, humans have 24 vertebrae. Well, most humans, anyway. Sometimes humans have a few more or less.