Saturday, January 28, 2012

Whale's Pelvis

A couple of years ago Inside Nature's Giants disected a breached Fin Whale. During the multiple day dissection, they were able to retrieve the vestigial pelvis from the whale.   


Moving away from the throat and to the rest of the body, Reidenberg tried to get the heart out, but couldn't reach far enough into the chest to get it. The team also worked hard to retrieve - successfully - one of the vestigial hindlimbs. If you know anything about whales, you'll know all about the vestigial pelvic girdles and hindlimbs present in various members of the group. However, I suppose the presence of hindlimbs and pelvic girdles in modern whales is not well known to the public at large, and I even recall seeing scepticism about their presence being expressed by some (as if they're rare or based on apocryphal accounts). So, if you're going to talk about the terrestrial origins of cetaceans - and this is exactly what they did in Inside Nature's Giants - it would be wrong not to get that vestigial pelvis or hindlimb out [adjacent hindlimb pelvis pic © Channel 4]... [1]

Joy Reidenberg is a professor of anatomy at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. She is also the scalpel-wielding comparative anatomist in the award-winning documentary series Inside Nature's Giants(titled Raw Anatomy in the United States), the second series of which is currently being screened. Reidenberg explains why the spectacle of slicing up animals is good for the public understanding of science and why the discipline of anatomy is still very much alive.[2] 

As you can see there is a little bit of confusion by the author in the first excerpt over the exact identity of the bone.  Joy Reidenberg cleared up the confusion in the comment section.  

...The "hind limb bone" we found is actually a remnant pelvis. Innominate is the term used to describe the fusion of three bones: ilium, ischium, and pubis. Sometimes, a remnant of the femur (thigh bone) is also fused to this structure. We were looking it over to determine if that was the case, but it appears as though it was only the pelvic remnant without the femur after all.
 [1]

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