As Christmas approaches I usually try to find something festive and anatomical. In the past we have looked at the flight of reindeer and how you process your Christmas dinner, an advent of eponymous terms, reindeer and angels, cold paws in the snow, and party shoes. This year I want to bring you an anatomical phenomenon that you may be completely unaware of. I present to you the anatomical Christmas tree. You probably haven’t seen this before unless you hang around in body building gyms or someone points it out to you (I encountered it the second way). What creates this tree? The edges of thi ..read more

For the past 5 months people across the world (UK mainly) have been helping us by making felted vertebrae. The instructions are in the Ive got yer Back section of the web page if you want to try it out. At the beginning of October we brought all of those piece together for a special event during National Back week. The night had talks on spinal evolution and anatomy from Prof Tom Gillingwater and a talk on back pain by Gavin Routledge, clinical director at Active X clinics. Whilst the final art piece was stunning in its position within the Anatomical department at Edinburgh University. The fi ..read more

Did you watch the physical 100 in Netflix? It was a bizarre Korean show where people from all walks of life but supposedly at the peak of fitness were challenged, either individually or in teams, to perform tasks. A but like Squid Games only for real and not so terminal. I don’t know how real the voice overs were that we got in the UK, there seemed to be a lot of people with very similar voices saying the same things, but one of the over whelming comments was ‘Oh, look at those back muscles’. There aren’t many sports where you do actually get to see back muscles. A trip a long time ago to a sw ..read more

This week saw Mark Cavendish, the all time best ever sprinter in the Tour de France crash out of the race. This denies him the opportunity of setting the record for most ever stage wins in the race, upping his current total of 34 to 35 and topping the great Eddy Merckx. What Cav damaged was his collar bone or clavicle. This is a small slightly s shaped bone that acts as a brace between the top of the sternum and the shoulder blade, holding the arm out from the body and allowing it to function as a useful appendage. It may be visible depending on the percentage of body fat The name clavicle d ..read more

I recently had an article published on one of my favourite subjects – why winged four legged creatures don’t really work. You can read the whole article here As part of the peer review process other people read your article and send back comments as to how it could be improved. One such comment was a link to a document that reviewed ten flying creatures. The issue being that I had not mentioned any of these creatures in my article. The issue was – they didn’t fly. In the words of Buzz Lightyear – they fell with style. When it comes to the anatomy of flight, I was concentrating on the limb str ..read more

Last month a class member asked me about the pelvic joints. A friend of theirs had injured themselves skiing in Sweden and had been told by the physio there to rest to give the joint time to recover. Upon returning to the UK they were told that the joint was not moveable and so to be active. The question was simple – was the joint at the back of the pelvis moveable. The answer is not so simple. The pelvis is such a crucial bony girdle for our upright posture that it is maybe not surprising that people have lots of different ideas about it. It starts its life as a number of separate bones. The ..read more

I’m delighted to announce that a small group of us (depicted above as our favourite avengers) have been awarded a sum of money from the American Association for Anatomy to develop resources for public engagement. We have an interesting time ahead as we try to canvas opinion as to what it is important to highlight to the public and we are joined by our anatomist colleagues across the globe to try and deliver entertaining events that increase everybody’s knowledge of their bodies. Watch this space ..read more

My combat class recently started back after the Christmas break. We finished the first class with a cool down called stick wrestling. It’s not what it sounds like and it certainly isn’t the activity you see if you google that term. Two people grasp a stick and the aim of the practice is to make your opponent let go of the stick. This is not a test of brute strength, it’s not a case of throwing your opponent around. It looks like a dance, it’s a flow of allowing your opponent to move the stick around whilst being aware of what they are trying to do. Each of you are trying to move the stick into ..read more

I couldn’t resist a title like that with the New Year around the corner and a number of projects about to launch but what I really want to talk about is the TV series Limitless. The series sees Chris Hemsworth push his body beyond what anyone could reasonably expect. My attention was drawn to the series by some colleagues who helped out with the science side of things. Their contributions have been replaced with voice overs by the actor but I think they way the science is explained throughout the programs is good and easy to relate to. The body is pushed with a number of things we probably al ..read more

I recently took part in the International Feltmakers Association Felt Swap for 2022. Every year the organisation matches up felt makers across the world and provides a theme. Each feltmaker creates something and sends it off to their partner. This year the subject was structure. Obviously as an anatomist there are so many things I could do about structure but I was limited by the feltmakers being mainly wet felters as opposed to needle felting which is how I produce most of my items. I have been experimenting with a wet felted skull but it is still in its embryonic stages (ironically something ..read more