Another picture from the recent ostrich dissection (click for full-size, unlabeled version). Last time we were in the middle of the neck, looking from anterior to posterior. This shot is from closer to the base of the neck, looking from posterior to anterior.

Those ostrich necks I went to Oro Grande to get last Thursday? Vanessa and I started dissecting them last Friday. The necks came to us pre-cut into segments with two to three vertebrae per segment. The transverse cuts were made without regard for joints so we got a bunch of cross sections at varying points through the vertebrae. This was fortuitous;

I was putting a new card in my camera and needed some test photos, so I shot what was on my desk: some random doodles from discussions with various folks, and an ostrich cervical. I love my job. Bonus SV-POW!bucks to the first person to decipher the diagram on the lower left.

Today was one of the most interesting days of my life. Vanessa and I needed ostrich parts for dissection, so I had gotten in touch with Doug Osborne of OK Corral Ostrich Farms in Oro Grande.

What’s that?  You want proof, you say?  Well, I find your lack of faith disturbing; but since you asked, you got it! What we have here is the part-way assembled skull of our old friend Veronica, in dorsal view, with anterior to the left.  The long pointed bones down there are the nasals: you don’t see their anterior ends in complete skulls because they’re covered by the fused premaxillae.

Work continues apace with Veronica, my tame ostrich.  (See previous parts one, two, three and four).  I’ve been photographing the individual bones of the skull — a skill that’s taken me some time to get good at, and one that I might do a tutorial on some time, to follow up the one on photographing big bones. Here is a preview of the result of this photography-fest: a multi-view figure of the ethmoid ossification.

Cleaning and bleaching is complete!  Here are all the bones of Veronica’s skull [see earlier part one, part two and part three], laid out as they were in life (though of course much more widely separated), all in dorsal view: On the left, we have the bones of the lower jaw, palate and braincase, with the first three and a half vertebrae at the bottom.

For reasons that seemed good to me at the time, I took my best shot at photographing the right cervical rib from cervical vertebra 3 of my ostrich, Veronica [see earlier Part A, Part B and Part C for context].  I thought you might like to see the result, so here it is: Third right cervical rib of subadult female ostrich (Struthio camelus), total length 23 mm. (Total length of the rib, I mean, not total length of the ostrich.) Left column:

After the third simmering, Veronica the Ostrich Head started to come apart beautifully — more so than she should have done in one or two places, as it became apparent that her skull, as well as being incompletely fused due to presumed subadult age at time of death, was slightly damaged.

Yesterday, I followed up Veronica‘s second simmering by taking more flesh off the bones, and in doing this I stared to take apart the bones that constitute the skull.