GD CORE 2: Bones 1 (O-V)

This (below) is the carpiece of the turtle.

The spinal cord of the turtle is fused to its carapace just as ours is.

Owl eyes are so big that they can’t move in their skull! This is why their vertebrae are engineered for a 250º turn of the neck! They can’t turn their eyes, but they can really turn their heads!

Look carefully at the eye bones of the creature above. Each one is made of several bones that have grown together.

Eye bones are called orbital bones.

Owls can turn their necks a whopping 7/8ths of the way around.

The nerves to the brain of people go from the neck on the outside of the skull. They then tunnel into the skull in the top of the brain area.

Owls have a way of pooling their blood that is going to their brain. They also have extra-wide bone-holes that the blood vessels going to their skull go through. Both of these “devices” make it so an owl doesn’t kill itself when it turns its head around.

In humans, the vertebral artery really hugs the hollow cavities in the neck. But this is not the case in owls.

We have two general types of bones: compact bone (cortical bone) and trabecular bone (springy bone). The bone below is compact bone. (Read further on if you have trouble with this question.)

Blood is made in the spaces between the trabecular bone network.

This is the feemore bone of a sauropod. (Do you think that the bone in this picture is real? Why or why not?)

Fingernails and hair are completely dead. There is nothing at all living in them. Bone is different. Much of it is lifeless proteins and minerals, but tucked inside the protein and mineral matrix are living cells.

The head of the femur bone of the leg is trabecular bone. The head of the femur bone goes into the pelvis hip ball socket at 90º.

You make a whopping 500 billion red blood cells (RBC) a day in your bone marrow! It’d take you 17,000 years for you to count the RBC’s your body makes in ONE day!

The bones around the human ear are cortical compact bone.

The cochlea of the ear is shaped like 3 bent tubes in the shape of upside-down U’s. This cochlea of the ear is enclosed in a bone cavern.

The orbital bone around the eye has some compact bone on its edges.

The orbital bone of the human eye fits around the eye very tightly.