About Bone

Since the pandemic started, the news media note that pasta has been flying off grocery store shelves almost as fast as hand sanitizer and toilet paper. Certainly pasta is cheap, easy to cook, and filling; and throwing hot pasta against the wall to test its doneness has to be stress relieving.

But there may be another reason for pasta’s scarcity, which an AboutBone blog reader tipped me off about—craft projects. She sent me an image of a pasta skeleton, which had been forwarded to her. She did not know its provenance, so I was hesitant to post it without being able to attribute the artist, because even pasta artists have intellectual property rights.

I stewed over the issue for several days, and then during my next early-morning, biweekly foray to the grocery store, I scored eight boxes of pasta from the sparsely stocked shelves. Each box contained a different shape of hard, whitish construction material, faintly reminiscent of tiny bones. So here are examples to inspire you should you and your kin tire of baking bread and assembling jigsaw puzzles.

Send me a picture of your masterpiece, either gluten-laden or gluten-free, and I will include it in a future post.

I learned about George Stubbs several months ago when I was looking for an image of a horse to illustrate a blog post. I came across the stunning painting of Whistlejacket, which hangs in the National Gallery in London.

Englishman George Stubbs did not arrive at his impressive talent easily. He taught himself to paint and developed a mastery of portraying horses by meticulously dissecting and drawing the anatomy of a dozen of them over 18 months in the mid 18^th century. He particularly focused on their bones, muscles, and subcutaneous veins to arrive at “authentic, elegant and transcendental paintings.*” Michelangelo had achieved equal mastery of the human form by similar means 200 years earlier; but Stubbs went even further. Finding no suitable engraver, he taught himself to etch “to the necessary standard” and made the plates for his book, The Anatomy of the Horse.

Although the book was a marvel of detailed equine anatomy rarely found in human anatomical works of the time, Stubbs saw himself as an artist rather than as an anatomist. He identified himself on the title page as George Stubbs, Painter. In the introduction he hoped that the book “might prove particularly useful to those of my own profession” and took care to portray his specimens in lifelike positions.

Stubbs developed an aristocratic patronage and lived well in London on commissions received from painting both humans and racehorses.

He also started a second book, Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body, with That of a Tiger and a Common Fowl. Unusual for the time, the drawings of these animals, which were externally quite different, demonstrated marked, shared skeletal similarities.

Stubbs became friends with brothers William and John Hunter, both eminent doctors. The three of them shared their deep interests in anatomy and the natural world. The Hunters greatly valued Stubbs’ artistic expertise because, as Britain’s colonial expansion brought home growing knowledge of the natural world, visual records were vital for identifying species and distinguishing differences between them. For instance, Stubbs had opportunities to visit aristocrats’ country estates, which often had menageries. On one visit he accurately painted a moose, rarely seen in Britain at the time. William Hunter was then able to compare the moose to the fossilized skeleton of an Irish elk, which was actually a deer with gigantic antlers. At the time, some considered the moose and the Irish elk to be the same species, but Stubb’s painting showed that the moose’s recently shed antlers were distinctly different from the fossilized Irish elk antlers. This evidence helped William Hunter show that the two animals were distinct species and that the elk was extinct, a then controversial concept.

Through his paintings of other privately kept wild animals, Stubbs introduced 18^th century Britons to kangaroos, lions, tigers, rhinos, and giraffes.

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Even with horses and dogs, each animal’s spirit seems to jump off the canvas and into viewers’ hearts. George Stubbs made the point that, despite first-glance appearances, we have much in common with animals larger, smaller, and more furry and feathery than ourselves.

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* Spira A, Postle M, Bonaventura P (editors): George Stubbs, All Done from Nature. London, Holberton Publishing, 2019.

Bone has been around for 500 million years, and a small fraction of it has been preserved as fossils—stone bones. Bone in another form, charcoal, has a shorter but extremely dark history, which extends into popular culture and space exploration. Variously known as bone charcoal, bone black, and bone char; it is produced by burning bones, byproducts of the meatpacking industry, in an oxygen-starved environment.

Almost 40,000 years ago, cave artists drew with charcoal made from either wood or bone, and Egyptian tomb painters used it about 5000 years ago. Why the ancients chose one type of charcoal over the other is unclear, but their properties do differ. Wood charcoal is blacker and is now known to be carcinogenic when ingested. Without realizing that the alternative was toxic, Hippocrates recommended bone char for treating epilepsy, anthrax, gangrene, and bad breath. (Black tongue, anyone?)

About 1800, someone discovered that pouring vinegar or wine through a bed of bone char clarified the liquid. It was soon revealed that bone char would do the same for sugar syrup, refining brownish raw sugar and making it white. The sugar industry could not get enough of it, and pioneers prospered by picking up and selling bleached bison bones that littered the American prairies to sugar refineries. (These bones were also a much-in-demand raw material for the fertilizer industry. See https://aboutbone.com/when-bone-piles-became-cash-cows )

Presently various industries use bone char to color linoleum, paint, printing ink, wallpaper, plastic, and concrete. Also, Hollywood has casted bone char as a nontoxic stand-in for oil slicks and spills in movies including On Deadly Ground, Beverly Hillbillies, Die Hard III, Waterworld, Down Periscope, and Men in Black. In other productions it has also mimicked mud and lava.

The truly out-of-this-world applications for bone char, however, relate to satellites. Launched in 1977, Voyager I and II have some of their optical components coated with bone char. These satellites are two of only several Earth objects that have left the Solar System, and both are expected to maintain some functions until at least 2025. They will continue to drift intergalactically at minus 455 degrees Fahrenheit until eventually some distant star vaporizes them or a black hole engulfs them—extraordinary trips for some cow and pig bones.

At the opposite end of the thermal spectrum, the Solar Orbiter, a European Space Agency/NASA joint venture,  took off on its seven-year mission in February 2020. During the next two years, the satellite will position itself into a solar orbit closer than Mercury’s to explore the previously poorly observed solar poles. In doing so, it will experience light intensity 13 times that present on Earth and temperatures as high as 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. (Image putting your cell phone in an extremely hot oven and doubling the temperature.)

An eight-by-ten foot heat shield on the face of Solar Orbiter will protect the delicate scientific instruments from the Sun’s withering heat and light and allow them to function at a constant temperature. During planning, requirements for the shield included a surface that, over the course of the mission, would not flake off or fade from intense ultraviolet light. It could not emit vapors or build up static electric charges because either would distort the instruments’ measurements. The shield also had to be light weight in order for the satellite to escape Earth’s gravity at the journey’s onset.

The shield is made of titanium foil which is permanently bonded to a thin layer of, you guessed it, bone char. It proved best in meeting all the requirements; and yes, black does absorb heat, but bone char quickly radiates it away. Furthermore, the shield is positioned four inches in front of the satellite’s main body, allowing for adequate ventilation. Small openings in the shield allow cameras and other sensing devices to momentarily stare directly at the Sun before their overlying “eyelids” blink closed.  

Between now and 2027, the ten onboard instruments (one from the US and the others from individual European countries) will have a lot to tell us about solar winds and geomagnetic storms. They reach Earth in their mildest forms as aurora phenomena (northern and southern lights). In their harshest forms they could create havoc in our electrical systems, which could knock out satellites, GPS, electrical grids, and computer networks. So we should take a personal interest in the success of the high-tech Solar Orbiter, whose fate relies on humble bone.   

Viruses typically invade our bodies through an opening. Think gastrointestinal flu, Covid-19, AIDS. Our bones, however, are normally protected from any outside exposure, so they should be safe, right?

The short answer is yes and no. Of course knowledge is power, and we need both right now, so here is a nuanced answer.

Patients with smallpox complained frequently of bone pain. Epidemics in Prague in 1891-1892, in Boston a decade later, in the Philippines a few years after that, and in India in the 1940s led investigators to conclude that bone and joint changes appeared in approximately 1% of infected adults and 5% of infected children. The elbows were affected in 80% of cases, hands and wrists in 20%, other areas less commonly. Over half of these patients had more than one joint affected. In children, the affliction frequently halted the development of growing bones, leaving some remarkably short.

The good news is that the World Health Organization declared the worldwide eradication of smallpox in 1980. This came about by vaccinating populations with smallpox’s less virulent cousin, cowpox, imparting immunity to both. (Cow in Latin is vacca, hence the origin of the word vaccine). In areas where most people had been vaccinated, infections became rare, and routine immunization ended in the US and Western Europe in the early 1970s and worldwide in 1986.

People also got bone infections from chickenpox, but those were most likely caused by bacteria that entered the bloodstream through itchy skin blisters and scabs. Fortunately, chickenpox has become extremely rare since the advent of a vaccine in the 1990s.

The same is true for two other viral diseases that many people, myself included, tend to confuse: German measles and measles, also known respectively as rubella and rubeola (as if that clarifies things). Rubella causes milder symptoms than rubeola, but when the rubella virus passes from a pregnant woman to her fetus, the devastation includes heart defects, learning disabilities, and bone weakening, especially around the knee.

Rubeola, conversely, made patients more miserable at its onset, but it usually left bones alone. Fifty to eighty years later, however, some people developed Paget’s disease, also known as osteitis deformans, which even without much knowledge of Latin suggests its nature: excessive bone breakdown followed by disorganized new bone formation. Investigators have recently found a rubeola virus protein in the bone-remodeling cells in people with Paget’s disease. To study the possible link further, the researchers genetically engineered mice to harbor this viral protein in their bone cells. The mice developed Paget’s disease. On a positive note, the human incidence of Paget’s disease of bone has declined in recent decades, which coincides with the introduction of a rubeola vaccine in 1969.

Other viruses can cause aching muscles and swollen joints but do not seem to affect bone. Notorious ones of this sort cause dengue fever. It is also known as breakbone fever because it causes excruciating muscle aches. One victim related, “You don’t die from it, but you wish you could.” There are five forms of this virus, and surviving one form imparts long-term immunity from it but not the other forms. A vaccine that covers four of the varieties is available. Dengue viruses still infect almost 400 million people annually, mostly in Africa and South America. It is lethal for one person in ten thousand (40,000 per year), most often young children, whose immune systems are not fully developed.

So back to the question, do viruses infect bone? And more broadly, are there lessons here to apply to the current Covid-19 pandemic? Yes and yes. Some viruses historically have affected bone, but there are vaccines available to prevent such diseases entirely. Covid-19 causes muscle aches, but nothing so severe as those encountered with breakbone fever, and only time will tell whether the novel corona virus will cause bone manifestations, which may not be revealed for decades. A vaccine will become available against Covid-19, and we can hope that one form will suffice in contrast to the multiple forms needed to prevent dengue fever.

Certainly the current pandemic is devastating on many levels, but here is some perspective. Smallpox vexed people for well over 2000 years and killed 300 million people in the twentieth century. The Spanish flu killed up to 100 million people worldwide and nearly 700,000 Americans in just a few years. Ordinary seasonal influenza kills 300,000 to 650,000 people a year including 60,000 Americans. Dengue fever is agonizingly painful and kills young children. Until the 1950s, the causes for these drastic diseases were unknown, no testing was available, and there were zero test kits, intensive care units, and respirators. So despite present and fully justified concerns, we (including our bones) have a lot to be thankful for.

Stay immunized. Stay separated. Stay safe.

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In these uncertain times, we can always fall back on the security of bones and knowing that they can preserve messages in the fossil record. By contrast, lesser tissues and even completely boneless organisms,  including viruses, do not stand the test of geologic time particularly well, if at all. (Take that, novel coronavirus!).

So today it is particularly fitting to summarize a report emanating recently from the Wuhan Centre of China Geological Survey. The basis of the study is a strange marine reptile named Eretmorhipis, which comes from the Greek words for oar and fan. Two rather intact specimens have been discovered in Hubei Province, not far from Wuhan, in what was a lagoon 250 million years ago. This was a short two million years after a mass extinction wiped out 96% of marine animals.  

Oar-fan is a suitable name for this lagoon dweller because the animal’s paddle-like feet with fanned-out digits were likely useful for propulsion and maneuvering. Eretmorhipis also sported ten dorsal triangular plates, reminiscent of the spinal blades of Stegosaurus.

Based on Oar-fan’s closely spaced vertebrae, thick ribs, and the presence of abdominal ribs, the investigators surmise that it did not have much trunk or tail flexibility, contrasted to most reptiles. What is even more remarkable is Oar-fan’s tiny head compared to its overall length of about three feet. The investigators note that only tiny eyes can fit in such a small head. They therefore surmise that Oar-fan did not see well, especially in murky water characteristic of lagoons. So it had to rely on another sense to capture prey. But in its small head there would not be room for much sound detection equipment either. And everybody knows that trying to smell under water doesn’t work. How about tasting, since tongue flicking is a well-known reptilian trait? The investigators discount that sense as useful for Oar-fan to go hunting because “the vomeronasal fenestra is lacking in the palate … and tongue flicking is unsuitable for prey and predator detection.” I’ll have to take their word for those facts.

So with a clumsy trunk and tail, lousy eyes and ears, and the unlikely  ability to taste or smell, how did Oar-fan catch food? The investigators took a second look at Oar-fan’s jaw, which is shaped like a duck’s bill, and the lights went on. The whole animal is as preposterous as a duckbilled platypus, and its snout is the same shape. A platypus is known to scavenge in murky water by snatching up whatever its bill bumps into; and Oar-fan probably did the same, with shrimp being its most likely dietary staple. Another possibility, which the investigators cannot rule out based on the fossil record, is that Oar-fan used electroreception. This works for Guiana dolphins but is not known to exist in reptiles; and even bones, as great as they are for preserving Earth’s history, cannot provide that answer.   

Oar-fan does, however, add useful insights into the rapid ecological diversification that occurred after a monumental mass extinction.  Furthermore, thank you, Oar-fan, for momentarily diverting our attention from pandemics. Any good news from Wuhan is good news indeed.

Ziegler Reservoir, nearly 9000 feet up in the Colorado mountains, is dinky. When frozen over, you could walk across it in four minutes. Yet beneath its water is a repository of fossils that is unequaled worldwide. The story starts about 140,000 years ago, but humans have been involved for only the past ten. In 2010 the local water district, after acquiring the water rights from the namesake family, began deepening the reservoir in order to supply drinking water to Snowmass Village and man-made snow to the adjacent ski area. Hardly had the first bulldozer blade touched mud when old bones and teeth, gigantic ones, began surfacing. The findings were mammoth, both figuratively and literally.

The contractor summoned paleontologists from the Denver Museum of Science and Nature, who over the next several weeks worked closely with the construction crew to carefully retrieve a trove of fossilized bones, teeth, insects, and plant material, including pollen. Winter set in and work stopped until Spring. Then a large gathering of scientists and volunteers worked side by side with the heavy equipment operators to carefully remove and preserve as many specimens as possible. As agreed upon from the outset, collection continued for seven weeks, after which the construction project proceeded unimpeded. Water refilled the reservoir and continues to protect the expected vast store of remaining fossils from erosion or pilfering.

The scientists weren’t moaning, however, because they had obtained for study over 35,000 bones from roughly 50 species of animals ranging in size from mammoths, North American camels, and bison down to beavers, lizards, birds, frogs, snails, and insects. Plant material, including pollen, abounded as well. All told, the site is the most productive high-elevation Ice Age fossil site ever discovered—a reservoir indeed.

One might ask, did this accumulation occur as a result of a cataclysmic event such as a meteorite striking Earth? No, because the plants and animals became entombed in the reservoir over nearly 100 thousand years, not over a far shorter time, which would be characteristic of a sudden environmental change. The best guess is that the glacier responsible for carving the valley receded about 130,000 years ago, a lake formed, sediment accumulated gradually and turned the area first into a wetland and then into a meadow. For many millennia, animals came to drink, died naturally or became mired in mud, and were eventually silted over. What is even more remarkable, that when the next glacier which came along and maxed out about 20 thousand years ago, it skirted this valley, thus saving the entombed plants and animals from massive forces of churning and grinding.    

In the sediment of this ancient lake is the layered evidence of multiple alpine ecosystems. A number of vertebrate species unearthed have never before been found at this high elevation. And although most of the site’s large animals (mastodons, mammoths, giant ground sloths, North American camels) are now extinct, most of the plants and insects still exist, although elsewhere. The varying climate, from arctic to temperate and back to arctic, can be discerned from the fossilized insects and plant material, including pollen, recovered from each layer. Whether this time capsule of climate change has current relevance is yet to be determined. Regardless, the site will always be known as …

For many, winter ice means at least aggravation, if not slips and falls; but ice facilitates travel for some and provides amusement for others—practices that range back at least 4000 years and which were facilitated by bone.  

Inuits found it easier to dogsled on ice than either to walk on tundra or to paddle on water. Today, dogsled runners (and skis and snowboards), have plastic-covered gliding surfaces that minimize friction. Inuits, however, had to improvise with the hardest, smoothest material they had available: bones, which likely came from caribou shins or possibly from whale ribs. Craftsmen cut them into flat strips and drilled holes through them. Then using a leather thong, they lashed the bone segments to the sled’s runners. Away they slid.

Others borrowed the technology. For instance, Robert Perry made an expedition to Greenland in 1891-1892. On his ship’s first approach to land, its rudder hit some ice. The out-of-control tiller struck Perry’s lower leg and broke both bones. Perry had to stay in camp the next six months to heal while team members made short forays into the unknown. The second year, using dogsleds equipped with traditional bone-clad runners, Perry mushed far enough north to determine that Greenland was an island.

Farther east and about four millennia earlier, enterprising Northern European travelers thought, “We don’t need sleds or dogs. Those are a lot of work and extra mouths to feed. We can just tie bones to our boots.” Away they skated–first as a means of winter transportation and later for amusement.

At various archaeology sites in Great Britain and Scandinavia, cannon bones from the legs of horses and cattle have shown up, drilled through to accept thong laces and smoothed to glide on ice.

William FitzStephen, clerk to Thomas Becket and chronicler of twelfth-century London life wrote:

Others …. fit to their feet the shin-bones of beasts, lashing them beneath their ankles, and with iron-shod poles in their hands, they strike ever and anon against the ice and are borne along swift as a bird in flight or a bolt shot from a mangonel (catapult).

FitzStephen may have anticipated hockey checking when he continued:

But sometimes two by agreement run one against the other from a great distance, and raising their poles, strike one another. One or both fall, not without bodily harm, since on falling they are borne a long way in the opposite directions by the force of their own motion; and wherever the ice touches the head, it scrapes and skins it entirely.

Four centuries later, ice skating technology had improved, at least marginally. Olaus Magnus observed:  

The rest are outrun by those competitors in the race who attach to the soles of their feet the shin-bones of deer thoroughly smoothed and greased with pork fat.  

Another bone-aided ice escapade combined elements of sledding and skating, which several sixteenth-century artists depicted. It would be a tight fit even for a small child, but feasible, since a horse’s jawbone is almost eighteen inches long. (Cow jawbones are shorter.) The operator is practically sitting on the ice, the safest place to be considering how slippery it is.

Bottom line: bones do glide nicely on ice, just take care that the bones doing the sliding are not yours.

I, along with some others, take Presidents Day as an opportunity to celebrate the lives and contributions of all US presidents. Amid the praise, however, perhaps I alone feel compelled to describe their skeletal maladies. I have gleaned the following information from several websites and books that carefully detail the reported injuries, diseases, bad habits, and addictions experienced by US chief executives throughout their lives, starting with George Washington’s birth in 1732.

The list may not be complete and accurate for at least three reasons. X-rays were not discovered until 1895, so a “fracture” before that time, unless the bone ends were seen emerging through the skin, might have been a dislocated joint or a bad sprain. Secondly, diagnostic terms such as gout, lumbago, and rheumatism have been tossed about without strict and uniform definitions over the nearly 300-year span of this survey. And early on, there were not confirmatory laboratory tests for such diagnoses. Finally, there have been multiple instances where a president wanted to keep his ailment(s) secret because of their implication of weakness or vulnerability; yet the truth escaped. It is possible, however, that there are other presidential ails that never became publicly known.

Efforts at secrecy led to at least one other problem. It may have precluded some presidents from receiving the best care available, because for the sake of covertness, they shunned the most eminent (and most visible) doctors and hospitals. Another possible problem is that trying to maintain secrecy usually entailed lying. 

Jimmy Carter is the longest living president–presently 94 and counting. Who was the healthiest president? Likely it was Millard Fillmore. He neither drank nor smoked and was conscientious about maintaining his wellbeing. He had no known medical problems until he suffered a stroke at age 74. A second stroke later the same year killed him.

Conversely, John Tyler was in ill health throughout his life. His maladies included arthritis and general achiness, particularly in his post-presidential years. Nonetheless, he managed to father eight children with one wife before he was President and seven more with a second wife after his term. His last child was born when Tyler was 70. Tyler died two years later. Imagine his productivity had he been spry.

People will undoubtedly speculate forever about Lincoln’s skeletal condition. There is some agreement that he inherited it from his mother, since they shared many skeletal features. A reporter once described Lincoln as over six feet tall, lanky, with long drooping arms “terminating in hands of extraordinary dimensions, which, however were far exceeded in proportion by his feet.”  Lincoln, whatever his skeletal peculiarities, did not apparently have any noteworthy bony problems other than having a piece of his jaw extracted along with a tooth. Many of his fellow presidents were not so lucky.

Jefferson, Kennedy and George W. Bush all had severe back pain. Jefferson’s life predated the discovery of general anesthesia, so elective back surgery during his time was unimaginable. JFK had one operation, Bush two.

Gerald Ford sustained multiple injuries playing high school and college football, which led in later life to bilateral total knee replacements. These restored his ability to play golf and tennis.

In 1893 during his second presidential term, Grover Cleveland surreptitiously had surgery to remove a cancer from his mouth (on his cigar-chewing side) along with part of his upper jaw and hard palate. The surgery was performed entirely through his mouth, so there was no external evidence of the procedure, and his bushy moustache likely concealed swelling and bruising. The clandestine operation took place aboard a private yacht cruising Long Island Sound. His five-day absence went entirely unexplained, and Cleveland allegedly said to those involved that he lied more about this event than he did during the whole rest of his life. Twenty-five years later the truth emerged.  

Here is a list of presidential fractures sorted from head to toe. Taft fell from a wagon at age nine and sustained a “minor” skull fracture, which by some accounts left him with a life-long and visible indentation in his scalp. Both Truman and Carter broke their collar bones, the former from falling out of a chair in childhood and the latter from skiing in adulthood. Both had additional fractures in late life. Truman fell and broke several ribs; and Carter, the oldest living past President at age 94, broke his hip as he was leaving home to go turkey hunting. Far more dramatic were Jackson’s rib fractures, which resulted from a duel. Later, in an out-and-out gunfight, a bullet shattered Jackson’s shoulder. The first gunshot wound continued to drain and stink for the rest of Jackson’s life.

Jefferson, two months after becoming Minister to France, broke his wrist. This occurred either while jumping a fence during a tour of Paris with a married woman (Jefferson’s wife had died three years before), while he was jumping over a kettle, or while he was walking with a friend. Was somebody lying? Regardless, this injury nagged him for the rest of his life and further disabled him when, at age 78, he fell from a broken step at home and fractured his opposite wrist.

Reagan fell from a horse and broke his femur when he was 38. At age 90, well after retiring from public view, he broke his hip, which was successfully pinned, and he survived another two years.

Regarding non-fatal gun shots yet harrowing glimpses of death but without apparent skeletal injuries, the award goes to Rutherford Hayes. He sustained Civil War battle wounds on four separate occasions and also had horses shot from under him an equal number of times. 

Even though Washington as a child blurted “I cannot tell a lie”, and Lincoln was known as Honest Abe, the prize for bold truth-telling goes to Eisenhower. A White House visitor noticed him wearing a leather wrist brace and inquired. Ike responded that it was mild arthritis. The visitor said he was glad it wasn’t serious. Eisenhower exclaimed, “I should say it’s serious. I can’t play golf.”  

Happy Presidents Day!

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Truest Reward was the thirty-eighth thoroughbred to meet its demise in 2019 at the Santa Anita racetrack. The high incidence of horses breaking their legs at this track in recent years has raised many concerns and adverse publicity.

Multiple factors are likely involved. They include not cancelling races when the track is rain-soaked and doping the steeds with anti-inflammatory drugs, sedatives, and muscle relaxants. Although toxicology studies have not shown drug levels that exceeded the racing board’s rules, it remains disturbing that the board allows horses to run while taking multiple medications. Such drugs likely mask early symptoms of skeletal stress, which are exacerbated by too-frequent racing–a habit promoted by those with strong financial stakes in the sport. The problem is not unique to Santa Anita. According to the Jockey Club’s Equine Injury Database, an average of nearly ten horses died while racing or training at American racetracks in 2018. Even more sadly, the same fracture can occur in horses not bred to race.

Consider the long bones in your hand or forefoot. Imagine fusing two of the middle ones side to side, quadrupling their length, depriving them of any overlying muscle, and restricting their blood supply. Such are the cannon bones. They are a major reason why horses can run fast. But if the horse stumbles, gets kicked, or even tries to stand up in its stall, the cannon bone can break. The final snap may occur in a bone previously stressed and cracked, which was either unknown to or ignored by the trainer. Circulating medications may at times mask symptoms of the impending catastrophe.  

The bones themselves are problematic. Most of these fractures occur in either the front or hind leg’s cannon bone. I have blogged previously on the versatility of these strong, dense, long bones that have been repurposed as chisels, awls, hide scrapers, buttons, chess pieces, decorative objects, musical instruments, and paving. What makes the cannon bone useful to crafts people makes them useful to horses.

Those affiliated with horse racing, financially, emotionally, or both, describe the final act as euthanasia, which is double speak for kill. With either word, the result is the same: the world is absent one magnificent animal.

So why is an equine cannon bone fracture fatal? Dogs and cats can hop around pretty well on three legs. Horses can’t. If they try, their other hooves become diseased.  Casts and body slings are entirely impractical. Surgical fixation with metal plates and screws is sometimes attempted, but such procedures are complicated by several major issues. The fracture ends often tear the skin. Then bacteria-laden soil contaminates the wound. Infection overwhelms the surgical endeavor. The fracture may also strip the foot of its already tenuous blood supply, thus precluding the delivery of nutrients and antibiotics to the injury zone and beyond. Because of the added bulk, placement of sturdy hardware may preclude closure of the surgical incision. Then there is the issue of getting an 1100-pound patient to stand up following general anesthesia. The horse unknowingly and perhaps painlessly exerts tremendous bending and twisting forces that sorely test the stability of the most secure hardware fixation.

Is there hope? A little, especially for incomplete fractures and simple, non-displaced ones. Innovative veterinarian orthopedists can try to stabilize such fractures with screws placed through incisions just large enough to admit the drill, screw, and screwdriver. (three minute video) This is done with nerve blocks in the leg while the horse, awake, remains standing. (The surgeon and assistant perform the procedure on their knees.) Pool therapy, useful for sore tendons, ligaments, and joints in both humans and horses, may have a role in the rehabilitation of minor fractures that are securely fixed. Aquatic suspension may be particularly helpful during recovery from general anesthesia.

Since treatment is woeful and no improvements are on the horizon, hope has to rely on better regulation, which can’t come too soon. On New Years Day, Golden Birthday became the first Santa Anita racehorse in 2020 to meet Truest Reward’s fate from just five days before. And this is sport?

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The most popular About Bone posts in 2019:

Is it orthopedic or orthopaedic?

How are you going to celebrate National Fossil Day?

Versatile Venerable Vertebrae

Should you resolve to drink bone broth this year?

This time last year, I posted gift ideas for the frugal bone lover–nothing over $9.99. For this holiday season, I have decided to help you shop for those highly sophisticated, discriminating, hard-to-please recipients on your list. The options are vast, but for inclusion here, the selections had to meet these tasteful criteria:

no human skull motifs

no real-bone jewelry

nothing under $500

Of course, after you finish shopping, forward this post to those who will be shopping for you with a “hint, hint.”

By the way, I have no financial interest in any of the items, nor do I own any of them myself, except the last one, which is priceless.

For nature lovers, especially those with large homes or personal museums, consider an assembled skeleton. The leaping fox diorama is a steal for $1225, although it is presently on back order. Conversely the giraffe skeleton stands 14 feet tall and is immediately available for $42,000. Shipping charges would have to be negotiated. At a mere $3000 per vertical foot, the giraffe is certainly worth what it would add to any decor.

Perhaps your gifting budget is a bit tight and your nature lovers are a do-it-yourself types. Consider giving them skeleton “kits” to assemble. Size matters, of course. The squirrel monkey sells for $500 where as the caribou and the camel go for $3475 and $3975, respectively. (Camels are larger than caribous.)

For do-it-yourself techies, large-capacity 3D printers would bring smiles to their faces. One big enough to print whole bones is going to cost $700-$800, but consider that the data files for many different bones are posted on the internet and are free. For example, here are prints of skulls of a gopher tortoise and a gray fox.

Admittedly, not everybody shares my love for bare bones. Nonetheless, extravagant gifts, which do not blatantly shout bone, abound. Consider jewelry, either made from bone or made to look like bone. The ring contains a polished dinosaur fossil. The jeweler insists that the incorporated fossils come from rock shards that are unidentifiable by species and unimportant to paleontologists. Whew! And for $1145, what a great way to safely relate to a terrible lizard. The bone-bead bracelet seems pretty enough without the diamond bauble, but that certainly elevates the price, which is $1050, shipping included. The “bone cuff” is a classic Elsa Peretti design that Tiffany’s lets go for $1150 in sterling silver and for ten times that much in gold. I am not sure if a discerning woman would wear the diamond dog bone necklace, but if she has a dog, then it is a winner. What pooch wouldn’t want to style jewelry worth $1335 around its neck.

For the cerebral, reserved types on your gift list, consider chess sets made of bone. This set costs $1495, which might seem extravagant for a game, but the recipient gets 32 pieces at $47 each.

Then for the impossibly difficult people on your list who already have everything, give them a way to carry and store their bounty. The Alexander McQueen roller bag is “pre-owned” and available on eBay for $796, but the seller is amenable to offers. Standing nearly six feet tall is a bone-inlaid closet selling for $2499 and suitable for storing skeletons.

Finally, here is the most valuable and enduring gift of all. It is priceless, and spreading the word about the blog will also be a great present to me. If you would like, I will mail as many ABOUT BONE cards to you as you wish. Toss each friend and loved one a bone (card) and encourage them to subscribe. Oh so tasteful and supremely extravagant!

Happy Holidays

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Breaking news for 2020:

Want to hear about Bone, Inside and Out, in a somewhat organized manner? I will be teaching such a course 1:30 – 3:00 pm on five Tuesdays, January 14 – February 11, at the Skirball Cultural Center in West Los Angeles. Sign up now. We are going to have lots of fun.

WW Norton will be publishing my book, Bone, Inside and Out, in October. Details later.