The Australian Museum - Tumblr Posts

The Australian Museum in Sydney has one of the most interesting ways of displaying their taxidermy specimens, such as this human skeleton riding a horse. The have a lot of of stuffed Australian animals placed in corners and over ledges like they are spying on you. Also they have several platypus skeletons and a few stuffed ones as well. And their website has a page dedicated to the infamous and elusive Drop Bears.

This is great!  This image also does a wonderful job of illustrating the unguligrade locomotion of a Perissodactyl.  The hooves (or where the hooves would be) are made up of solely the middle distal phalanx — in other words, horses walk on only the tips of their middle ‘fingers’, which has grown large enough to become weight-bearing.  The bones that follow are other fused phalanges for support, followed by fused metapodials — the ‘hand bones’ — a culmination of wrist bones, and finally the radius/ulna and humerus.  I’ll illustrate this better at a later time but I thought it’d be worth pointing out.