Giraffe dissection 2: more of the front limb

I’ll try to keep the blood and gore to a minimum, promise. However, this post and (hopefully) a few follow-ons will have a lot of parts-of-a-dead-animal images, so you’re squeamish better forgo reading below the jump.

After John had taken the skin off the shoulder area of the giraffe, this is what we had to work with:

We’re looking at this in lateral view, and as you can see on the top right, part of the muscles leading to the neck have been cut away not only from the neck and ribcage, but also from the shoulder region. These had us guessing quite a bit, especially because they were not in the best of states. Penny Hudson’s help was crucial here – very heartfelt thanks, Penny!

I’ll spare you all the bloody photos of cut-up muscle, and jump right to a closer look at the humeral head:

Humeral head on the right – can you spot the pathology? And the massive biceps tendon on the left – you can kind of see the two heads splitting. This thing is massive and rugged, if you’ve seen it once you’ll always recognize it! The insertion at the distal end is equally impressive:

Tendon going to the radial tuberosity on the top left, and there is an extra tendon (the one John is about to cut) running down the radial shaft – we’ll see today how far this goes and hat it merges into.