Dancing with capybaras

[ossamenta]

My plans for last Sunday went awry. My intentions were to go to the Natural History Museum, where their conservator Bethany Palumbo and Ben Garrod - of Secrets of bones fame - would put together a capybara skeleton, and then go next door to the Radcliffe Science library for some serious writing. Instead I got stuck at the capybara table, and ended up helping them getting the carpals and tarsals together. Very tricky as there wasn't any picture of which bones went where, so it was all trial and error on matching up the joint surfaces. We used whitetack (i.e. a white version of blu-tack) to keep the small bones together before they were getting set permanently with glue and/or wire. Unfortunately it's not as secure as glue since body heat makes it malleable, so as I was holding the tacked bones trying to find a matching piece, they kept twisting slightly apart - very irritating. There are just so many little bones in the wrist and ankle joints, so unless you know which bone goes where, it often hard to even tell if a bone is a carpal or a tarsal.

I was quite surprised by the capybara skeleton. Since it's the world's largest rodent, I had been wondering if it would look more like beaver (the largest rodent in Europe) - which admittedly lives more in water than capybaras do and therefore might have bones more adapted for that - or an upscaled rat? Instead, with the exception of the rodent like skull and shoulder blades, the bones remind me more of a pig!

Ben and Bethany didn't manage to fully assemble the capybara before the museum closed. Hopefully there will be a second event (The capybara strikes back? The wrath of the capybara?) so the museum will have a whole capybara skeleton on display.