Bisected pelican arm bones of the Oxford Museum of Natural History

Here are the humerus and ulna of a pelican, bisected:

What we’re seeing here is the top third of each bone: humerus halves on the left, ulna halves on the right, in a photo taken at the 2012 SVPCA in one of our favourite museums.

The hot news here is of course the extreme pneumaticity: the very thin bone walls, reinforced only at the proximal extremely by thin struts. Here’s the middle third, where as you can see there is essentially no reinforcement: just a hollow tube, that’s all:

And then at the distal ends, we see the struts return:

Here’s the whole thing in a single photo, though unfortunately marred by a reflection (and obviously at much lower resolution):

We’ve mentioned before that pelicans are crazy pneumatic, even by the standards of other birds: as Matt said about a pelican vertebra (skip to 58 seconds in the linked video), “the neural spine is sort of a fiction, almost like a tent of bone propped up”.

Honestly. Pelican skeletons hardly even exist.