Things to Make and Do, part 31: redneck CT-scan

For reasons that would be otiose, at this moment, to rehearse, I recently found myself in need of a hemisected turkey cervical. Happily, I own five skeletonised turkey necks, so it was with me the work of a moment to select a candidate. But now what? How to hemisect it? We have  discussed plenty of hemisected things here at SV-POW!, but they tend to have been produced using heavy machinery such as a band saw: something that I singularly lack.

This is not as laborious as you might think. I used a single sheet of medium-grade sandpaper, and it took maybe 15–20 minutes. And I just rubbed back and forth while exerting downward pressure. Initially I worked my way only through the prezygapophyseal ramus, which is the part of the turkey cervical that extends the furthest laterally. Once I was satisfied that the plane between eroded prezyg and the intact postzyg was parasagittal, I just kept the vertebra parallel to the sandpaper and kept rubbing. (Sorry I didn’t think to get a photo at this stage.)

One thing that took me by surprise is that there was so very much bone dust. I mean, I am an idiot that this surprised me, since the whole purpose of this exercise was to reduce one half of this vertebra to bone dust. But the lesson to be learned here is to do it on the easily-cleaned bathroom floor — not on the desk next to the computer keyboard and above a carpet. Learn from my mistakes, folks!

Anyway, after some work on the prezyg/postzyg pair, here’s how the vertebra was looking:

Domestic turkey Meleagris gallopavo domesticus, 9th cervical vertebra, most of right side removed, in anterior view with dorsal to the right. Propped up on the coracoid of a different, larger, turkey.