Spanning The Globe August 2026
- marketingc8
- Aug 5
- 3 min read
It’s time to go spanning the globe for anatomy news and notes!
Looking Closely
“Anatomy is not only a set of facts to memorize. It is a tradition of observation, representation, teaching, revision, and ethical responsibility. Vesalius’s work reminds us that medical knowledge advances when people look closely, test assumptions, and communicate what they see in forms others can understand.”
Oh wow, we love that quote from this article, “Anatomy Illustrated: Five Centuries of Seeing the Human Body” on the High Point University website. High Point University (“The Premier Life Skills University”) is located southeast of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
This thoughtful article is about a new display from HPU’s Libraries Archives and Special Collections that features two very different books “united by one essential question: how do we learn to see the human body?” The first book is Andreas Vesalius’s Icones Anatomicae, a 1934 edition that preserves images from the early 16th century work. The second is a modern Thieme Atlas of Anatomy from 2010, “a full-color teaching atlas designed for students preparing for health care, clinical practice, and research.”
Another great quote from the article: “That is what makes these books so compelling together. One preserves the visual world of Renaissance anatomy through a twentieth-century fine press edition. The other represents the modern visual language of health sciences education. Both ask us to look closely at the human body, and at the books that have helped generations understand it.”
Where will the study of human anatomy be in another 500 years? We don’t know the answer to that but we do know it will all move forward on our ability to look closely.
Embolomeres
Embolomeres were large, crocodile-like early tetrapods that lived 350 to 280 million years ago. They were top predators. They lived in swamps and rivers. They were known for a unique vertebrae structure where the main spool-shaped halves of the backbone were equal in size, allowing for powerful, fish-like swimming movements.
Southwest of Chicago are the Mazon Creek Fossil Beds that contain “exquisitely preserved” 300-million-year-old fossils that suggest that these early four-limbed vertebrates “did not undergo a metamorphosis between their juvenile and adult stages,” according to this article in NewScientist.
That discovery is challenging the long-held assumption that these animals were “broadly amphibian-like and that the life cycle would have bridged the gap between life in the water and life on land,” said Jason Pardo at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
“We have for a very long time assumed that these animals were broadly amphibian-like, and that this life cycle would have bridged the gap between life in the water and life on land,” says Jason Pardo at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
Pardo and his colleagues looked at baby embolomeres “which were so well preserved that the scientists could see soft tissues and even egg yolk.”
Comparing the embolomeres to amphibian larvae, such as tadpoles, the researchers discovered there were no external gills on the embolomeres, meaning that they remained more or less the same from the time they hatched from their eggs until they reached adulthood (the same way human babies are more or less the same, even though they grow for many years). The fossils, said Pardo, “show that this sort of life cycle was the norm for our earliest terrestrial ancestors, too.”
The discovery means that early four-limbed vetebrates did not undergo a metamorphosis between their juvenile and adult stages, “challenging conventional ideas about the evolution of life on land.”
Fun fact: the fossilized baby embolomeres these scientists studied were two centimeters long.
Stefan Milo
He has 644,000 followers on YouTube and if you are not yet familiar with Stefan Milo check out his channel here.
Real name: Stefan Milosavljevich. He uses only academic sources for all his videos and his motto his “No Atlantis, No Aliens, No Nonsense.”
In other words, science!
Around here, we think rabbit holes get a bad reputation. If you’re immersed in a new topic, after all, isn’t that a good thing? Well, Stefan Milo is one big rabbit hole with a host of well-produced, engaging videos:
Here are a few of our favorites:
Snappy, fun, interesting! You’ll feel like you dropped into a really nerdy (that’s another good thing!) conversation.
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