I have been slowly working on the lone bones of a section of a limb of a young pig for the last few days in trying to get a good look at what exactly the growth plates look like up close. I would assume that the morphology and structure of pig’s bone is about the same as human bones. I put up originally 3 separate videos, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, but I found that the quality of those videos and their size was bad quality and it was hard for you to see what I was actually point at or referring to. So I redid all the content, combined my commentary into 1 and uploaded a 4th video. It is around 8 minutes long.
Note: There are also 4 pictures at the bottom of this post. I managed to also take some pictures of the actual plates and the bone ends with the plates removed. You can see that amount of definition and texture of the bones and cartilage. Apparently I have finally realized that taking videos and pictures using the 8 Megapixel iphone4s camera is still not good enough to capture the high def., high resolution shots that I was hoping for. Still working on figuring out how to get the right angles.
Thank you for uploading these videos
Awesome! It would be nice if you could completely excise the growth plate from the bone without destroying it in the process. By default bones undergo endochondral ossification, what scientists have trouble with is maintaining it in the articular stage.
If you look at 3:40 or so at the bone with the open growth plate you see that there is no cartilage at the ends(unless you removed it) pushing the bones apart. All the other bones show that it’s in the middle. Therefore the growth plates can expand parts of the bone that it does not touch directly.
Although how the cartilage generates sufficient force to push the bones apart I don’t exactly know. When eating a chicken bone the articular cartilage can be scraped right off for instance. How does the cartilage push apart something like the two boulders of bone?
You need to saw open the epiphysis of the fused growth plates so we can see the environment in there.
hey could you add a google +, to the top near the contact me?
i know a couple people using that now. its useful for networking. linked in is another suggestion.
it would be good to be able google + articles