5th Post - Crunchie bars, pneumatised bones and the ability to defy the laws of gravity part one

Remember back to those days when there was an advert on television that showed some people on a roller coaster and there was a song playing in the background, "I'm so excited, and I just can't hide it..." and if you looked really carefully the figures and the landscape was made of honeycomb toffee or the inside part of a Crunchie bar, "Thank Crunchie, it's Friday", was the tagline.

This confectionary produced by Cabury, although it was introduced by J. S. Fry & Sons in 1929. The sponge toffee, cinder toffee or the orangey-brown-yellow stuff in the middle of the bar is made from a blend of bicarbonate of soda and vinegar. The reaction, do you remember this from those lessons in Geography where the teacher creates an effect of a volcano, creates a froth which traps millions of bubbles and hardens to create a pumice-like stone or cinder toffee. If you want a recipe to make your own version of cinder toffee try and click on here.

But what does a recipe for cinder toffee have anything to do with Panthera leo volatilis, when you are next roasting the chicken, just wait until it has cooled and then break one of the bones in half or a few of them until you have found a bone that resembles a piece of cinder toffee.

Matt Wedel, of the University of California's Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) has been pioneering a study in pneumaticity (the cavities in the bones of birds) in sauropods (the large four legged herbivorous dinosaur with a long neck and tail, small head and large limbs). A bird's respiratory system is different from a mammalian system in the fact the avian lungs are ventilated by air sacs in the front and the rear of the body. As the infant bird grows, "its air sacs develop a system of outgrowths and tubes that invade and pneumatize the bird's bones, forming hollows. The forward air sacs are connected to the hollow bones at the front of the bird's body, and the rear air sacs are connected to the hollow bones at the back of the bird's body. This system of pneumatized bones provides the bird with a skeleton that is both light and strong."

So is it possible that Panthera leo volatilis has pneumatised (pnuematized) bones, which like the chicken and possibly the sauropod has a strong and light skeleton. Light enough to fly and defy gravity?