Skeletal tuberculosis is an unusual disease involving bone and joints and it may have different manifestations. This report introduces a 25-year-old woman suffering from chronic knee pain without any response to conservative treatments for one year. X-ray was normal but CT-scan and MRI indicated a small lesion in medial condyle of the femur. The patient underwent percutaneous CT-guided biopsy...

Introduction A recent Channel 4 television series, Secrets of the Dead, had one programme entitled “The Syphilis Enigma.” It presented evidence, summarised in book form, which challenged the accepted view that venereal syphilis came to Europe with the return of Columbus from his first voyage of discovery of the New World. This new and challenging case is based on a study of over 240 skeletons e...

A 16 yr old female presented with generalized weakness and easy fatigability since 2 months. Her medical history included that she had sickle cell disease (ss pattern) on regular treatment. She denied smoking and consumption of alcohol. She had adequate calcium intake and her menstrual history was non-contributory. History of right tibial diaphysial fracture 1 year back followed by refracture a...

Results: The angle between centre head neck line to transcondylar line was measured using goniometer in 164 dry bones and the mean value was 9.8 deg. The mean value was 9.49 deg on the right side and 10.13 deg for the left side femora with a standard deviation of 1.66 and 1.50 respectively showing a higher angle in the left side femora. A statistically significant difference of 0.64 was found f...

Photogenic predator: Coeloid cephalopods, a group of shell-less molluscs, evolved at around the time when vertebrates started to conquer land. As visual predators, they competed against early fi shes and developed remarkable complexity of body and behaviour. The photo shows the octopus Wunderpus photogenicus, found in shallow waters from Indonesia to the Philippines. (Photo: Roy L. Caldwell.) F...

The Krapina fossils are the largest collection of Neandertals known, representing a unique opportunity to examine Neandertal variation at a single place and time. Because of the nature of the assemblage, knowledge about the collection as a whole must be obtained from the analyses of the individual skeletal elements. In this work I present a summary of a subset of the Krapina fragments, the occi...

The squamous occipital bone consists of two parts: a cartilaginous supraoccipital part below and a membranous interparietal (IP) part above the highest nuchal line. The IP part develops from two pairs of ossification centres which form the two lateral plates and a median central piece. Any anomalous ossification of these centres gives rise to IP bones. Occasional separate ossified part of the I...

Erythropoietin (EPO) is a glycoprotein that is critical for the regulation of red blood cell production. During embryonic development, Epo is mainly expressed in the fetal liver. However, as hematopoiesis switches sites from the fetal liver to the bone marrow, peritublular interstitial cells of the kidney support EPO production. Epo expression is tightly regulated by spatial, temporal and envir...

Osteoporosis is a complex disease characterized by a reduction in bone mass with associated bone microarchitectural deterioration and a high risk of fractures. Although environmental factors like nutrition and mechanical load, as well as lifestyle, may influence the development of the disease, family and twin pair studies have suggested that there is also a strong genetic component in a predisp...