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We're not going to run out of new anatomy anytime soon
I first had this thought in 2019, and I started this draft in early 2020, but…you know how that particular story turned out. I’m picking it back up again now because I’ve had the …
This weird balkanization of science doesn’t make it harder to spot anomalous and potentially new anatomical structures in the dissection lab, but it can impair people’s efforts to understand the evolutionary history and clinical importance of a given body part, especially if they happen to fall into one literature silo and never learn that the other, parallel ones exist. What we now call the anterolateral ligament (ALL) of the knee was first discovered by a French surgeon 145 years ago (Segond 1879), and independently rediscovered sporadically throughout the twentieth century, but it wasn’t widely recognized as a body part normally present in most people until a pair of papers in 2012 and 2013 brought it to global prominence (Vincent et al. 2012, Claes et al. 2013). It’s hard to say how important this factor is, but I note that almost all the anatomical variants I’ve helped students present at conferences or publish are things that they found in complicated areas – nerve plexuses, bundles of tendons crossing a joint, and so on – where they could easily have escaped detection if people hadn’t really been on the ball.
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