Antlers Are Bone on a Timer
They are living bone. What looks, at a distance, like a pair of branches caught in a deer's skull is instead a temporary organ, grown from pedicles, bony bases on the frontal bones, and fed by blood vessels while velvet covers its forming surface. The apparent wood is a trick of silhouette. Not wood, but scheduled architecture.The cycle is expensive. During growth, osteogenesis lays down mineraliz...More
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