your favourite pointless feature.

I propose a thread in which people post their favourite pointless feature of either the human body, or any animal body, or even a plant or bacterium if you know of any. This can be either features that are always seen, or ones that just sometimes pop up. like human tails or so on.

my favourite at the moment is the extensor coccygis, a muscle that is there to extend the coccyx. the only problem is that the human coccyx has fused into one lump, rendering this muscle useless.

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MSci MSc ARCS DIC PhD..... yes, I am bragging.

Man I cant think of one. Um Mens Nipples???

close, but those can be excused.. I am looking for stuff like the "design" of the appendix, which is just right for catching infections, whales with legs and stuff like that.

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MSci MSc ARCS DIC PhD..... yes, I am bragging.

Although i like my nipples they are useless. Now the appendix thats
different. My friend a few months ago had to have his removed.He was
in the hospital for a week. Not a pleasent situation. I cant think of a
thing. What about the gooch?

In the tradition of the Ostrich wing thread I will go with a vestigial wing of a flightless bird. My specific example will be those of the elephant bird of Madagascar. This bird's entire wing composed simply of its humerus; it has no radius, ulna, or fingers of any sort. Also, this humerus is so small that it didn't even extend out of the body, it just sort of sat there underneath the fleshy tissue.

Here's a picture:



The arm is the tiny little bone pointing backwards that comes off the scapula.

Umm... if the bird's sternum (breastplate) and shoulder formed a capitalized "E" (see it?), then the humerus would be the middle lateral line in the "E"

So hard to describe....

Edited to add: Because the picture does not work you can see this fine skeleton here. At least until I can find a non-geocities version

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The picture doesnt work for me???

I think it's because it has been linked from geocities, copy and paste this into your address bar: http://www.geocities.com/vorompatra/PIX/GEBbones.gif

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"Ach, stick it up yer trakkans!"

still doesn't work

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MSci MSc ARCS DIC PhD..... yes, I am bragging.

Bizarre. Ok, go here to see the nice picture. You have to scroll down a ways. It's the skeletal picture with the egg sitting next to the skeleton

Sorry everyone

It's worth it though

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Geocities won't show images that are linked directly from other pages, as SLP discovered over on evcforum recently.

Of course, once you've visited the geocities page once and it's in your cache, all is well.

My favourite is slugs. Not anything about slugs, just slugs. They seem to exist purely to plague my garden and eat my purple basil.