I love anatomy. With a little bit of background knowledge it becomes easy to see the similarities and disparities between any two organisms you wish to compare, and it is always exciting to see how the bones of my arms correspond to the flippers of a whale, the forelegs of a horse, the wings of a bird, and so on.

In order to highlight the resemblances between our skeleton and other vertebrates, though, illustrators have sometimes created some rather odd diagrams. While searching for grist for my writing mill I happened upon this one in the Boys’ Airplane Book which purports to show the “curious resemblance” between the skeleton of a bird and a human:

Perhaps the figure on the