I first had this thought in 2019, and I started this draft in early 2020, but…you know how that particular story turned out.
我第一次有这个想法是在 2019 年，并在 2020 年初开始起草，但……你知道那个特定故事的结局。

I’m picking it back up again now because I’ve had the titular point reinforced on several trips and projects over the past couple of years. And because I think it’s ultimately a hopeful message. If you are interested in making anatomical discoveries, good! Because relative to a single human life, the work to be done is effectively infinite.
我现在重新拾起它，因为过去几年在几次旅行和项目中，这个标题观点得到了加强。而且我认为这最终是一个充满希望的信息。如果你对解剖学发现感兴趣，那很好！因为相对于一个人的生命，还有大量工作要做，几乎是无限的。

But wait, you might say, how could that possibly be true? Have we not been plumbing the depths of the human body literally for thousands of years? Have we not imaged people down to micron resolution with every available scanning modality?
但等等，你可能会说，这怎么可能呢？我们不是已经对人类身体进行了数千年的深入研究吗？我们不是已经用各种可用的扫描方式将人体成像到微米分辨率了吗？

And what about other extant critters? Chickens are one of the commonly-used model organisms in laboratory studies, and the basis for a multi-billion-dollar food industry. Surely we must know everything there is to know about their anatomy? (Spoiler alert: we do not.)
其他现存生物又如何呢？鸡是实验室研究中常用的模式生物之一，也是支撑起数十亿美元食品产业的基础。我们肯定已经对它们的解剖学了如指掌了吧？（剧透警告：我们并没有。）

What about fossils? Are we not even now engaged in a massive, civilization-wide, distributed project to scan museum collections? Can we not publish entire dinosaur skeletons as 3D files in the supplementary information to our papers (Lacovara et al. 2014)? There will always be new fossils to discover, but can’t we at least say that the ones we’ve digitized are completely known?
关于化石呢？我们难道不是正在参与一个大规模、文明范围内的分布式项目，扫描博物馆的藏品吗？我们难道不能将整个恐龙骨架作为 3D 文件发布在我们的论文补充信息中吗（Lacovara et al. 2014）？总会有新的化石被发现，但我们至少可以说，我们已经数字化的那些是完全已知的吗？

Where is all this new anatomy hiding?
所有这些新的解剖结构都藏在哪里？

I’ll tell you. 我来告诉你。

(Warning: dissection images inbound. Nothing too gory, but still.)
（警告：解剖图像即将到来。不算太血腥，但仍然。）

I’m going to draw a lot from human anatomy, because it’s one of the areas where I have the most hands-on experience, and because humans are one of the best-studied organisms on the planet. So if there are macroscopic structures awaiting discovery in humans, imagine how much more true that will be of every other species that we haven’t been studying with extreme diligence and self-interest for millennia.
我将从人体解剖学中汲取大量内容，因为这是我最有实际经验的领域之一，而且人类是地球上研究得最好的生物之一。因此，如果在人类中还有待发现的宏观结构，想象一下，对于我们几千年来没有以极端的勤奋和自我利益进行研究的每一种其他物种，这种情况将更加真实。

The Human Factors 人体因素

Part of the reason why we are still making new discoveries in human anatomy is because we’ve made the process of finding, recognizing, and publishing new structures surprisingly difficult. None of these barriers were put in place deliberately (we could quibble about barriers to publication), but they’re slowing the advance of anatomical knowledge nonetheless.
我们仍在人体解剖学中发现新事物的原因之一是，我们使得发现、识别和发表新结构的过程变得出奇地困难。这些障碍都不是故意设置的（我们可以对发表的障碍进行争论），但它们仍然在减缓解剖学知识的进步。

1. Not everyone gets to look, and everyone who does is on the clock
1. 不是每个人都能看，而且每个看的人都在计时

I’d originally put this point farther down, but for human anatomy it is the subtext and background radiation for everything else I have to say, so I’m giving it pride of place.
我原本打算把这一点放在后面，但对于人体解剖学而言，它是我所要讲述的一切的潜台词和背景辐射，因此我将其置于显要位置。

When we described the long cutaneous branch of the obturator nerve a few years ago (Staples et al. 2019, this post), I wondered why it hadn’t been discovered sooner. I hypothesized that it fell into a perceptual blind spot: the people with the best chance to discover it were medical students and surgeons, and each group faced a significant barrier. Surgeons had the expertise to recognize and preserve this tiny, delicate nerve, but they didn’t have the time or operative freedom to flay their patients open from ankle to groin to trace its path. Med students had the opportunity to chase the variant nerve all the way down the lower extremity, but only if they managed to preserve it while skinning the limbs, and if they recognized it as anomalous – neither of which was likely on Day 1 when they did the skinning.
几年前当我们描述闭孔神经的长皮支时（Staples 等人，2019 年，这篇文章），我好奇为什么它没有被更早发现。我假设它落入了一个感知盲点：最有机会发现它的人是医学生和外科医生，而每组人都面临重大障碍。外科医生有识别和保护这条细小、脆弱神经的专业知识，但他们没有时间或手术自由度将患者从脚踝到腹股沟完全打开以追踪其路径。医学生有机会一路追踪这条变异神经到下肢，但前提是他们能在剥离肢体皮肤时保留它，并识别出它是异常的——这在第一天进行剥皮时几乎不可能。

Later I realized that these same factors apply to all kinds of anatomical discoveries. No shadowy Illuminati group deliberately made this decision, but as a civilization we have collectively ‘decided’ that three groups of people would get to peer inside the human body, and they’d all be hobbled. Surgeons are under immense pressure to make smaller incisions, do less invasive surgeries, and keep their patients on the table for as little time as possible, because small holes and short surgeries generally correlate with better outcomes. I’m not saying this is wrong – it is undoubtedly the right decision in the vast majority of cases – but it does mean that our most experienced anatomists have very little opportunity to investigate possibly new anatomical features, unless they happen to impede a surgery.
后来我意识到，这些相同的因素适用于各种解剖学发现。没有阴暗的共济会组织故意做出这个决定，但我们作为一个文明集体“决定”了三组人可以窥视人体内部，而他们都会被束缚。外科医生承受着巨大压力，要求他们做更小的切口、更少的侵入性手术，并尽量缩短患者在手术台上的时间，因为小切口和短手术通常与更好的结果相关。我并不是说这是错的——在绝大多数情况下这无疑是正确的决定——但这确实意味着我们最有经验的解剖学家几乎没有机会去研究可能的新解剖特征，除非它们恰好妨碍了手术。

The second group that gets the privilege of hands-on exploration of the human body is medical students, and they’re also on the clock. Med school is legitimately challenging – we use the metaphor “drinking from the firehose” a lot – and med students usually have a long list of structures to find in a 3-4 hour dissection. I don’t think anyone could reasonably blame med students for not being “discovery oriented”; the fact is that when you’re going to spend between 100 and 200 hours dissecting an entire human body, at some point it becomes a job, and with all the other subjects med students are expected to master (biochemistry, cell biology, physiology, microbiology, pharmacology, etc.), it’s not their only job, and not always the top priority in a given day or week.
第二组有幸亲手探索人体的是医学生，他们也在时间压力下。医学院确实充满挑战——我们经常使用“从消防水管喝水”的比喻——医学生通常有一个长长的结构清单，需要在 3-4 小时的解剖中找到。我不认为有人能合理地责怪医学生不是“以发现为导向”的；事实上，当你要花费 100 到 200 小时解剖一具完整的人体时，在某个时刻它就变成了一份工作，而医学生还需要掌握其他众多科目（生物化学、细胞生物学、生理学、微生物学、药理学等），这并不是他们唯一的工作，也不是每天或每周的最高优先级。

That leaves the third group: anatomy teachers, like me. With dozens or hundreds of med students to do the dissecting for us, shouldn’t we be in a perfect position to recognize interesting things in the anatomy lab? To some extent, yes, but the clue is in the question. I’m in the anatomy lab to teach, and teaching a big room full of very smart, very motivated folks who have Wikipedia and Radiopaedia and their textbooks and the campus library on their phones and tablets is a bit of a high-wire act, requiring dedication and focus – on teaching, not on discovery. So I keep my antennae out, probably more than most, but I’m still relying on the med students to make the discoveries, and I suspect that is true of most anatomy teachers.
这留下了第三组：像我这样的解剖学教师。有几十甚至几百名医学生为我们进行解剖，我们不应该处于一个完美位置来识别解剖实验室中的有趣事物吗？在某种程度上，是的，但问题的关键在于此。我在解剖实验室是为了教学，而教一屋子非常聪明、非常有动力的人，他们有维基百科、放射学和他们的教科书以及校园图书馆在手机和平板电脑上，这有点像走钢丝，需要专注和奉献——对教学的专注，而不是对发现的专注。所以我保持警觉，可能比大多数人更多，但我仍然依赖医学生来做出发现，我怀疑大多数解剖学教师也是如此。

2. Anatomical knowledge is oddly siloed
2. 解剖学知识奇怪地被隔离

If you crack open the 40th edition of Gray’s Anatomy, published in 2008, and turn to page 1419, the very first sentence about the fibularis tertius muscle reads, “Fibularis tertius (peroneus tertius) is a muscle unique to humans.”
如果你打开 2008 年出版的第 40 版《格雷氏解剖学》，翻到第 1419 页，关于腓骨第三肌的第一句话是：“腓骨第三肌（腓骨第三肌）是人类独有的肌肉。”

That bold assertion would probably come as a surprise to Dudley Morton, who published a paper titled “The peroneus tertius muscle in gorillas” in The Anatomical Record…in 1924. And to William Straus, Jr, who described and illustrated the peroneus tertius muscle in chimps and gorillas in a 1930 paper in The Quarterly Review of Biology.
这一大胆的断言可能会让 Dudley Morton 感到惊讶，他在 1924 年发表了一篇题为“大猩猩的腓骨第三肌”的论文，发表在《解剖学记录》上。还有 William Straus Jr，他在 1930 年发表在《生物学季评》上的论文中描述并绘制了黑猩猩和大猩猩的腓骨第三肌。

How did this happen? The Anatomical Record and The Quarterly Review of Biology are not obscure sources, they’re highly-regarded journals with global readership. There’s a long story here, involving the prominent (not to say tyrannical) Victorian anatomist Richard Owen, the Gilded Age quest to tally anatomical features separating humans from apes, and some extremely dubious evolutionary hypotheses, but the short version is that comparative anatomy, physical anthropology, and clinical anatomy are three distinct fields. Each field has its own preferred publication venues, citation classics, and bodies of “common knowledge”. Ideas that were sunk long ago in one field may still be viable in another, because the debunking happened in a paper that few people outside of its home field have ever read or cited. And not just hypotheses, but even basic facts, like whether the peroneus tertius muscle is actually unique to humans (for avoidance of doubt, it most certainly is not).
这是怎么发生的？《解剖学记录》和《生物学季刊》并非默默无闻的来源，它们是备受推崇的期刊，拥有全球读者群。这里有一个漫长的故事，涉及维多利亚时代杰出的（甚至可以说是专横的）解剖学家理查德·欧文，镀金时代对人类与猿类解剖特征差异的统计追求，以及一些极其可疑的进化假说，但简而言之，比较解剖学、体质人类学和临床解剖学是三个不同的领域。每个领域都有其偏好的出版渠道、经典引文和“常识”体系。在一个领域早已被否定的观点，在另一个领域可能仍然可行，因为这种否定发生在一篇很少有非本领域人士阅读或引用的论文中。不仅是假说，甚至基本事实，比如腓骨第三肌是否确实为人类独有（为了避免疑虑，它绝对不是）。

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.
这种奇怪的科学分裂并不会使在解剖实验室中发现异常且可能新的解剖结构变得更加困难，但它可能会妨碍人们理解某一身体部位的进化历史和临床重要性，尤其是当他们恰好陷入某一文献孤岛，从未意识到其他平行文献的存在时。

3. There are many barriers to publication
3. 出版存在许多障碍

Crucially, both surgeons and med students live notoriously busy lives. Even if they notice and preserve something interesting, plowing through the literature, getting publication-quality photos, and actually writing and formatting a paper all take time. Hardly anyone has the time to do all the work by themselves, but collaboration means coordinating the efforts of multiple busy people. Then there’s the task of finding an appropriate journal – loads of otherwise promising OA outlets don’t take anatomical case studies, for example. And finally there is the gauntlet of peer review, about which we’ve already spilled many words.
关键在于，外科医生和医学生的生活都以忙碌著称。即使他们注意到并保留了有趣的东西，查阅文献、获取出版质量的照片，以及实际撰写和格式化论文都需要时间。几乎没有人有时间独自完成所有工作，但合作意味着协调多个忙碌的人的努力。然后是寻找合适的期刊的任务——例如，许多有前途的开放获取期刊并不接受解剖学案例研究。最后还有同行评审的考验，关于这一点我们已经说了很多。

Now, in point of fact, surgeons, med students, and anatomy professors do find and publish new anatomical discoveries. But there are enough hurdles just on our side to explain why we’re not done yet, and may never be.
事实上，外科医生、医学生和解剖学教授确实会发现并发表新的解剖学发现。但我们这边有足够的障碍可以解释为什么我们还没有完成，而且可能永远不会完成。

Nature Doesn’t Make It Easy
大自然并不容易

Beyond the speed bumps we humans have accidentally erected there lurks the unending, phenomenal complexity of nature, which throws up its own barriers to discovery.
除了我们人类无意中设置的减速带之外，还潜藏着大自然无尽的、非凡的复杂性，它为发现设置了自身的障碍。

1. Humans and other animals are hideously complex
1. 人类和其他动物极其复杂

Dissection-based human anatomy courses run between 100 and 200 hours not because that’s an administratively or pedagogically convenient number – I and everyone else in medical education, and especially the bean counters, can assure you it is not – but because that’s simply how long it takes to find all the bits. Minimally – we expect that students will take advantage of open lab hours on evenings and weekends to tidy up their dissections. And that’s relatively hasty, on-the-clock dissecting for teaching purposes. The professionally prepared plastinated cadavers for exhibits like Body Worlds can require 500 to 1000 hours of dissection.
基于解剖的人体解剖学课程时长在 100 到 200 小时之间，并不是因为这是一个行政或教学上方便的数字——我和医学教育中的每个人，尤其是那些会计师，可以向你保证并非如此——而是因为找到所有部分所需的时间就是那么长。至少——我们期望学生会利用晚间和周末的开放实验室时间来完善他们的解剖。而且这还是相对匆忙的、为了教学目的的解剖。像 Body Worlds 这样的展览中，专业准备的塑化尸体可能需要 500 到 1000 小时的解剖时间。

That might sound ridiculous. After all, professional butchers, and hunters and farmers who dress their own kills and livestock, all get very good at taking apart large mammals much faster than that. But there’s a world of difference between taking apart a carcass as efficiently as possible – for which I give all those folks full props – and trying to dissect and put a name to all the parts.
这听起来可能很荒谬。毕竟，专业的屠夫，以及自己处理猎物和牲畜的猎人和农民，都能比这快得多地拆解大型哺乳动物。但尽可能高效地拆解尸体——对此我向所有这些人表示敬意——和试图解剖并命名所有部分之间有着天壤之别。

I was confronted with the frankly appalling complexity of the human body about a decade ago, when as part of a student project (Altounian et al. 2015) I did a deep dissection of the esophageal plexus. I went in after hours to do the extra dissecting work, just like we encourage the med students to do, and it took me something like four hours. It was rewarding work, but it’s probably telling that in ten years I’ve never done it again.
大约十年前，我面对了人体那令人震惊的复杂性，当时作为学生项目（Altounian 等人，2015 年）的一部分，我进行了食管丛的深度解剖。我利用课后时间进行额外的解剖工作，就像我们鼓励医学生做的那样，这花费了我大约四个小时。这是一项有意义的工作，但十年间我从未再做过，这或许说明了一些问题。

Incidentally, I don’t think this gets much easier as animals get smaller. A chicken or a cat has about the same number of body parts as a human, they’re just smaller and harder to see. Frogs seem to be a little simpler than shrews or hummingbirds, but it may also be that we know them less well, and dissect them less patiently and completely. At some point gross anatomy has to give way to histology as body parts become microscopic, but that doesn’t mean that the animals in question aren’t still pretty darned complex.
顺便说一下，我不认为随着动物变小，解剖会变得更容易。鸡或猫的身体部分数量与人类大致相同，只是它们更小，更难看清。青蛙似乎比鼩鼱或蜂鸟简单一些，但也可能是因为我们对它们了解较少，解剖时不够耐心和彻底。在某个阶段，随着身体部分变得微小，大体解剖必须让位于组织学，但这并不意味着相关动物就不再相当复杂。

In sum, humans and other animals have lots and lots of parts. But it gets worse.
总之，人类和其他动物有许多许多部分。但这还不够。

2. Anatomical variation is extremely common
2. 解剖变异极为常见

It took me a long time to realize that there’s a needle-and-haystack problem with recognizing genuinely new anatomical structures from the common variations that turn up all the time. This is one of those things that might seem hard to believe unless you’ve experienced it, but we humans are crazy variable under the hood. In my program we encourage the students to log interesting variations on the whiteboard in the lab, not least so that everyone can beware of the variant anatomy while studying for their practical exams. If the students are really diligent about the logging, something like a third of the donor bodies end up written on the board. And those are the variations the students found and worried might distract their studying, not all the variations that exist. Oh, and we reset the log between each of our five curriculum blocks through the year. So essentially every cadaver has a chance to end up on the ‘variation board’ at least once, and some might be up there three or four times.
我花了很长时间才意识到，从常见的变异中识别出真正新的解剖结构存在一个“大海捞针”的问题。这一点可能难以置信，除非你亲身经历过，但我们人类在内部结构上是非常多变的。在我们的项目中，我们鼓励学生在实验室的白板上记录有趣的变异，尤其为了让每个人在准备实践考试时都能警惕这些变异解剖。如果学生们非常认真地记录，大约三分之一的捐赠尸体最终会被写在板上。而这些只是学生们发现并担心可能干扰他们学习的变异，并非所有存在的变异。哦，而且我们在每年通过的五个课程模块之间重置日志。因此，基本上每个尸体都有机会至少一次出现在“变异板”上，有些甚至可能出现三四次。

Here’s why this is relevant: numerous times I’ve seen some variation in lab, in a body system or region in which I was not familiar with the primary literature, and I’ve thought “cool variation” and moved on. Then later I’ll get curious and look it up, or I’ll be researching something completely different and stumble over a mention of that same variation. A couple of times that variation has turned out to be so phenomenally rare that if I’d only gotten good photos at the time, I could have had a nice little paper.
这就是为什么这很重要：我多次在实验室中看到某种变异，在我不熟悉的身体系统或区域中，我会想“酷变异”然后继续。然后后来我会好奇并查找，或者在研究完全不同的东西时偶然发现提到同样的变异。有几次，这种变异竟然罕见到如果我当时拍了好的照片，我本可以写一篇不错的论文。

So to a first approximation, almost every human being has at least one anatomical variation notable enough that a med student would write it on a whiteboard. And this is actually a problem, because those of us who work in anatomy labs see so many of those common variations that sometimes it keeps us from recognizing the truly novel and important stuff.
因此，粗略估计，几乎每个人都至少有一种解剖变异明显到足以让医学生写在白板上。而这实际上是个问题，因为我们这些在解剖实验室工作的人看到了太多这些常见变异，有时这使我们难以识别真正新颖和重要的东西。

3. Some body parts have distractors
3. 有些身体部分有干扰物

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).
我们现在称之为膝关节前外侧韧带（ALL）的部分，最早是由一位法国外科医生在 145 年前发现的（Segond 1879），并在整个二十世纪间零星地被重新发现，但直到 2012 年和 2013 年的一对论文使其在全球范围内广为人知之前（Vincent 等人，2012 年；Claes 等人，2013 年），它并未被广泛认为是大多数人身体中通常存在的部分。

Given the vast amount of time, money, and effort that humankind has put into understanding, rehabbing, rebuilding, and replacing our knee joints, the absurdly long period during which the ALL escaped wide detection is flat-out amazing to me. But it also makes sense in a weird way. The ALL angles downward and forward from the lateral aspect of the distal femur to the anterior portion of the proximal tibia (hence anterolateral ligament), and in that position it is sandwiched between the patellar retinaculum, which lies deep to the ALL, and the iliotibial tract, which lies on top of it. Crucially, both the patellar retinaculum and the iliotibial tract are made of dense connective tissue, like the ALL, and they run in the same direction as the ALL.
考虑到人类在理解、修复、重建和替换膝关节方面投入的巨大时间、金钱和精力，ALL 在如此长的时间内逃过广泛检测的事实，对我来说简直是不可思议。但这也以一种奇怪的方式说得通。ALL 从股骨远端外侧向下向前延伸至胫骨近端前部（因此称为前外侧韧带），在这个位置上，它被位于其深部的髌骨支持带和位于其上方的髂胫束夹在中间。关键在于，髌骨支持带和髂胫束都由致密的结缔组织构成，就像 ALL 一样，并且它们的走向与 ALL 相同。

I’ll bet that in the decades and centuries before the 2010s, hundreds if not thousands of surgeons and medical students saw the ALL and mistook it for part of either the patellar retinaculum or the iliotibial tract – structures that they were expecting to see in that region, also made of connective tissue, also running in the same direction.
我敢打赌，在 2010 年代之前的几十年甚至几个世纪里，成百上千的医生和医学生看到了 ALL，却误以为它是髌骨支持带或髂胫束的一部分——他们预期在该区域看到的结构，同样由结缔组织构成，同样沿着相同的方向延伸。

A similar thing probably happens with the aforementioned long cutaneous branch of the obturator nerve. In the two known cases, it was running with the great saphenous vein, in a position usually occupied by a branch of the saphenous nerve. I reckon that surgeons see the long cutaneous branch of the obturator nerve on a regular basis, but they have no way of knowing that it’s a weird variant because it sits where they were already expecting to see a nerve.
类似的情况可能也发生在上述闭孔神经的长皮支上。在已知的两个案例中，它与大隐静脉一起运行，通常这个位置被隐神经的分支占据。我认为外科医生经常看到闭孔神经的长皮支，但他们无法知道这是一个奇怪的变异，因为它出现在他们原本预期看到神经的地方。

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. And of course I can only count the hits; I can’t tally all the variants that we missed because we mistook them for their distractors. Thoughts like that haunt me.
很难说这个因素有多重要，但我注意到，我帮助学生们在会议上展示或发表的几乎所有解剖变异，都是在复杂区域发现的——神经丛、穿过关节的肌腱束等等——这些地方如果人们不特别留心，很容易被忽略。当然，我能统计的只是那些被发现的变异；那些因为我们误将其视为干扰项而错过的变异，我无法一一记录。这样的想法一直萦绕在我心头。

4. Some things are just hard to see
4. 有些东西就是难以察觉

The plain fact is that some parts of the body are easier to investigate than others. I’ve written a lot about how the pneumatic diverticula of birds are under-documented, even in chickens, the most numerous and best-studied birds on the planet (whinge, whinge). But diverticula can be surprisingly tricky – when birds die, many of the diverticula empty out and collapse. The diverticula can look just like loose connective tissue, unless they’ve been injected with latex or resin, or re-inflated and CT scanned, and both the injection and the scanning take a lot more time and effort than a simple dissection. One handy thing about the paramedullary (or supramedullary) diverticula is that they’re unable to collapse; the bony walls of the neural canal keep them propped open whether they’re inflated or not.
事实是，身体的某些部分比其他部分更容易研究。我写了很多关于鸟类的气囊憩室未被充分记录的内容，即使在地球上数量最多、研究最充分的鸡身上也是如此（抱怨，抱怨）。但憩室可能出奇地棘手——当鸟类死亡时，许多憩室会排空并塌陷。除非它们被注入乳胶或树脂，或者重新充气并进行 CT 扫描，否则憩室看起来就像松散的结缔组织，而注入和扫描都比简单的解剖需要更多的时间和精力。副髓（或超髓）憩室的一个方便之处在于它们无法塌陷；神经管的骨壁无论是否充气都能保持它们敞开。

Speaking of, the neural canals of archosaurs host a whole zoo of anatomical novelties – big veins, pneumatic diverticula, odd joints, ligament scars, and, oh yeah, an entire novel balance organ. Although the big veins (in crocs and some birds) and pneumatic diverticula (in many birds) have been known to exist since the 1800s, they’ve really only started to be adequately documented in this century. The same goes for everything else on the list; to pick a timely example, the ligament scars were only described for the first time in archosaurs a couple of weeks ago. Why the delay? I think that neural canals, being relatively small-diameter bony tubes, are just that much harder to study than most other parts of the body, whether we’re talking about big-ass crocs or tiny hummingbirds. Heck, one of the most recently-discovered macro structures in the human body is the midline interlaminar ligament, only recognized for the first time in 2019 (Simonds et al.), which lies – you guessed it – along the roof of the neural canal.
说到这里，主龙类的神经管里充满了各种解剖学上的新奇事物——大静脉、气囊憩室、奇怪的关节、韧带疤痕，哦，对了，还有一个全新的平衡器官。尽管大静脉（在鳄鱼和某些鸟类中）和气囊憩室（在许多鸟类中）自 19 世纪以来就已为人所知，但它们在本世纪才开始得到充分记录。列表中的其他所有内容也是如此；以一个及时的例子来说，韧带疤痕仅在几周前才首次在主龙类中被描述。为什么会有延迟？我认为神经管作为相对小直径的骨管，比身体的其他大部分部位更难研究，无论是大鳄鱼还是小蜂鸟。见鬼，人体内最近发现的一个宏观结构是中线板间韧带，直到 2019 年才首次被认识（Simonds 等人），它位于——你猜对了——神经管的顶部。

So one way to make new discoveries is to simply look in inconvenient places. Sacral pneumaticity in dinosaurs is poorly understood because the sacral vertebrae are often inaccessible, but there are ways around that: studying the unfused sacral vertebrae of juvenile and subadult animals, looking at broken specimens, and staying alert for interesting opportunities. But now I’m getting ahead of myself – problem solving deserves a whole section.
因此，发现新事物的一种方法就是简单地查看不方便的地方。恐龙的骶骨气囊性尚未得到充分理解，因为骶骨通常无法触及，但有一些方法可以解决这个问题：研究幼年和亚成年动物的未融合的骶骨，查看破损的标本，并保持警惕以抓住有趣的机会。但现在我有点超前了——解决问题值得单独一节。

What to do about it
对此该怎么办

Of the factors slowing down the pace of anatomical discovery that I numbered above, all but the first can be overcome with time, curiosity, patience, and determination. One of the biggest boosts is simply being aware that new discoveries are still being made, and staying on the lookout for them.
在我上面列举的减缓解剖学发现速度的因素中，除了第一个之外，其他都可以通过时间、好奇心、耐心和决心来克服。最大的推动之一就是意识到新的发现仍在不断被发现，并保持警惕。

As for the first – the fact that not many folks get to dissect human bodies, and everyone who does is busy – I could fix that if I was sufficiently rich. If I was a multi-billionaire, I’d hire 1000 of the world’s best surgeons (in staggered waves, so I didn’t doom thousands of patients by pulling too many experts off the line at once), supply them with 10,000 ethically donated willed bodies representing as many geographic regions and genetic backgrounds of humankind as possible, and give each surgeon a couple of years to dissect their 10 bodies, ideally in labs with 50-100 bodies at a time so the small groups of surgeons could look at each other’s work without getting overwhelmed, or work in teams if they preferred. I’d also supply them with professional photographers to document everything they found, and a small army of research assistants to help them with library work and writing up. That wouldn’t be enough to declare the science of human anatomy a completed project, but we’d know a heck of a lot more than we do now.
至于第一个问题——很少有人有机会解剖人体，而且每个这样做的人都很忙——如果我有足够的财富，我可以解决这个问题。如果我是一个亿万富翁，我会雇佣 1000 名世界上最好的外科医生（分批进行，以免同时抽调太多专家导致数千名患者无人治疗），为他们提供 10,000 具符合伦理的捐赠尸体，这些尸体代表了尽可能多的地理区域和人类基因背景，并给每个外科医生几年的时间来解剖他们的 10 具尸体，理想情况下是在同时有 50-100 具尸体的实验室中进行，这样一小群外科医生可以互相查看彼此的工作而不至于感到不知所措，或者如果他们愿意，可以团队合作。我还会为他们提供专业摄影师来记录他们发现的一切，以及一支小型的研究助理队伍来帮助他们进行图书馆工作和撰写报告。这还不足以宣布人体解剖学是一个已完成的项目，但我们肯定会比现在知道得多得多。

I’m not a multi-billionaire, and no-one on the planet is ever going to fund the vast study I just described. I think we’ll still get to an equivalent level of knowledge, but it will take the next 500 to 1000 years, as those discoveries are made piecemeal, mostly by alert medical students who happen to do better than average dissections in their gross anatomy courses.
我不是亿万富翁，地球上也没有人会资助我刚才描述的庞大研究。我认为我们仍然会达到同等水平的知识，但这将需要接下来的 500 到 1000 年，因为这些发现是零碎地进行的，主要由那些在解剖学课程中表现优于平均水平的警觉医学生完成。

Turning to comparative anatomy, I’ll conclude this section with one of my favorite published sources. Baumel (1988) is a 123-page book on the anatomy of the tail of the pigeon. If a chunk of pigeon the size of the last digit of one of your fingers can bear over 100 pages of detailed examination – and it can, I have the book and I refer to it in my research – then we are not going to run out of new anatomy anytime soon (not least because there are the other 10,000+ species of birds that have not had their tails described in that level of detail).
转向比较解剖学，我将用我最喜欢的出版物之一来结束这一部分。Baumel（1988）是一本关于鸽子尾巴解剖的 123 页的书。如果一块鸽子尾巴大小的肉（大约是你手指最后一个指节的大小）可以承受超过 100 页的详细检查——而且确实可以，我有这本书，并在我的研究中参考它——那么我们不会很快用完新的解剖学知识（更不用说还有其他 10,000 多种鸟类，它们的尾巴还没有被详细描述）。

But is it worth it?
但这值得吗？

Sure, people might say, some goobers might write boring-ass treatises about pigeon tails or chameleon tongues or frog pelvises, but isn’t that all just so much pointless stamp collecting? Does any of it really matter? Shouldn’t we funnel our limited support for science toward things that are going to make a practical difference?
当然，人们可能会说，有些傻瓜可能会写一些关于鸽子尾巴、变色龙舌头或青蛙骨盆的无聊论文，但这不都是毫无意义的集邮吗？这些真的重要吗？我们不应该把有限的科学支持转向那些会产生实际影响的事情吗？

I’d counter that science is a young enterprise and we are still exceptionally bad at determining in advance what kinds of things are going to be important in the future. Baumel’s book on pigeon tails has been cited just in this decade in fields as diverse as biomechanics, embryology, evolution – and, hey, by researchers investigating rudderless flight control for UAVs, a technology application that didn’t exist when the book was first published. The skin of sharks inspired wetsuits so efficient they’ve been banned at the Olympics, and the first-in-class COVID-19 medication remdesivir is one of hundreds of pharmaceuticals derived from the biochemistry of sea sponges. I think documenting the universe is a noble goal in itself, but we should probably keep researching All the Things because that’s where the new technology is going to come from. And the people – nations, states, businesses, inventors – smart enough to invest in basic science are going to get those discoveries before anyone else does.
我会反驳说，科学是一个年轻的行业，我们仍然非常不擅长提前确定哪些类型的东西在未来会变得重要。Baumel 关于鸽子尾巴的书仅在本十年就被引用于诸如生物力学、胚胎学、进化等不同领域——嘿，还有研究无舵飞行控制无人机的研究人员，这是一种在书首次出版时还不存在的技术应用。鲨鱼的皮肤启发了奥运会禁用的超高效潜水服，而首批 COVID-19 药物瑞德西韦是数百种从海绵生物化学中衍生出来的药物之一。我认为记录宇宙本身就是一个崇高的目标，但我们可能应该继续研究所有事物，因为这就是新技术将来自的地方。而那些足够聪明的人——国家、州、企业、发明家——投资于基础科学的人将会比其他人更早获得这些发现。

And anyway, compared to most other fields of inquiry, anatomy research is dirt cheap. Embalmed human cadavers cost money, but I could still get the 10,000 cadavers I’d need for my dream project for less than the cost of a Marvel movie. Of course that project is never going to happen, but fortunately we can continue piggybacking human anatomical research on the vast anatomy education effort necessary to train physicians. For comparative anatomy and paleontology, we basically need to keep giving geeks a little research time and a ten-thousandth of a percent of the cost of the Large Hadron Collider so they can keep themselves busy when they’re not teaching or running museums, and they’ll keep doing the work. (That’s not to say that more support wouldn’t be appreciated, or speed things up a little.)
无论如何，与其他大多数研究领域相比，解剖学研究的成本低得令人难以置信。防腐处理的人体标本确实需要花费，但我仍能以低于一部漫威电影的成本获得我梦想项目所需的 10,000 具标本。当然，那个项目永远不会实现，但幸运的是，我们可以在培训医生的庞大解剖学教育工作中继续依赖人体解剖学研究。对于比较解剖学和古生物学，我们基本上只需要给那些极客一点研究时间和大型强子对撞机成本的十万分之一，这样他们在不教学或管理博物馆时就能保持忙碌，他们也会继续这项工作。（这并不是说更多的支持不会受到欢迎，或者不会稍微加快进度。）

So if you like anatomy, come join the hunt. You probably won’t get rich, but you’ll stay busy doing interesting work, which is a different form of wealth. And if you stay alert, you will not run out of new things to find.
所以，如果你喜欢解剖学，来加入这场探索吧。你可能不会变得富有，但你会忙于有趣的工作，这是一种不同的财富形式。而且，如果你保持警觉，你将永远不会缺少新发现。

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doi:10.59350/63r4z-32f49