Mal12345
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Oh I have seen people posting about that!
Having been in a cadaver lab I can see how people wouldn't see something if they weren't looking for it. There's so much random tissue in there and it's not always so clear what is what, like it is in that dissection image in the link. There's all this connective tissue and fascia, and a lot of the ligaments are all continuous with other stuff. People make things look clear by dissecting it.
But don't they dissect cadavers? Or has that gone out of fashion?
Yeah that's what I was talking about. Cadaver dissection.
You said that they make things look clear by dissecting it, which kind of threw me off. Do you mean to say that it isn't clear unless it's dissected the right away? It could be embedded within muscles or something, for instance, right (maybe not specifically that in this case)?
Yes exactly. Maybe not embedded in muscles but embedded in other tissues, or maybe it's sort of blending into something else. There's a lot of tidying up that goes on in dissection. They cleaned it up very clearly in that photo in the link. If you just sliced open a leg at the knee it would look like a total mess in there (if you are brave, type in "knee surgery" into youtube and you will see what it looks like on the inside).
It's still a very huge deal if they discovered a totally new ligament though. That's significant.
Oh yes. Clearing out the fat from a hefty corpse can be as tedious and time-consuming as dusting off a new archaeological find, but much stinkier and more repulsive.
That said, I'm surprised we didn't find something this large before now... A microscopic layer of the cornea, I can understand. But...
Ha. Yes stinky indeed.
Hm. So apparently they suspected SOMETHING was there, but my understanding is that they hadn't designated it as a ligament, per se, until just recently. In 1879, they had identified it as a "pearly resistant fibrous band."