Pyramid question

[yagyujubei]

Has anyone ever seen the inside of a severely pyramided tortoise shell? I have seen box turtles and snappers, and the shell is smooth where the spine is fused to the shell. In a deformed shell, what do you see? I have always thought that the humps were hollow, and the bone shell was relatively smooth inside. If not, does the spine follow the convolutions of the shell? Seems hard to believe having seen some severe examples. Maybe it bridges the gap? How about a weathered shell when the keratin scutes fall off? What do you see? I don't think that the humps are solid bone, but I can't see the spine followimg the outside shape of the shell other than slightly.What's the answer?

 

[Greg T]

Never thought about the inside of the shell. I assume it would be hollow up in the pyramids.

 

[Yvonne G]

http://tortoiseforum.org/Thread-Pyramiding-in-tortoises-with-Metabolic-Bone-Disease

The inside or body cavity side of the bone is smooth, however, the top side of the bone follows the pyramid.

 

[yagyujubei]

Yvonne, Thanks for the link. This seems to be a hotly debated subject, but I see that the inside of the shell remains smooth as I thought. So the question would seem to be, what causes the bone porosity and raised areas. Obviously the vertabral scutes are the most affected, followed by costals, with the larger scutes being the worst. We know that star tortoises are often pyramided. It seems to be the concensus that since they sometimes do this in the wild , that it is the norm for them, but not all pyramid in the wild. Why not? I believe that it has to be related somehow. I have read that stars are a closely related species.

 

[Tom]

There is still much to learn on this subject and many questions to be answered. It is my opinion that a lot of the things that are assumed to be true about this subject are not. In time things will become clearer, but right now the water is very muddy.

 

[Yvonne G]

And the debate in that thread was because I mistakenly titled the thread (since changed) only pyramiding, and not pyramiding plus MBD. The pictures are showing MBD. I didn't realize that was what Ed was objecting to in his posts until it had gone on for a while. Once I realized what he was arguing about, I changed the title to include MBD. Like Mark has said in a different thread, plain old pyramiding is only cosmetic and doesn't cause any type of problems. When coupled with MBD is when there's a problem.