The many fangs of camels

The skeleton of a dromedary at the Zoological Museum of Naples...what's up with all those fangs!?

Camelids are extremely interesting and puzzling creatures, with a long list of peculiarities both in their soft and hard anatomy, including those allowing life in deserts.

Today I want to talk a bit about skeletal oddities mainly, exemplified here by the skeleton of a dromedary (Camelus dromedarius, see above photo) and the skull of a wild camel (Camelus ferus, see below), both displayed at the Zoological Museum of Naples. UPDATE: note that according to Pietro Martini, who is cited below, the museum's labels may be wrong here: the skeleton should be that of a Bactrian camel, the skull that of a dromedary.

The aforementioned wild camel skull (note that I'm following Jemmett et al. (2022) here in restricting the common name "Bactrian camel" to the domestic form Camelus bactrianus alone).

You may notice the presence of multiple fangs in both the upper and lower dentition (those in these specimens are actually on the smallish side and sometimes broken, they can be larger), which one may find quite unexpected in an herbivorous mammal...what's going on here? The solution is that, in addition to a pair of large canines, camels also have a pair of caniniform incisors and another pair of caniniform premolars (Faye et al. 2023). Their bites are nasty: male camels fighting during rut can inflict serious injuries to each other (see here for gruesome details on damaged dhulas for example).

A detail of the skull and neck region of the same dromedary specimen.

Unlike other artiodactyls, camels don't have proper hooves, instead the two digits are cushioned by large pads and terminate in nails: this configuration allows them to exert a lower pressure on the ground, and it's an adaptation to walking on sand. This also means that they're not unguligrades but digitigrades (Faye et al. 2023).

Taxidermy specimen of a juvenile Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus), also at the Zoological Museum of Naples. Note the nail and the two humps.

Another thing you can see on the skeleton is that the presence of humps is not immediately apparent on the skeleton of camels: in life, they're not even placed over the dorsal vertebrae with the taller neural spines, but further back on vertebrae with shorter ones. This has often led to the conclusion that camels humps leave no osteological mark whatsoever (see discussion here for example, as well as Witton 2018). Martini et al. (2018) however recently pointed out to features in the thoracic and lumbar vertebrae that, taken as a whole, may hallmark the presence and even number of humps.

Another Bactrian camel, this time a live one at the Zoo di Napoli. Note the the very pronounced S-shaped curve of the neck. More extreme poses are possible.

Camels' necks are very peculiar, being very long and capable of a great range of movement, greater than one would predict from bones alone, as you can see from the photos above and below. This is apparently achieved (at least in part) thanks to extensive cartilage between and around the cervical vertebrae. Apparently, the space between camels' vertebrae occupied by cartilage and other soft tissues can be as much as 30 mm or more. This is all very weird and has been discussed before, and probably needs to be better studied.

More neck action from the same individual.

References

  • Faye, B., Konuspayeva, G., Magnan, C. (2023). Anatomical Features of Large Camelids. In: Large Camel Farming. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-2237-5_2
  • Martini, P., Schmid, P. & Costeur, L. (2018). Comparative Morphometry of Bactrian Camel and Dromedary. J Mammal Evol 25, 407–425. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10914-017-9386-9
  • Jemmett AM, Groombridge JJ, Hare J, Yadamsuren A, Burger PA, Ewen JG. (2023). What’s in a name? Common name misuse potentially confounds the conservation of the wild camel Camelus ferus. Oryx. 2023;57(2):175-179. doi:10.1017/S0030605322000114
  • Witton, M. P. (2018). The palaeoartist's handbook: recreating prehistoric animals in art. Crowood Press.


Comments

  1. Andreas JohanssonMay 27, 2025 at 12:13 PM

    Nice blog :)

    If I understand aright, camelids are the most basal artidacyls, so is digitigrady ancestral for Artiodactyla?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Davide GioiaMay 27, 2025 at 2:10 PM

      Thanks! Yes unguligrady evolved from a digitigrade condition in artiodactyls (you can still find a holometacarpalian condition in things like pigs), and yes camels are often found in quite a basal position among living artiodactyls, though not necessarily in the basalmost position. Their digitigrady though seems to be secondary, evolving from an unguligrade condition.

      Delete
    2. Andreas JohanssonMay 27, 2025 at 10:52 PM

      Thanks!

      Someone - I forget who - pointed me here a couple of weeks ago, and it seems to be right up my alley.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nope, this is NOT Dilophosaurus

Image
The large double-crested theropod dinosaur displayed at the Museo delle Scienze (MUSE).   Surely this is Dilophosaurus right!? Surprise, it's not. Nope, the mounted skeleton you see in the photo, a cast displayed at the Museo delle Scienze (MUSE), is not actually Dilophosaurus wetherilli . What you're actually seeing here is instead another early theropod dinosaur, the Chinese  Sinosaurus triassicus.  Despite the name, Sinosaurus is from the Early Jurassic, and it's an early example of large theropod dinosaur: it's been recently estimated at around 5-6 m long and more than 800 kg in weight (Liang et al. 2024). Other than S. triassicus , a second species, S. sinensis , is usually ascribed to the genus (see Zhang et al. 2023 and references therein).  Another view of the same mounted skeleton, from a slightly different angle. Note the somewhat surprisingly thin skull. As you can see from the photos, Sinosaurus had a relatively delicate skull construction with a pair ...
Read more

Moose, and why they’re so amazing

Image
The moose ( Alces alces ) is quite an incredible beast. Me being absolutely flabbergasted by the sheer size of a European moose displayed at the Turin Museum of Natural History. But just how big can moose get? It’s a survivor of the Last Glacial Maximum, and while the European moose ( A. a. alces ) currently ranges in northern and eastern Europe (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Baltic States, Belarus, Russia and Ukraine) and Poland, with some vagrant individuals in Croatia, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia and some isolated populations in Austria, Germany and Czech Republic, subfossil remains have also been found as far south as Spain, the UK, Switzerland and Italy. The species has progressively restricted its range up to historical times, mainly due to habitat destruction and overhunting (Niedziałkowska et al. 2024). It’s the largest modern deer (Cervidae), with the probable largest individual being estimated at 816 kg, and with unconfirmed reports of individuals exceeding a ton (Wood 1976, 19...
Read more

Deer are weirder than you think

Image
  One of the incredible suspended taxidermy displays at the Museo delle Scienze (MUSE), showing two male Central European or common red deer ( Cervus elaphus hippelaphus ) entangled in combat. In some rare instances interlocked males can no longer separate, and they usually both die. As promised in the previous post , here's more on deer and why they're so fascinating. For how mundane we may find them, deer (family Cervidae) are actually some of the weirdest mammals you can think of, for a variety of reasons, which include laryngeal modifications to enhance their calls during rut, ancient hybridizations, bipedal walking, carnivoran-like aggressive posturing and roaring, and much more (if you want to know more on this stuff, as you should, Darren Naish has previously blogged on all this here , here and here ). But what deer are most renowned for, and arguably their weirdest specialization, is their headgear: instead of just evolving horns (keratinous structures with a bony core...
Read more