OsteoBase

Web interactive exploration for osteology

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Let's go!

Select a taxon to explore its skeleton:




Site version
NEW !!!

25 new species have just been added with bones of the vertebral column in addition to the bones of the skull already available.


From now on OsteoBase contains 33 actinopterygians species belonging to 26 different families (Salmonidae, Merlucciidae, Gadidae, Ophidiidae, Lophiidae, Mugilidae, Scorpaenidae, Triglidae, Centropomidae, Moronidae, Serranidae, Percidae, Carangidae, Lutjanidae, Haemulidae, Sparidae, Sciaenidae, Labridae, Scaridae, Anarhichadidae, Eleginopsidae, Labrisomidae, Siganidae, Sphyraenidae, Scombridae et Paralichthyidae).


To learn more about osteology, you can visit AcanthoWeb's website, the website of a research team working on acanthomorphs' systematics which supports this project.

Welcome on OsteoBase website!

OsteoBase is an interactive website designed for osteological exploration, from the entire skeleton to constituting bones. The interface provides access to pictures of a collection of osteological items, organized to compare these osteological items in different taxa.
Thus OsteoBase constitutes an osteological identification tool providing two ways to navigate:
- users can either select a bone to make comparison across several taxa (navigation by osteological structures)
- or select a taxon to visualize its bones (navigation by taxon).
Taxa can be sorted by geographical zones.

One of the main originalities of OsteoBase is the navigation through the pictures: the entire osteology can be explored just by hovering and clicking on pictures, without a need to know the name of bones. OsteoBase can therefore be used as an educational tool to learn osteology to initiate users like students or biologists not specialized in this field (for instance ecologists who want to identify prey remains).

Color code of the site

orange = osteological structures
green = taxa
yellow = specimens
blue = geographical areas

Surf on the website

logo mozilla firefox This application has been optimized for Mozilla Firefox.

Click on the logo of the browser to be taken to the download site.

About OsteoBase

OsteoBase receives support from:

  • FishBase, a global information system on "fishes", including information on taxonomy and biology of almost all extant species

From the start, this tool was designed for the osteology of actinopterygians in order to be inserted in FishBase. But OsteoBase has also been designed to apply to any taxon. Thus, application to other taxa would be quite possible.


How to cite OsteoBase?
TERCERIE, S., BEAREZ, P., PRUVOST, P., VIGNES-LEBBE, R., BLED, L., BAILLY, N., 2011. - Osteobase. World Wide Web electronic publication. www.mnhn.fr/osteo/osteobase, version September 2011.