Mechanical properties and adaptations of some less familiar bony tissues

This review attempts to show the bone community that there are many ways of being a ‘bone’, and that the range of mechanical properties of bone material is much greater than is conventionally thought to be the case. However the structure–function relationships have in many cases hardly moved beyond mere assertion. There is a pressing need for an examination of some material properties of a whole variety of bones, always using exactly the same testing method, for instance nanoindentation of wet material, so that firm comparisons can be made.