Great image of the cranial base

Above is a fresh dissection showing a superior view of the cranial base with the dural lining intact, tentorium removed. The image is taken from here. You can see the olfactory and optic nerves passing through the dura. Fabulous. How shiny is the fascia lining the skull? This is very different from the dead bones you normally see. Note how the shapes of each middle cranial fossa are quite different between the left and the right. The left greater wing seems to be anterior (towards the nose/ top of the picture). It does not look like a side bend to me - there is no bulge to the left? In Sutherland's framework, probably a left lateral shear?In palpating a clients head on a table, orienting to a squashed fluid balloon head, this pattern might present as the left hand towards the ceiling and the right hand towards the table. Often these are the obvious shapes and directions you feel in lateral shears, rather than feeling lateral translation of sphenoid.Whatever we name it, and it is easy to get confused here, there is clearly experience and shaping by conditional forces. A great clinical approach is to try and work out the forces that have acted on the babies skull to generate the shapes you perceive.For comparison here are three more real skulls, showing a variety of shapes. 

Cranial base - three real skulls side by side

Cranial base - three real skulls side by side

cranial base labelled