Fancy Some Ribs?

According to the juice bottle lids which have recently replaced Wikipedia as my primary reference tool one person in twenty has an extra rib.  Or, to put it another way, nineteen out of every twenty are unaccountably lacking in the rib department.  I must admit that as soon as I read that little snippet I surreptitiously started counting my ribs to see if I was one of the favoured few.  I stopped when I realised that I have no idea how many ribs a human is supposed to possess.  Possibly the answer is under the lid of a juice bottle I didn't buy.

Right now I can imagine my mother saying something like, "Oh good, he's drinking fruit juice," while my father is saying something like, "well at least the quality of his research has improved?"

But an extra rib, how cool would that be?  Not as great as an extra arm of course; with an extra arm I could read a book, drink coffee and change the channels on my TV simultaneously.  Still an extra rib has its advantages.  If somebody needed a rib transplant the favoured person could step forward and say, "take one of mine, I have more than I need," while everyone else stared in admiration.

Cannibals (you knew we'd get there eventually) would prize the extra ribbed person highly although in a barbecue sauce related way which might not necessarily please the subject of their admiration too much.  If you cracked a rib you'd have another standing by doing nothing that could take up the slack.  The benefits of possessing an extra rib are simply too numerous to mention.

Which leads me to wonder; why stop at one?  If you can have an extra rib why can't you have two, or three, or four, or well you see where I'm going with this.  If we had multiple extra ribs our stomaches and internal organs would finally get the protection they need.  We do have an odd body.  Our heads have plate armour, our chests are protected by the sort of laminar armour that is our rib cage but when we got down to things like our liver, stomache, intestines and, of course, genitals apparently evolution just said, "screw it, it should be fine". 

The human being is like a tortoise in reverse.  Rather than having a hard shell protecting the body that everything else can withdraw into we have a hard shell protecting the head that nothing can withdraw into.  Memo to head; all of that skull isn't going to do you any good if all the soft leaky bits attached to it get cut off or otherwise rendered non viable.

Personally what I think we need is overlapping ribs that can concertina down our bodies in time of need.  The moment danger threatens we could be encased in ribcage down to our ankles.  This would provide much needed protection.  Especially since, if we were encased in ribcage down to our ankles, we certainly wouldn't be running away very quickly.  If we fell over at this point we'd rather resemble earthworms with rigor mortis.  If the danger was very pressing this resemblance would become more and more accurate.

OK, so the sliding ribcage armour needs a little work.  Let's not throw the idea away just yet.  There may be a practical purpose for an extra rib, we just need to find it.  We don't want to discourage evolution from trying new things.  If nothing else with a few extra ribs imagine what a hell of a xylophone we'd make.