Fixed

I figured out the problem with my primitives.
I was passing the vertex count as the count parameter to

glDrawElements(GLenum mode, GLsizei count, GLenum type,
void *indices)

instead of passing the number of indices. I had to do an application with my vertex and index buffers hard coded to re-create the problem.

Here is a wire framed screen of the tiger in the nebula distribution with all its vertices.