New paper out: Atterholt, Jessie, and Wedel, Mathew J. 2022. A computed tomography-based survey of paramedullary diverticula in extant Aves.

Remember this classic XKCD comic?

I made this for my own amusement, and thought you guys may as well get to benefit from it, too.

For reasons that would be otiose, at this moment, to rehearse, I recently found myself in need of a hemisected turkey cervical. Happily, I own five skeletonised turkey necks, so it was with me the work of a moment to select a candidate. But now what? How to hemisect it? We have

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For this forthcoming Barosaurus paper, we would like to include an establishing photo of the AMNH Barosaurus mount. There are two strong candidate photos which we’ve used before in an SVPCA talk, but since this is a formal publication we need to be more careful about copyright.

Matt and I are writing a paper about Barosaurus cervicals (yes, again). Regular readers will recall that the best Barosaurus cervical material we have ever seen was in a prep lab for Western Paleo Labs.

I was on a video call with Matt, talking about a project he’s working on that involves Haplocanthosaurus . A lot of his recent project involve Haplocanthosaurus which is … an OK sauropod. I mean, it’s no brachiosaur. So this is how the conversation went: Mike: I have bad news for you, dude. Haplocanthosaurus is only one or two nodes away from being a camarasaur.

I was looking more closely at the turkey skeleton from my recent post, and zeroed in on the last two dorsal (= thoracic) vertebrae. They articulate very well with each other and with the first vertebra of the sacrum, with the centra and zygapophyses both locking in so that there can only have been very little if any movement between them in life.

I closed the last post by claiming that finding the infected bone in Dolly was “a crazy lucky break”. Here’s why: {.size-large .wp-image-19753 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“19753” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2022/02/19/sauro-throat-part-4-the-osteological-paradox/dolly-and-the-osteological-paradox/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/dolly-and-the-osteological-paradox.jpg” orig-size=“3000,6800”

Naturally I was grateful when Cary invited me to be part of the team working on Dolly, the diplodocid with lesions in its neck vertebrae (Woodruff et al. 2022; see previous posts on Dolly here and here). I was also intellectually excited, not only to see air-filled bones with obvious pathologies, but also for what those pathologies could tell us about Dolly and other sauropods. That’s the part of our new paper I want to unpack in this post.