Luke Horton asked in a comment on a recent post: Given the chance to examine a titanosaur cadaver with your hypothetical army of anatomists, what would you look for first? *FACEPALM* How we’ve gone almost 17 years without posting about a hypothetical sauropod dissection is quite beyond my capacity.
Over on Mastodon (sign up, it’s great!), Jim Kirkland posted a baby Utahraptor caudal vertebrae for #FossilFriday.
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Daniel Vidal et al.’s new paper in Scientific Reports (Vidal et al. 2020) has been out for a couple of days now. Dealing as it does with sauropod neck posture, it’s obviously of interest to me, and to Matt.
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The more I look at the problem of how flexible sauropod necks were, the more I think we’re going to struggle to ever know their range of motion It’s just too dependent on soft tissue that doesn’t fossilise.
Last night, I submitted a paper for publication — for the first time since April 2013. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like.
A couple of times now, I’ve pitched in an abstract for a Masters project looking at neck cartilage, hoping someone at Bristol will work on it with me co-supervising, but so far no-one’s bitten. Here’s how I’ve been describing it: Understanding posture and motion in the necks of sauropods: the crucial role of cartilage in intervertebral joints The sauropod dinosaurs were an order of magnitude bigger than any other terrestrial animal.
In a comment on the last post, on the mass of Dreadnoughtus , Asier Larramendi wrote: So I did. The table of measurements in the supplementary material is admirably complete. For all of the available dorsal vertebrae except D9, which I suppose must have been too poorly preserved to measure the difference, Lacovara et al. list both the total centrum length and the centrum length minus the anterior condyle.
[This is part 4 in an ongoing series on our recent PLOS ONE paper on sauropod neck cartilage. See also part 1, part 2, and part 3.] Weird stuff on the ground, Big Bend, 2007. Here’s a frequently-reproduced quote from Darwin: It’s from a letter to Henry Fawcett, dated September 18, 1861, and you can read the whole thing here.