Back in at least 2008 — maybe earlier — I kept all the bones from our good-sized Christmas turkey. Of course, it’s missing the head, neck and feet, but otherwise it’s pretty much all there.

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Thanks to everyone who’s engaged with yesterday’s apparently trivial question: what does it mean for a vertebra to be “horizontal”? I know Matt has plenty of thoughts to share on this, but before he does I want to clear up a couple of things. This is not about life posture First, and I really should have led with this: the present question has nothing to do with life posture.

I was in Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago to work with Liguo Li, of Yongjinglong fame, and I took a day to run up to New York for a quick day’s work at the American Museum of Natural History.

As I mentioned in my first post on Aquilops , I drew the skull reconstructions that appear in figure 6 of the paper (Farke et al. 2014). I’m writing this post to explain that process.

Readers with long memories might recall that, nearly two years ago, we published annotated skeletal reconstructions of Camarasaurus and of Tyrannosaurus , with all the bones labelled. At the time, I said that I’d like to do an ornithischian, too.

I recently reread Dubach (1981), “Quantitative analysis of the respiratory system of the house sparrow, budgerigar and violet-eared hummingbird”, and realized that she reported both body masses and volumes in her Table 1. For each of the three species, here are the sample sizes, mean total body masses, and mean total body volumes, along with mean densities I calculated from those values. House sparrow, Passer domesticus , n

We’re starting the new year with a new feature, in which we answer questions that have come our way. We never had a policy about not answering questions, it’s just that previous ones have tended to arrive in the comments section and have been dealt with there. But suddenly in the last few days I’ve gotten two questions from extrabloggular sources, and rather than hide the replies I thought I’d make them available to all.

Just  a quick note to let anyone who’s not on the Dinosaur Mailing List know that the DML has spawned a new list dedicated to the history of palaeontology.  It’s hosted at Google Groups, so you have the choice of subscribing to it as a mailing list or reading it as a forum.

Last time, we looked at the bones of the sauropod skeleton, and I mentioned that “thanks to the wonder of homology, it doubles as a primer for dinosaur skeletons in general”.  To prove it, here everyone’s favourite vulgar, overstudied theropod Tyrannosaurus rex , in L. M. Sterling’s reconstruction from Osborn 1906:plate XXIV, published just one year after the big guy’s initial description.