This is the second in a series of posts on our new paper about the expanded neural canals in the tail vertebrae of the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus. I’m not going to talk much about Haplo in this post, though.

New paper out today: Wedel, Mathew; Atterholt, Jessie; Dooley, Jr., Alton C.; Farooq, Saad; Macalino, Jeff; Nalley, Thierra K.; Wisser, Gary; and Yasmer, John. 2021. Expanded neural canals in the caudal vertebrae of a specimen of Haplocanthosaurus. Academia Letters, Article 911, 10pp. DOI: 10.20935/AL911 (link) The paper is new, but the findings aren’t, particularly.

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In short, no. I discussed this a bit in the first post of the Clash of the Dinosaurs saga, but it deserves a more thorough unpacking, so we can put this dumb idea to bed once and for all. As Marco brought up in the comments on the previous post, glycogen bodies are probably to blame for the idea that some dinosaurs had a second brain to run their back ends.

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If you’ve been here for very long you know I have a bit of a neural canal fixation.

Here’s a working version of that link. Working link. Working links: Falkingham (2012) on photogrammetry for free Mallison photogrammetry tutorial 1 Mallison photogrammetry tutorial 2 Mallison photogrammetry tutorial 3 Mallison photogrammetry tutorial 4 The rest of this series. Reference Powell, Jaime E.  2003.

This  is the fifth in a series of posts reviewing the Apatosaurus maquette from Sideshow Collectibles. Other posts in the series are: Part 1: intro Part 2: the head Part 3: the neck Part 4: body, tail, limbs, base, and skull Part 6: texture and color Part 7: verdict There are really only a couple of interesting points to discuss for posture: the neck and the feet. The neck posture is fine.

In a recent post I showed photos of the trachea in a rhea, running not along the ventral surface of the neck but along the right side. I promised to show that this is not uncommon, that the trachea and esophagus of birds are usually free to slide around under the skin and are not constrained to like along the ventral midline of the neck, as they usually are in mammals. Here goes.