Last night a thought occurred to me, and I wrote to Matt: If birds had gone extinct 66 Mya along with all the other dinosaurs, would it ever have occurred to us that they had flow-through lungs?
A month after I and Matt published our paper “Why is vertebral pneumaticity in sauropod dinosaurs so variable?” at Qeios , we were bemoaning how difficult it was to get anyone to review it. But what a difference the last nineteen days have made!
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I’ve been reading The Guinness Book of Animal Facts and Feats (Wood 1982) again. Here’s what he says on pages 98-99 about the strength of crocodiles, and what happens when they bite off more than they can chew.
Okay, before some wag makes this point, the gator is missing a good chunk of its tail, so this is more like the left half of the anterior two-thirds of a gator. But that would make a lousy title. We might have more to say about this in the future, but for now, I’m going to let this 1000-word-equivalent speak for itself. Many thanks to Elizabeth Rega for the use of the gator.
An important new paper is out: R. Kent Sanders and Colleen G. Farmer. 2012. The pulmonary anatomy of Alligator mississippiensis and Its similarity to the avian respiratory system.
Vanessa Graff and I spent yesterday working in the herpetology and ornithology collections at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (LACM). The herpetology collections manager, Neftali Comacho, pointed us to this skull of Alligator mississippiensis . It’s not world’s biggest gator–about which more in a second–but it’s the biggest I’ve seen in person.