For anyone who doesn’t already know, Palaeontologia Electronica is an on-line, open-access palaeontology journal — the only one in the world (unless you count Acta Pal Pol , which is freely available online and also published on paper.) PE is sponsored by the Palaeontological Association, the Paleontological Society and the Society of Vertebrtate Paleontology, the big three professional associations, so you

This post is nearly three weeks late — it’s based on a piece of artwork that appeared on 25 September, and which I wanted to write about immediately.

For reasons that seemed good to me at the time, I took my best shot at photographing the right cervical rib from cervical vertebra 3 of my ostrich, Veronica [see earlier Part A, Part B and Part C for context].  I thought you might like to see the result, so here it is: Third right cervical rib of subadult female ostrich (Struthio camelus), total length 23 mm. (Total length of the rib, I mean, not total length of the ostrich.) Left column:

[Hello to any redditors who have followed a link here.  Please scroll down to find the more interesting articles; sorry that your introduction to SV-POW! is a backlink article.] Excuse the self-promotion, but some SV-POW! readers might be interested to know that I have an Ask Me Anything going over at the social news aggregator site reddit com.

Yes, you too can have your very own brachiosaurid cervical!  Specifically, “Cervical P” of the as-yet unnamed brachiosaur NHM R5937, informally known as “The Archbishop”.  Here is is! The Archbishop, Cervical P, paper model in left posterodorsolateral view. (All images of the vertebra are copyright the NHM.) All you need is scissors, glue, and this handy cut-out-and-keep schematic.

It’s a strange thing, but no-one seems to bother properly figuring their sauropods’ cervical ribs — that is, the long, thin, posteriorly directed ribs of the neck vertebrae.

If you’ve been following SV-POW!