Arriving as an early Christmas present, and coming in just a week before the end of what would otherwise have been a barren 2014, my paper Quantifying the effect of intervertebral cartilage on neutral posture in the necks of sauropod dinosaurs is out!

Just a quick post to link to all six (so far) installments of the “necks lie” series. I need this because I want to cite all the “necks lie” posts in a paper that I’ll shortly submit, and it seems better to cite a single page than four of them.

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.

Folks, You may know that the inaugral TetZooCon is set to take place next Saturday (12 July) at the London Wetland Centre. It’s an informal convention that’s condensed around occasional SV-POW!sketeer Darren Naish’s absurdly informative blog Tetrapod Zoology, and features a day of talks, a palaeoart workshop and a quiz. At £40 for the day, it’s a bit of a bargain.

In a back room at the Field Museum, from my visit in 2012. I took a lot of photos of the neck, which nicely records the transition in neural spine shape from simple to bifurcated–a topic of interest to sauropodophiles.

Are you a lover of sauropod necks? Do you long to demonstrate to your friends and family how much better[1] they are than the necks of other long-necked critters? Are you crazy for the Taylor and Wedel (2013a) paper on why sauropods had long necks; and why giraffes have short necks , but disappointed that it’s not, until now, been obtainable in T-shirt form? If so, it’s your lucky day!

I made these back in the day. The idea was that you could print them out and have them along while dissecting bird necks, so you could draw on the muscles. It’s basically one drawing of an ostrich vertebra, morphed in GIMP and stacked to simulate articulation. All of the ones in this post show the vertebrae in left lateral view. If you need right views, flip ’em in GIMP or heck, I think even Windows Explorer will do that for you.

One aspect of sauropod neck cartilage that’s been overlooked — and this applies to all non-avian dinosaurs, not just sauropods — is the configuration of the cartilage in their necks. It’s not widely appreciated that birds’ necks differ from those of all other animals in this respect, and we don’t yet know whether sauropods resembled birds or mammals.

Last time, we looked at how including intervertebral cartilage changes the neutral pose of a neck — or, more specifically, of the sequence of cervical vertebrae.

As I mentioned a few days ago, Matt and I have a couple of papers in the new PLOS ONE Sauropod Gigantism collection.