This tutorial is based on all the things that I stupidly forgot to do along the way of tearing down the juvenile giraffe neck that Darren, John Conway and I recently got to take to pieces.  At half a dozen different points in that process, I found myself thinking “Oh, we should have done X earlier on!”  So it’s not a tutorial founded on the idea that I know how this should be done;

In a comment on the previous post, Dean asked: “What was the difference in length between the neck with its cartilage and the bones flush together?” I’m glad you asked me that.  You’ll recall from last time that the fully fleshed neck — intact apart from the removal of the skin and maybe some superficial muscle — was 51 cm in length from the front of the atlas to the back of the centrum of the seventh cervical vertebra.

Back in early Februrary, Darren and I got an email out of the blue from biomechanics wizard and all all-round good guy John Hutchinson, saying that he’d obtained the neck of a baby giraffe — two weeks old at the time of death — and that if we wanted it, it was ours.

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.

Many thanks to Mark Evans of the New Walk Museum, Leicester, for this photograph of yet another camel skeleton, this one from the MNHN in Paris, France:   Head and neck of Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus) in right lateral view. Photograph by Mark Evans.   This is especially interesting because it’s our first Bactrian camel — the Cambridge Camel and the Oxford camel are both dromedaries.

Welcome to post four of what seems to be turning out to be Camel Week here on SV-POW!.  As it happens, I spent last Friday and Saturday in Oxford, for a meeting of the Tolkien Society, and I had three hours or so to spend in the wonderful Oxford University Natural History Museum. In a completely ideal world, I would have been able to play with a sequence of camel cervicals;

Since I posted my photograph of the Cambridge University Zoology Museum’s dromedary camel in the last entry, I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind.  Here it is again, this time with the background removed: You’ll remember from last time that the thing that struck me most powerfully about it was the huge disarticulations between the centra of C3, C4 and C5.  [Stevens and Parrish (2005:fig.

One of the most bizarre of sauropods – and arguably one of the most bizarre of dinosaurs – is the Patagonian dicraeosaurid diplodocoid Amargasaurus cazaui Salgado & Bonaparte, 1991. Here’s a picture of a replica specimen, provided by Nizar Ibrahim.

In an email, Vladimir Socha drew my attention to the fact that Tom Holtz’s dinosaur encyclopaedia estimates the maximum height of Sauroposeidon as 20 meters plus, and asked whether that was really possible.  Here’s what Tom actually wrote: “ Sauroposeidon was one of the largest of all dinosaurs.

I Cannot Brain Today, I Have the Dumb Man, I hate making mistakes. The only thing worse than making mistakes is making them in public, and the only thing worse than that is finding them in published papers when it’s too late to do anything about them. About the only consolation left–if you’re lucky–is getting to be the one to rat yourself out (we have to do this a lot). So here goes.