Here’s where I thought Dave Hone’s Academics on Archosaurs series was going: Be honest: aren’t you just a little disappointed that it’s not? [The actual Tom Holtz article is here.

Another picture from the recent ostrich dissection (click for full-size, unlabeled version). Last time we were in the middle of the neck, looking from anterior to posterior. This shot is from closer to the base of the neck, looking from posterior to anterior.

Those ostrich necks I went to Oro Grande to get last Thursday? Vanessa and I started dissecting them last Friday. The necks came to us pre-cut into segments with two to three vertebrae per segment. The transverse cuts were made without regard for joints so we got a bunch of cross sections at varying points through the vertebrae. This was fortuitous;

I was putting a new card in my camera and needed some test photos, so I shot what was on my desk: some random doodles from discussions with various folks, and an ostrich cervical. I love my job. Bonus SV-POW!bucks to the first person to decipher the diagram on the lower left.

Today was one of the most interesting days of my life. Vanessa and I needed ostrich parts for dissection, so I had gotten in touch with Doug Osborne of OK Corral Ostrich Farms in Oro Grande.

As previously reported, the lot of us are in Bonn for the sauropod biology workshop. Last night we met up at the welcome reception at the Goldfuss Museum.

Last time, we looked at the bones of the sauropod skeleton, and I mentioned that “thanks to the wonder of homology, it doubles as a primer for dinosaur skeletons in general”.  To prove it, here everyone’s favourite vulgar, overstudied theropod Tyrannosaurus rex , in L. M. Sterling’s reconstruction from Osborn 1906:plate XXIV, published just one year after the big guy’s initial description.

I’m pleased to announce that Darren has a new paper out (Naish and Sweetman 2011) in which he and fellow Portsmouth researcher Steve Sweetman describe a maniraptoran theropod from the Wealden Supergroup of southern England.  It’s represented only by a single cervical vertebra: Indeterminate maniraptoran theropod BEXHM 2008.14.1, posterior cervical vertebra, in right lateral view. Sauroposeidon cervical vertebra 8 for scale.

Image borrowed from here. This isn’t the most perceptive prognostication of all time, and others probably have or will come up with it independently, but I still wanted to get it out there. The upcoming TV show Terra Nova , about a family sent back to the Cretaceous as pioneers from an ecologically wrecked future Earth, will have dinosauroids. I haven’t heard any leaks to that effect, it just seems inevitable.

UPDATE much later: most of the links in this post are dead, but happily rights to my Cosmos article reverted to me a long time ago, and it’s now freely available here: Click to access wedel-2011-we-are-all-airheads.pdf – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Busy days. I just published a popular article on skeletal pneumaticity as a web feature at the Australian science magazine Cosmos.