You may remember this: …which I used to make this: …and then this: The middle image is just the skeleton from the top photo cut out from the background and dropped to black using ‘Levels’ in GIMP, with the chevrons scooted up to close the gap imposed by the mounting bar. The bottom image is the same thing tweaked a bit to repose the skeleton and get rid of some perspective distortion on the limbs.

We’ve shown a lot of sauropod sacra around here lately (for example here, here, and here), so here’s a little look back down the tree. You haven’t heard from me much lately because I’ve been busy teaching anatomy. Still, I get to help people dissect for a living, so I can’t complain.

My awesome employers Index Data flew us all out to Boston a few weeks ago, for six days of food, drink, work (yes, work!) and goofy tyrannosaurs. There is really no excuse for this, is there? SPECIAL BONUS: I am wearing my Xenoposeidon T-shirt.

Here’s a cool skeleton of the South American pleurodire Podocnemis in the Yale Peabody Museum. What’s that you’re hiding in your neck, Podocnemis ? Laminae! Here’s a closeup: The laminae run from the transverse processes to the prezygapophyses and the centrum, which I reckon makes them analogues of the PRDLs and ACDLs of sauropods.

Secretary bird: Matt pointed out to me something that in retrospect is obvious, though I’d never thought about it before: the eyelashes of birds are not homologous with ours, since mammals’ eyelashes are modified hairs and birds don’t have hair. Instead, their lashes are modified feathers. It would be interesting to see both kinds of eyelash under a microscope and compare.

Check this baby out: I know, I know what you’re thinking. “Enough with the vulgar overexposed skull of this beast, Taylor”, you cry: “Show us its zygapophyses!” But of course. This is from the anterior part of the tail, in right lateral view: the vertebrae that you see here are the third to seventh of those that carry chevrons.

More from my flying visit to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. I found this exhibition of bird eggs very striking. In particular, it was shocking how much bigger the elephant-bird egg is than that of the ostrich.

Picture-of-the-day post: a couple of days ago I had the chance to spend an hour in a very brief visit to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Needless to say, that was a pathetically inadequate amount of time to look at even one of the public galleries properly. But here is one photo I took — skeletons of both extant monotremes, the platypus and the echidna: Click through for full resolution.