A couple of weeks ago, I was given a pheasant, which I reduced to science and food. When we last saw it, it was down to a skinned and partially defleshed head/neck and feet.
Well, who knew? There I was posting images of “Pelorosaurus” becklesi‘s humerus, radius and ulna, and skin impression. There I was saying that this beast is due a proper description, and warrants its own generic name.
Yesterday, we looked at (mostly) the humerus of the Wealden sauropod “ Pelorosaurus ” becklesii , which you will recall is known from humerus, radius, ulna and a skin impression, and — whatever it might be — is certainly not a species of Pelorosaurus . Now let’s look at the radius and ulna.
It’s an oddity that in eight years of SV-POW!, we’ve never written about one of the best of all the Wealden-formation sauropod specimens: the forelimb and associated skin impression NHMUK R1870 that is known as “ Pelorosaurus ” becklesii . Let’s fix that.
When Fiona checked her email this morning, she found this note from our next-door neighbour Jenny: What a delightful surprise! And here it is: The SV-POW! mole, intact And a close-up of that awesome digging hand: The SV-POW!
Link from second slide. Other posts in this series. Reference: Osborn, Henry Fairfield, and Charles C. Mook. 1921. Camarasaurus , Amphicoelias and other sauropods of Cope. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History , n.s. 3 :247-387, and plates LX-LXXXV.
In lieu of the sauropod neck cartilage post that I will get around to writing someday, here are some photos of animals London and I saw at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum this Sunday morning. In chronological order: Mountain lion, Puma concolor Black bear, Ursus americanus , which taxon has also graced these pages (and my desk) with its mortal remains.
A few weeks ago I threw this picture into the “Night at the Museum” post and promised to say more later. Later is now. I started sculpting dinosaur claws because of the coincidental arrival of two things in my life. One was a cast of OMNH 780, the horrifically awesome thumb claw of Jurassic megapredator Saurophaganax maximus , which I blogged about here.
All I want to do in this post is make people aware that there is a difference between these two things, and occasionally that affects those of us who work in natural history. In one of his books or essays, Stephen Jay Gould made the point that in natural history we are usually not dealing with whether phenomena are possible or not, but rather trying to determine their frequency.
Another extraordinary specimen from the wonderful Oxford University Museum of Natural History: the skeleton of a goliath frog Conraua goliath , the largest extant anuran, which comfortably exceeds 30 cm and 3 kg in life: As noted by sometime SV-POW!sketeer Darren Naish over on Tetrapod Zoology , frogs have stupidly weird skeletons — surely the most derived of any tetrapod, despite their lowly, early diverging “amphibian”