[This is part 4 in an ongoing series on our recent PLOS ONE paper on sauropod neck cartilage. See also part 1, part 2, and part 3.] Weird stuff on the ground, Big Bend, 2007. Here’s a frequently-reproduced quote from Darwin: It’s from a letter to Henry Fawcett, dated September 18, 1861, and you can read the whole thing here.

Broadly speaking, pneumatic sauropod vertebrae come in two flavors. In more primitive, camerate vertebrae, modeled here by Haplocanthosaurus , the centrum is a round-ended I-beam and the neural arch is composed of intersecting flat plates of bone called laminae ( lam above; fos = fossa, nc = neural canal, ncs = neurocentral suture;

Last week, for the first time ever, I spent the entire working week on palaeo.  I took a week away from my job, and spent it staying in London, working on the Archbishop at the Natural History Museum.

Earlier this month Daniela Schwarz-Wings and colleagues published the first finite element analysis (FEA) of sauropod vertebrae (Schwarz-Wings et al. 2009). Above is one of the figures showing some of their results. Following standard convention, stresses are shown on a gradient with cooler colors indicating lower stresses and hotter colors indicating higher stresses.

This is corn on the cob: This is a shish kebab: Most tetrapods are like shish kebabs: a whole lot of meat stuck on a proportionally tiny skeleton.

A 3D reconstruction of the paranasal sinuses in a human (from Koppe et al. 1999). You also have paratympanic sinuses that pneumatize the mastoid process of the temporal bone (feel for an inferiorly-directed, thumb-size protuberance right behind each ear). An x-ray of a pig skull, from here. Can you see the outline of the brain-shaped endocranial cavity? How about in this x-ray of a rhino skull? Image courtesy of Kent Sanders.

I just got word from the History Channel that their documentary “Evolve: Size” will air Saturday, Nov. 8. Kent Sanders, Brooks Britt, and I filmed a long segment for this back in May, covering pneumaticity in sauropods. Hopefully it didn’t all go to the cutting room floor! With any luck, you’ll see the results of this: Check local listings for showtimes. UPDATE: IMMEDIATE REACTION Hey, not bad.

You know, we have not done what we intended with this blog. We intended to post pretty pictures of sauropod vertebrae, sketch a few lines of text a la our inspiration, and call it good. But not one of us is capable of shutting up –me least of all–so we sit down to write 6 lines and end up writing 60 or 600. Well, not this time.