In case you haven’t heard, Taylor et al . (2009) recently argued that sauropods naturally held their cervico-dorsal junctions in extension, and their cranio-cervical joints in flexion… at least, when they weren’t foraging, feeding or engaged in other such activities [if you need help with those terms please see the Tet Zoo article here]. Given that we here at SV-POW!

Here at SV-POW! Towers, we often like to play Spot The T. rex — a simple drinking game that can be played whenever you have supply of palaeontology-related news reports.  Each player in turn takes a report off the stack, and if T. rex is mentioned anywhere in the report, the player drinks.

Because the appearance of accuracy has an irresistible allure, non-specialists frequently treat these estimates as factual.

Since we’re spending a few days on neck posture, I thought I’d expand on what Mike said about bunnies in the first post: in most cases, it is awfully hard to tell the angle of the cervical column when looking at a live animal. Because necks lie. Take this horse (borrowed from here). You can see that the external outline of the neck, which is what you would see in the living animal, is pointed in a different direction than the cervical column.

So far in our coverage of the new paper (Taylor et al. 2009) we’ve mostly focused on necks, following the discovery by Graf, Vidal, and others that when they are alert and unrestrained, extant tetrapods hold their necks extended and their heads flexed. (Although they turn up with distressing regularity, “ventroflexed” is redundant and “dorsiflexed” is an oxymoron; Darren lays down the law here.) There’s more to the paper;