It warmed my crooked little heart to see Mike Taylor, noted sauropodologist and disdainer-of-mammal-heads, return mammal skulls to the blog’s front page yesterday. Naturally I had to support my friend and colleague in this difficult time, when he may be experiencing confusing feelings regarding nasal turbinates, multi-cusped teeth, and the dentary-squamosal jaw joint.

This is the second in a series of posts on our new paper about the expanded neural canals in the tail vertebrae of the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus. I’m not going to talk much about Haplo in this post, though.

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When I started working on sauropods, I thought their vertebrae were cool but they were loaded with weird structures that I didn’t understand. Then I dissected my first ostrich neck and suddenly everything made sense: this was a muscle attachment, that was a pneumatic feature, this other thing was a ligament scar. Everyone who is interested enough to read this blog should give themselves the same “Aha!” moment.

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