For reasons that would be otiose, at this moment, to rehearse, I recently found myself in need of a hemisected turkey cervical. Happily, I own five skeletonised turkey necks, so it was with me the work of a moment to select a candidate. But now what? How to hemisect it? We have

I was looking more closely at the turkey skeleton from my recent post, and zeroed in on the last two dorsal (= thoracic) vertebrae. They articulate very well with each other and with the first vertebra of the sacrum, with the centra and zygapophyses both locking in so that there can only have been very little if any movement between them in life.

Back in at least 2008 — maybe earlier — I kept all the bones from our good-sized Christmas turkey. Of course, it’s missing the head, neck and feet, but otherwise it’s pretty much all there.

We all know what turkeys look like, right?

Recently I had the opportunity to give a talk on photographing specimens and preparing illustrations in Jim Parham’s phylogenetics course at Cal State Fullerton. Jim is having each student (1) write a description of a specimen, (2) run a phylogenetic analysis, and (3) do some kind of calibration on their tree. I think that’s rad.

For a paper that I and Matt are preparing, we needed to measure the centrum length of a bunch of turkey cervicals. That turns out to be harder than you’d think, because of the curious negative curvature of the articular surfaces.

I’ve measured a few necks in my time, including the neck of a baby giraffe. I can tell you from experience that necks are awkward things to measure, even if they have been conveniently divested of their heads and torsos. They have a tendency to curl up, which impedes attempts to find the straight-line length.