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WOW! I knew I was dragging a bit on getting around to this vertebral orientation problem, but I didn’t realize a whole month had passed. Yikes. Thanks to everyone who has commented so far, and thanks to Mike for getting the ball rolling on this. Previous posts in this series are here and here. First up, this may seem like a pointlessly picky thing to even worry about.

I was lucky enough to have Phil Mannion as one of the peer-reviewers for my recent paper (Taylor 2018) showing that Xenoposeidon is a rebbachisaurid. During that process, we got into a collegial disagreement about one of the autapomorphies that I proposed in the revised diagnosis: “Neural arch slopes anteriorly 30°–35° relative to the vertical”. (This same character was also in the original Xenoposeidon

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Let’s say you had a critter with weird neural canals and super-deeply-dished-in centrum-ends, and you wanted to digitally rearticulate the vertebrae and reconstruct the spinal cord and intervertebral cartilages, in a project that would bring together a bunch of arcane stuff that you’d been noodling about for years.

Here’s caudal 1 in Haplocanthosaurus priscus, CM 879. Hatcher (1903) only illustrated this vert in right lateral view, in a drawing by Sydney Prentice (see this post). I showed the vert in left lateral, right lateral, and dorsal views in my 2009 air sac paper (figs.

You know how you’ll be doing an image search for some vertebrate fossil and you’ll get a page full of SV-POW!

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