Back into 2019, when Matt and I visited the Carnegie Museum, we were struck by how different the necks of juvenile and adult Tyrannosaurus rex individuals are. In particular, the juvenile individual known as Jane has a slender and amost fragile-looking neck compared with the monstrously robust neck of its adult counterpart.

Our old friend Ray Wilhite sent us this glorious photo of a horse neck that he dissected recently, with permission to post here: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-20849 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“20849” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2023/03/13/the-equine-interspinal-ligaments-of-ray-wilhite/equine-neck-dissection-1/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/03/equine-neck-dissection-1.jpg” orig-size=“4080,3072” comments-opened=“1”

Here’s something that’s been in the works for a while: a popular article in Scientific American on stretch growth of axons in large, fast-growing animals: Smith, Douglas H., Rodgers, Jeffrey M., Dollé, Jean-Pierre, and Wedel, Mathew J. 2022.

Here at SV-POW! Towers, we like to show you iconic mounted skeletons from unusual perspectives.

Last time, we looked briefly at my new paper Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted (Taylor 2022). As hinted at in that post, this paper had a difficult and protracted genesis. I thought it might be interesting to watch the story of a published paper through its various stages of prehistory and history.

Today finally sees the publication of a paper (Taylor 2022) that’s been longer in gestation than most (although, yes, all right, not as long as the Archbishop). I guess the first seeds were sown almost a full decade ago when I posted How long was the neck of Diplodocus ? in May 2011, but it was submitted as a preprint in 2015.

Matt dropped me a line midweek about the catalogue of complete sauropod necks, with some interesting thoughts.

A couple of months ago, I asked for your help in compiling a list of all known complete sauropods necks. This has gone really well, and I want to thank everyone who chipped in, and all the various authors I have contacted for details as a result.

We’re way late to this party, but better late than never I guess. Wu et al. (2013) described Xinjiangtitan shanshanesis as a new mamenchisaurid from the Middle Jurassic of China.

Early in my 2015 preprint on the incompleteness of sauropod necks, I wrote “Unambiguously complete necks are known from published account of only six species of sauropod, two of which are species of the same genus”, and listed them.