{.size-large .wp-image-13637 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“13637” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2016/08/22/path-of-the-recurrent-laryngeal-nerve-in-frogs-giraffes-and-elasmosaurs/frog-rln-ventral-view-ecker-1889-plate-1-fig-115-rln-highlighted/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/frog-rln-ventral-view-ecker-1889-plate-1-fig-115-rln-highlighted.png” orig-size=“1050,1362” comments-opened=“1”

In a back room at the Field Museum, from my visit in 2012. I took a lot of photos of the neck, which nicely records the transition in neural spine shape from simple to bifurcated–a topic of interest to sauropodophiles.

Are you a lover of sauropod necks? Do you long to demonstrate to your friends and family how much better[1] they are than the necks of other long-necked critters? Are you crazy for the Taylor and Wedel (2013a) paper on why sauropods had long necks; and why giraffes have short necks , but disappointed that it’s not, until now, been obtainable in T-shirt form? If so, it’s your lucky day!

Back in 2010, SVPCA was held in Cambridge. (It was the year that I gave the “why giraffes have short necks” talk [abstract, slides].) While we were there, I took a lot of photos in the excellent Cambridge University Museum of Zoology, which was just across the courtyard from the lecture theatre where the scientific sessions were held.

In a recent post I showed photos of the trachea in a rhea, running not along the ventral surface of the neck but along the right side. I promised to show that this is not uncommon, that the trachea and esophagus of birds are usually free to slide around under the skin and are not constrained to like along the ventral midline of the neck, as they usually are in mammals. Here goes.

Thanks to everyone who joined in the discussion last time on why sauropods had such long necks.  I’ve discussed this a little with Matt, and we are both amazed that so many different hypotheses have been advanced (even if some of them are tongue-in-cheek).  We’ll probably come back to all these ideas later.

Many thanks to Mark Evans of the New Walk Museum, Leicester, for this photograph of yet another camel skeleton, this one from the MNHN in Paris, France:   Head and neck of Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus) in right lateral view. Photograph by Mark Evans.   This is especially interesting because it’s our first Bactrian camel — the Cambridge Camel and the Oxford camel are both dromedaries.

Welcome to post four of what seems to be turning out to be Camel Week here on SV-POW!.  As it happens, I spent last Friday and Saturday in Oxford, for a meeting of the Tolkien Society, and I had three hours or so to spend in the wonderful Oxford University Natural History Museum. In a completely ideal world, I would have been able to play with a sequence of camel cervicals;

Since I posted my photograph of the Cambridge University Zoology Museum’s dromedary camel in the last entry, I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind.  Here it is again, this time with the background removed: You’ll remember from last time that the thing that struck me most powerfully about it was the huge disarticulations between the centra of C3, C4 and C5.  [Stevens and Parrish (2005:fig.

Here’s the answer to last week’s riddle. The big vertebra was obviously cervical 8 of Sauroposeidon , which you’ve seen here more than once. The small vertebra is also a mid-cervical, also from the Early Cretaceous, but from Croatia rather than Oklahoma. The very long centrum, unbifurcated neural spine, and extensive pneumatic sculpturing mark it as a brachiosaurid.