You’ll remember that we’ve been playing with CM 555, a subadult apatosaurine of indeterminate species, though John McIntosh assigned it to Brontosaurus (then Apatosaurus ) excelsus . At the start of the week, we had the centra and neural arches of cervicals 1-14, plus there were some appendicular elements on a shelf that we’d not yet gone to. But then today, Matt found this drawer: {.alignnone .wp-image-15853 .size-full

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As noted in the last post, Matt and I are off to spend a week at the Carnegie Museum from 11th-15th March. We expect to see many, many fascinating specimens there: far more than we’ll be able to do proper work on in the five days we have. So our main goal is to exhaustively document the most important specimens that we see, so we can work on them later after we’ve got home.

If you followed along with the last post in this series, you now have some bird vertebrae to play with. Here are some things to do with them. 1. Learn the parts of the vertebrae, and compare them with those of other animals Why are we so excited about bird vertebrae around here?

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.

The 1st Palaeontological Virtual Congress is underway now, and will run through December 15. Mike and I have two presentations up: {.aligncenter .wp-image-15560 .size-large loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“15560” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2018/12/05/our-presentations-are-up-at-the-1st-palaeo-virtual-congress/taylor-and-wedel-2018-1pvc-cover-slide/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/taylor-and-wedel-2018-1pvc-cover-slide.jpg”

We’ve posted a lot here about how crazy the cervical vertebrae of apatosaurines are (for example: 1, 2, 3), and especially the redonkulosity of their cervical ribs.

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The more I look at the problem of how flexible sauropod necks were, the more I think we’re going to struggle to ever know their range of motion It’s just too dependent on soft tissue that doesn’t fossilise.

Here’s the story of my fascination with supramedullary airways over the last 20 years, and how Jessie Atterholt and I ended up working on them together, culminating with her talk at SVPCA last week. (Just here for the preprint link?