When I started my palaeo Masters (as it then was) at Portsmouth, I had a very bad habit of writing unnecessary double negatives of the kind the Sir Humphrey Appleby might use. Instead of saying “Taxon X resembles taxon Y”, I would say “is not dissimilar to”. I did this all the ...
chapter in a long-delayed edited volume; a paper on Joni Mitchell that was given Major Revisions from a humanities journal for (I thought) spurious reasons; an anatomy paper at PeerJ whose revisions should soon be finished; and the newly submitted paper that I mentioned at the top of the ...
(I say “primarily” because anatomy is never that simple and orthogonal: everything does two or three things, and apparently simple movements are generally the result of many different muscles working together.) In parts A and B of the figure, we showed relatively small ventral and lateral ...
Assuming the scale bar is supposed to be 1 meter (and not 20 meters or 2.0 meters as it is labeled) yields a summed cervical length of 13.4 meters, a summed dorsal length of 3.39 meters, and a cervical/dorsal ratio of 3.96–all admirably close, off by no more than 4cm across 16+...
Where is all this new anatomy hiding? I’ll tell you. (Warning: dissection images inbound. Nothing too gory, but still.) I’m going to draw a lot from human anatomy, because it’s one of the areas where I have the most hands-on experience, and because humans are one of the best...
As decor, these are a little less friendly and a little more sinister than the labeled teaching skulls. As things you could use to actually learn anatomy — not bad! I’m sure the basicranium is a mess where it’s glued to the wooden stand, but you could still use this thing to lea...
If you want to find the paleontology and anatomy videos that Mike and I have done (plus one video about open access), they have theirown sidebar page now, for your convenience and for our own. It’s, uh, just to the right of where your eyes are pointing right now. You know what,...
Humans have these, too, in our lower cervical vertebrae to run our forelimbs, and in our lower thoracic vertebrae to run our hindlimbs. Recall that the segmental anatomy of the adult human spinal cord corresponds increasingly poorly to the vertebrae the farther we are from the head because of...
Ultimately, this has been a fun exercise and it’s made me more aware of how I title my papers. This is useful because I have some manuscripts in the works that deal with really detailed anatomy, and I need to figure out how to give them titles that are precise and informative but st...
Thatisinteresting. And a bit worrying, since a lot of the “big science” to come in future decades will be big analyses of big datasets. I’m glad to be poking around weird anatomy instead. I think there is wisdom in that. I’m nervous about the idea that if wedid(for example) ...