These long cervical ribs are ossified tendons of ventral neck muscles, presumably longus colli ventralis. We know they’re ossified tendons because of their bone histology (Klein et al. 2012), and we suspect that they’re longus colli ventralis because those tendons look the same in birds, jus...
And from comparisons with crocs and birds, we expect that sauropod cervical ribs had two sets of muscles inserting on them: a lateral set, and a ventral set. They’re the green lines, especially C and E, converging on the cervical rib in this diagram from our 2013 PeerJ paper: ...
Japanese designs are intricate and colorful and play out nicely over the length of a full sleeve tattoo. 36 votes Agree or disagree? 3 Ocean Waves Full Sleeve Tattoos Photo: Wikimedia Commons CC-BY Just like the undulations of the ocean, the muscles in your arms expand and contract frequ...
If you believe in “Artificial Intelligence”, take five minutes to ask it about stuff you know well Dear Royal Society: please stop lending legitimacy to Elon Musk New paper: review of the supernumerary muscles of the human leg and foot New paper out today: Boisvert et al. (2025) on...
If you believe in “Artificial Intelligence”, take five minutes to ask it about stuff you know well Dear Royal Society: please stop lending legitimacy to Elon Musk New paper: review of the supernumerary muscles of the human leg and foot Recent Comments llewelly on I’m stoked for Aquil...
External fossae on bones can house many different soft tissues, including muscles, pads of fat or cartilage, and pneumatic diverticula (O’Connor 2006). Pneumatic fossae are often strongly lipped and internally subdivided and may contain pneumatic foramina, which makes them easier to diagnose (but ...
Incidentally, the existence and importance of the RLN has been known since classical times. The RLN innervates the muscles responsible for speech, and on either side it passes right behind the thyroid gland, which is subject to goiters and tumors and other grotesque maladies. So a careless thyr...
Finally, since we’ve had a bit of a sauropod drought lately, here are a couple of photos of the mounted cast skeleton ofPatagotitanin Stanley Field Hall at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. I gotta say, this mount beats the one at the AMNH in every way, because it’s...
By one of those happy coincidences that you sometimes get, today saw the publication of not one but two dinosaur ontogeny papers: this morning I was sent a copy of Woodruff and Fowler (2012) on ontogenetic changes in the bifid spines of diplodocoids, and tonight I was alerted to Werning ...
In particular, the big jaw muscles inside the zygomatic arches were impossible to get out at this stage, thanks to a combination of strength and slipperiness. At this stage, the lower jaw could, just, be moved, whereas before it was solid with rigor mortis. If I were making a movie ...