The thickness of the articular cartilage between the centra of adjacent vertebrae affects posture. It extends (raises) the neck by an amount roughly proportional to the thickness of the cartilage. For those versed in the neck-posture wars, it’s hardly necessary to point out that extension of ...
Two partial cervical vertebrae, with part of a little one in between them, and a sectioned rib up on the shelf. I didn’t try to measure these through the glass either, but I’d estimate that each of the cervical centra is a meter and change in length, and both were a few cm lon...
Images of vertebra from Gilmore (1936:plate XXIV). At the bottom, the vertebrae are composed in a horizontal posture. Superimposed, the same vertebrae are shown inclined by the additional extension angles indicated in Table 1. If the slightly sub-horizontal osteological neutral pose of Stevens ...
In a world where the largest vertebra of Argentinosaurus is only 1cm bigger in diameter than the largest vertebra of Patagotitan, differences like I got with Dystylosaurus would be enough to scramble the order of giant vertebrae. So if you’re ever stuck measuring something from a cast, be ...
Rib articulation angles in the dorsal vertebrae of (a)Lufengosaurus, (b)Diplodocus, (c)Haplocanthosaurus, (d)Tyrannosaurus, and (e) an ostrich. Anterior is to the right.DiplodocusandHaplocanthosaurusare pretty wildly different considering they coexisted in the Morrison. I really gotta write a ...
Migeod’s assessment of the size of the animal was based on the vertebrae: “The [neck] vertebrae found give a 20-foot [6.10 m] length […] The length of the back including the sacral region was about 15 feet [4.57 m]. The eight or nine caudal vertebrae cover about 6 feet [1.83...
And now, the punchline. You may be wondering why, when a new sauropod has been announced, I didn’t lead with a nice image of one of the vertebrae? After all, are we not Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week? It’s because thereareno images of the vertebra. There are no images of...
of vertebrae, or how and whether pneumatic and neurovascular features relate to each other, there is a ton of work to be done that just requires collections access, a notebook, a camera, and time. And it lends itself to collaboration; two sets of eyes will see a lot more. (If you ...
Here are a couple of quick examples from my neck of the woods: Working from very little evidence by modern standards, Longman (1933) had correctly figured out that pneumatic sauropod vertebrae come in two flavors, those with a few large chambers and those with many small chambers. He called...
Another difficulty with this interpretation of horizontality is that it can make the neural canal jagged. Consider a sequence of vertebrae oriented as in part A, all at the same height: the neural canal would rise upwards along the length of each vertebra, before plunging down again on transiti...