I first became aware of this specimen a few years ago, when the distal end of the right femur was temporarily on display at the Field House. There’s a big bony prominence just proximal to the medial femoral condyle, right where we’d expect the medial head of the gastrocnemius to origin...
I first became aware of this specimen a few years ago, when the distal end of the right femur was temporarily on display at the Field House. There’s a big bony prominence just proximal to the medial femoral condyle, right where we’d expect the medial head of the gastrocnemius to origin...
Fossae and formamina vary between individuals of the same species, and along the spinal column, and even between the sides of individual vertebrae. Here’s an example that we touched on in Wedel and Taylor (2013), but which is seen in all its glory here: Taylor and Wedel (2021: Figure...
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 ...
At the bottom of the image I labeledsegmental musclesandintermuscular septum. You’ve seen these before, although you may not have known it: they make the zig-zag patterns in the meat of fishes, where we call the segmental musclesmyomeres(“muscle parts”) and each intermuscular septum amyo...
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+...
(1999: fig. 3) figured and labeled the epipophysis in one of the cervical vertebrae. The vertebra image in that figure is tiny (nice work, glam-magz!), so here are some sketches of Jobaria mid-cervicals (from two different individuals) that I made back in the day when I was ...
And the same thing labeled: And now flipped around so we can see it in medial view: And now that image labeled: And, hey, there are three of our alternative hypotheses on display: the long (many vertebral segments) lumbosacral expansion of the spinal cord, which is reflected in a gradual...
Often these features were not labeled in the plates and figures, the authors had just assumed that any idiot would know what a postcentrodiapophyseal lamina was because, duh, it’s right there in the name. But that was the whole problem: I didn’t know how to decode the names. I ...