So misleading that when I laid down the first sketch of this post, it really was going to be about the osteological novelty of the perforation. I’m laying my card on the table here, I’m dumbass enough to have walked right into the trap I’m warning about. The only thing that save...
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 ...
Some of these bones are labeled in the vintage human skull drawings below. The skull is not only made up of bones but cartilage and ligaments. There is only one moveable bone in the skull, which is the jaw bone (mandible). Male skulls are heavier, larger, and thicker than the female ...
Before we go on, that list is by no means exhaustive. It is the product of long familiarity but not of long intentional thought; it’s literally the stuff that I thought of on the fly while composing this post. I could probably make it four times longer if I wanted to spend a day ...
At the bottom of the image I labeled segmental muscles and intermuscular 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 muscles myomeres (“muscle parts”) and each intermuscular septu...
(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 ofJobariamid-cervicals (from two different individuals) that I made back in the day when I was doing ...
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 our child-sized spinal cords (seethis postfor...
stegosaurs (1) expand dorsally, instead of in some other direction, and (2) expand and contract over just a handful of vertebrae, instead of being more spread out. Of the many weird specializations of the spinal cord in birds, the glycogen body is the only one that produces that specific...
At the bottom of the image I labeled segmental muscles and intermuscular 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 muscles myomeres (“muscle parts”) and each intermuscular septu...
innermost, sitting intimately on top of the spinal cord and spinal nerve roots, is the pia mater, or “tender mother” In mammals the space between the dura mater and the bony walls of the neural arch is filled with epidural fat. This isn’t unhealthy fat, this is fat used as packing...