I’m just back from SVPCA 2010 (the Symposium of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy), and what an amazing meeting it was.  I think it was the best I’ve been to.  That’s partly because I understand more of the talks these days — it’s the first time I’ve ever listened to every single talk, even all the mammal-tooth and fish-skull talks — and I learned something interesting and new from almost every one of them.

A bit frightening to realise it’s been more than a month since the last SV-POW! post.  We have some excuse for that: I am just back from a fortnight’s holiday with my family, and shortly before that Matt was at a conference in Uruguay.  Still, a whole month? And this post is going to be disappointingly short and off-topic — it’s just a bit of housekeeping really.

What’s that?  You want proof, you say?  Well, I find your lack of faith disturbing;

Work continues apace with Veronica, my tame ostrich.  (See previous parts one, two, three and four).  I’ve been photographing the individual bones of the skull — a skill that’s taken me some time to get good at, and one that I might do a tutorial on some time, to follow up the one on photographing big bones. Here is a preview of the result of this photography-fest: a multi-view figure of the ethmoid ossification.

SV-POW! is, as I’m sure you know, devoted to sauropod vertebrae. But occasionally we look at other stuff… and you might have noticed that, in recent months, we’ve been looking at, well, an awful lot of other stuff. I’m going to continue that theme here and talk about salamanders. Yeah: not sauropods, not sauropodomorphs, not saurischians, and not even dinosaurs or archosaurs. But salamanders. Don’t worry, all will become clear.

It’s been a while since we last caught up with my wallaby, which I am suddenly going to decide to call Logan.  When we saw him last, I was concentrating on his feet, although the initial post does also include a photo of the partially prepped skull in right lateral view.

By now most SV-POW! readers will have heard of Leviathan melvillei , the big-toothed Miocene sperm whale that was named in Nature today (Lambert et al. 2010) — if not, see for example the Discover Magazine blog article for the basics.

Cleaning and bleaching is complete!

For reasons that seemed good to me at the time, I took my best shot at photographing the right cervical rib from cervical vertebra 3 of my ostrich, Veronica [see earlier Part A, Part B and Part C for context].  I thought you might like to see the result, so here it is: {.size-full .wp-image-2820 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-2820” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“2820”

After the third simmering, Veronica the Ostrich Head started to come apart beautifully — more so than she should have done in one or two places, as it became apparent that her skull, as well as being incompletely fused due to presumed subadult age at time of death, was slightly damaged.

Yesterday, I followed up Veronica’s second simmering by taking more flesh off the bones, and in doing this I stared to take apart the bones that constitute the skull.