Amazing diagram of the path of the vagus nerve and its branches in the neck, thorax, and abdomen, from Wilson-Pauwels et al. (1988). The gonads aren’t drawn here, but they do receive vagal innervation.
A student wrote to me to ask where I got the motivation to prep my anatomy lectures. Here’s what I sent back.
Otters are a “near-threatened” species in the UK, so it’s a tragedy when one is killed by a car. That said, when a roadkill otter is spotted by a friend and delivered to me five days after Christmas, that goes some way to redeeming the tragedy.
In lieu of any new science today, have some memes, and a wonderful day! A timeless classic. In case you’re wondering, that’s “rolling on the beach laughing my telson off”. Horseshoe crabs have been around for 445 million years, about twice as long as mammals, turtles, and dinosaurs.
Since 2015 I’ve been working in the Morrison Formation of Utah with Brian Engh, John Foster, ReBecca Hunt-Foster, and more recently Jessie Atterholt and Thuat Tran.
Reconstructed right forelimb of Brachiosaurus at Dinosaur Journey in Fruita, Colorado, with me for scale, photo by Yara Haridy.
When I visited Dinosaur National Monument in October with Brian Engh and Yara Haridy, we spent a decent amount of time checking out DNM 28, a skull and associated bits of Camarasaurus.
From Will’s Skull Page, here. Here’s a skull of a wild boar. Note the loooong face, practically a straight line from the tip of the snout to the top of the back of the head. We shall now proceed through a series of pig skulls with increasingly steep foreheads. From the UCL Museums and Collections blog, here. Some domestic pigs have a longish snout and nearly straight forehead, like their wild forebears.
Long-term readers will remember that way back in the pre-history of this blog, I wrote about my experience de-fleshing a pig head, which because the very first part in our ongoing series Things to Make and Do. In a subsequent post with a sheep-skull multiview, I included the multiview of that pig skull, too.
Well, it’s time. Ten years and almost 5 months after Mike kicked off our “Things to Make and Do” section with his post on cleaning a pig skull, I am finally getting around to prepping a pig skull of my own.
The Man Himself, taking notes on what look like Giraffatitan caudals. Here’s how I got my start in research. Through a mentorship program, I started volunteering at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in the spring of 1992, when I was a junior in high school. I’d been dinosaur-obsessed from the age of three, but I’d never had an anatomy course and didn’t really know what I was doing. Which is natural!