For reasons that would be otiose, at this moment, to rehearse, I recently found myself in need of a hemisected turkey cervical. Happily, I own five skeletonised turkey necks, so it was with me the work of a moment to select a candidate. But now what?

Among the numerous weird features of MWC 8028, the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus, is the extreme biconcave profile of the caudal vertebrae, in which each centrum is basically reduced to a vertical plate of bone separating two cup-shaped articular surfaces.

For this forthcoming Barosaurus paper, we would like to include an establishing photo of the AMNH Barosaurus mount. There are two strong candidate photos which we’ve used before in an SVPCA talk, but since this is a formal publication we need to be more careful about copyright.

Matt and I are writing a paper about Barosaurus cervicals (yes, again). Regular readers will recall that the best Barosaurus cervical material we have ever seen was in a prep lab for Western Paleo Labs.

I was on a video call with Matt, talking about a project he’s working on that involves Haplocanthosaurus. A lot of his recent project involve Haplocanthosaurus which is … an OK sauropod. I mean, it’s no brachiosaur. So this is how the conversation went: Mike: I have bad news for you, dude.

I was looking more closely at the turkey skeleton from my recent post, and zeroed in on the last two dorsal (= thoracic) vertebrae.

I closed the last post by claiming that finding the infected bone in Dolly was “a crazy lucky break”. Here’s why: Another point made by Wood et al. (1992) concerns our perceptions of frailty and robustness. They were talking about archaeological populations, mostly from cemeteries, but the point is equally valid for non-human animals.

Naturally I was grateful when Cary invited me to be part of the team working on Dolly, the diplodocid with lesions in its neck vertebrae (Woodruff et al. 2022;

Back in at least 2008 — maybe earlier — I kept all the bones from our good-sized Christmas turkey. Of course, it’s missing the head, neck and feet, but otherwise it’s pretty much all there.

Okay, this is cool: with the help of Ryan Ridgely, my coauthor* Larry Witmer used the CT scans of the two best infected vertebrae of Dolly to create 3D models, which are now viewable on Sketchfab.

I was at the SVP meeting in Albuquerque in 2018 when Cary Woodruff called me over and said he had something cool to show me. “Something cool” turned out to be photos of infected sauropod vertebrae from the Morrison Formation of Montana.