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In short, no. I discussed this a bit in the first post of the Clash of the Dinosaurs saga, but it deserves a more thorough unpacking, so we can put this dumb idea to bed once and for all. As Marco brought up in the comments on the previous post, glycogen bodies are probably to blame for the idea that some dinosaurs had a second brain to run their back ends.

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Ray Wilhite posted this gorgeous image on a Facebook thread, and we’re re-posting it here with his permission.

If you followed along with the last post in this series, you now have some bird vertebrae to play with. Here are some things to do with them. 1. Learn the parts of the vertebrae, and compare them with those of other animals Why are we so excited about bird vertebrae around here?

Last year about this time I vowed to return SV-POW! to its nominal roots: a new post at least once a week for all of 2018. It had been a while since the blog had lived up to the letter of its name, and I thought it would be a fun challenge to see if blogging to a schedule again would be inspiring or oppressive.

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When I started working on sauropods, I thought their vertebrae were cool but they were loaded with weird structures that I didn’t understand. Then I dissected my first ostrich neck and suddenly everything made sense: this was a muscle attachment, that was a pneumatic feature, this other thing was a ligament scar. Everyone who is interested enough to read this blog should give themselves the same “Aha!” moment.

In a move that will surprise no-one who’s been paying attention, my and Matt’s presentation of vertebral orientation at the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress is now up as a PeerJ preprint. Sadly, with the end of the conference period on 15th December, the page for my talk has been deleted, along with some interesting comments. But here at SV-POW!, we have no truck with ephemerality, hence this more permanent manifestation of our work.

We all know what turkeys look like, right?

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