No time right now for me to dig into the interesting and important discussion on how we should orient vertebrae (here and here so far) – that will be coming soon. In the meantime, here’s something else.
Thanks to everyone who’s engaged with yesterday’s apparently trivial question: what does it mean for a vertebra to be “horizontal”? I know Matt has plenty of thoughts to share on this, but before he does I want to clear up a couple of things. This is not about life posture First, and I really should have led with this: the present question has nothing to do with life posture.
I was lucky enough to have Phil Mannion as one of the peer-reviewers for my recent paper (Taylor 2018) showing that Xenoposeidon is a rebbachisaurid. During that process, we got into a collegial disagreement about one of the autapomorphies that I proposed in the revised diagnosis: “Neural arch slopes anteriorly 30°–35° relative to the vertical”. (This same character was also in the original Xenoposeidon
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Robin N. Kok asked an interesting question on Twitter: For all the free money researchers throw at them, they might as well be shareholders. Maybe someone could model a scenario where all the APC money is spent on RELX shares instead, and see how long it takes until researchers own a majority share or RELX.
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Let’s say you had a critter with weird neural canals and super-deeply-dished-in centrum-ends, and you wanted to digitally rearticulate the vertebrae and reconstruct the spinal cord and intervertebral cartilages, in a project that would bring together a bunch of arcane stuff that you’d been noodling about for years.
Here’s caudal 1 in Haplocanthosaurus priscus, CM 879. Hatcher (1903) only illustrated this vert in right lateral view, in a drawing by Sydney Prentice (see this post). I showed the vert in left lateral, right lateral, and dorsal views in my 2009 air sac paper (figs.