Birds have little blobs of tissue sticking out on either side of the spinal cord in the lumbosacral region (solid black arrow in the image above). These are the accessory lobes of Lachi, and they are made up of mechanosensory neurons and glycogen-rich glial cells (but they are not part of the glycogen body, that’s […]

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.

I planned to post this last spring but I never got around to it. I think I have a mental block about discussing the glycogen body.

Ray Wilhite posted this gorgeous image on a Facebook thread, and we’re re-posting it here with his permission. It’s taken from a poster that Ray co-authored (Roberts et al. 2016). We’re looking here at a coronal cross-section of a hen (age not specified), with anterior to the left.

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.

A simply mind-blowing preparation of the skull of an American paddlefish, Polyodon spathula. In life the paddle-shaped snout is covered by thousands of electroreceptors that detect the swarms of zooplankton on which the paddlefish feeds.

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.

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.

We all know what turkeys look like, right? Turns out that two thirds of that bird is a lie. Here’s a diagram produced for hunters on which part of the turkey to shoot.

If you were curious about the Wedel et al. presentation on the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus at the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress but didn’t attend the event, it is now preserved for posterity and freely available to the world as a PeerJ Preprint (as promised). Here’s the link.