Today sees the publication of a special issue of Acta Palaeontologica Polonica in honor of my mentor, Rich Cifelli, who took me under his wing when I was in high school and advised me in my undergraduate and Master’s thesis research.

Morphological variation in paramedullary airways; yellow = spinal cord, green = diverticula. The spectrum of variation is discretized into four groups: i , branches of intertransverse diverticula contact spinal cord at intervertebral joints; ii , branches of intertransverse diverticula extend partially into the vertebral canal, but remain discontinuous;

Remember this classic XKCD comic?

I made this for my own amusement, and thought you guys may as well get to benefit from it, too. Enjoy! References Melstrom, Keegan M., Michael D. D’Emic, Daniel Chure and Jeffrey A. Wilson. 2016. A juvenile sauropod dinosaur from the Late Jurassic of Utah, U.S.A., presents further evidence of an avian style air-sac system.

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.