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New paper: Hart et al. 2025 on neural canal ridges in crocs
The dawn of a new era: AMNH FR 34089, a caudal vertebra of the giant extinct croc Thecachampsa, backlit to show the neural canal ridges. This is not just my favorite specimen with NCRs, it’s one of my...
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Tutorial 48: my museum collections kit
I was on the road for most of August, September, and October, and in particular I made a ton of museum collections visits. When I visit a museum collection, I bring a specific set of gear that helps...
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5th Palaeontological Virtual Congress: Neural canal ridges in crocs
When our paper on neural canal ridges came out last year (Atterholt et al. 2024), I hoped that it would inspire other people to go peer inside neural canals and discover a lot more of them. My wish was...
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My Constant Reader, and staying close to the work
A middle caudal vertebra of a diplodocid, presumably Tornieria africana, on display at the Museum fur Naturkunde Berlin, in left lateral view. Quick backstory: this post at Adam Mastroianni’s...
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If I could dissect a sauropod…
Luke Horton asked in a comment on a recent post: Given the chance to examine a titanosaur cadaver with your hypothetical army of anatomists, what would you look for first? *FACEPALM* How we’ve gone...
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Neural canal ridges: the director’s cut
Trunk vertebra of a tuna (Thunnus), OMNH RE 0042, showing paired bony spinal cord supports Here’s a grab-bag of follow-up stuff related to our new paper on neural canal ridges in dinos (Atterholt et...
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New paper: Atterholt et al. (2024) on neural canal ridges in dinosaurs
Bony spinal cord supports (arrows) in caudal vertebrae of several specimens of Camarasaurus. (a) Right lateral view of neural canal with broken vertebral arch, clearly exposing a bony spinal cord...
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All the SV-POW! videos, and other stuff on the sidebar
BYU 11505, a caudal vertebra of a diplodocid from Dry Mesa, in posteroventral view. Note the paired pneumatic foramina on the ventral surface of the centrum. If you want to find the paleontology and...
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Fossils of Jimbo the Supersaurus on exhibit
To answer Mike’s question from the last post, here’s a nice dorsal of Jimbo. All the material’s from the same quarry and has consistent preservation, and this dorsal is a monster. I didn’t try to...
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New paper: pneumaticity in a rebbachisaurid caudal vertebra
Fig. 2. Rebbachisauridae indet. (MDPA-Pv 007) from the Sierra Chata locality (Candeleros Formation) Cenomanian (Upper Cretaceous). Anterior caudal vertebra in anterior (A1, A3), posterior (A4, A6), and...
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New paper: Wedel and Atterholt (2023) on expanded neurocentral joints in...
Sauropod vertebrae in anterior view exhibiting a spectrum of variation in the dorsoventral positions of the neurocentral joint. Wedel and Atterholt (2023: fig. 1). As described in the last post,...
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We were probably wrong about caudal pneumaticity in Ca13 of the Brontosaurus...
This is one of those posts where the title pretty much says it all, but here’s the detailed version. Recap: the 2013 paper In Matt’s and my 2013 paper Caudal pneumaticity and pneumatic hiatuses in the...
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DIY dinosaurs: more dinosaur bone standees
Michelle Stocker with an apatosaur vertebra (left) and a titanosaur femur (right), both made from foam core board. In the last post I showed the Brachiosaurus humerus standee I made last weekend, and I...
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How did baby Utahraptor caudals articulate? The answer will sicken and...
Over on Mastodon (sign up, it’s great!), Jim Kirkland posted a baby Utahraptor caudal vertebrae for #FossilFriday. Here it is: And after a bit of virtual prep work: My first reaction was just “That’s...
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Obscure vertebral anatomy term of the day: bouton
Long-time readers will recall that I’m fascinated by neurocentral joints, and not merely that they exist (although they are pretty cool), but that in some vertebrae they migrate dorsally or ventrally...
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New paper out today: defining ‘cranial’ and ‘caudal’ for vertebrae
Vertebrae of Haplocanthosaurus (A-C) and a giraffe (D-F) illustrating three ways of orienting a vertebra: articular surfaces vertical — or at least the caudal articular surface vertical (A and D),...
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3D printing is especially useful for sauropod workers
This is the first 3D print of a dinosaur bone that I ever had access to: the third caudal vertebra of MWC 8028, the ‘new’ Haplocanthosaurus specimen from Snowmass, Colorado (Foster and Wedel 2014,...
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What’s up with your insanely thick intervertebral discs, Snowmass...
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...
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Pneumatization sites: how does air get into vertebrae?
Science doesn’t always get done in the right order. In the course of the research for my paper with Mike this past spring, “Why is vertebral pneumaticity in sauropod dinosaur so variable?”, published...
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Haplocanthosaurus neural canals are weird, part 1: in which we tell the world
A. Recovered skeletal elements of Haplocanthosaurus specimen MWC 8028. B. Caudal vertebra 3 in right lateral view. C. The same vertebra in posterior view. Lines show the location of sections for D and...
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