From The Dinosaur Heresies. Part 1.

This is a caudal vertebra from the middle of the tail of an ostrich, LACM Bj342: The middle row shows it in anterior, left lateral and posterior views; above and below the anterior view are the dorsal and ventral views. It’s about 5 cm across the transverse processes.

Last night London and I spent the night in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (LACM), as part of the Camp Dino overnight adventure. So we got lots of time to roam the exhibit halls when they were–very atypically–almost empty.

Earlier this month I was amazed to see the new paper by Cerda et al. (2012), “Extreme postcranial pneumaticity in sauropod dinosaurs from South America.” The title is dramatic, but the paper delivers the promised extremeness in spades.

This is the third post in a series on neural spine bifurcation in sauropods, inspired by Woodruff and Fowler (2012). In the first post, I looked at neural spine bifurcation in Morrison sauropod genera based on the classic monographic descriptions. In the second post, I showed that size is an unreliable criterion for assessing age and that serial variation can mimic ontogenetic change in sauropod cervicals.

This year, I missed The Paleo Paper Challenge over on Archosaur Musings — it was one of hundreds of blog posts I missed while I was in Cancun with my day-job and then in Bonn for the 2nd International Workshop on Sauropod Biology and Gigantism .  That means I missed out on my annual tradition of promising to get the looong-overdue Archbishop description done by the end of the year.

In a comment on the initial Shunosaurus tail-club post, Jaime Headden pointed out the passage in the Spinophorosaurus paper (Remes et al. 2009) that discusses the club of Shunosaurus (as justification for positioning the Spinophorosaurus osteoderms on the end of its tail): And this gives the reference that I needed for the Shunosaurus tail-spikes (as opposed to the club) — reference 26 is Zhang

A comment by Charles Epting on the recent article about self-publication led me to check the relevant section of the draft Phylocode, which I’ve read once or twice before but not recently enough for this to have hit me with the force it ought: From Chapter II. Publication , and specifically Article 4. Publication Requirements : I am … flabbergasted, if that’s the word I want.

In a comment on an earlier article, What’s the deal with your wacky postparapophyses, Shunosaurus ?, brian engh asked: It seems we’ve never actually featured the famous Shunosaurus tail-club here before — an amazing oversight, and one that I’m going to remedy right now, thanks to Dong et al. (1989).  This short paper is written in Chinese, so I can’t tell you anything beyond what’s in the figures, captions and

In color, this time, with multiple views, thanks to Xing et al. (2009). They also did a finite element analysis of the tail club and concluded that it was a fairly pathetic weapon. Xing et al. closed by supporting the contention of Ye et al. (2001) that the tail club was a sensory organ.