Something about this photo from the last post has been bugging me all week. It’s the expression on my face. The set jaw, the thrust forward chin, the cocked eyebrow…I knew I had seen these things before. It took me a while, but I was finally able to place it. My doppelganger: If this is an omen, I have no idea what it means. Science will resume shortly.
Every now and then, you come across a sauropod skull so beautiful, it’s almost enough to distract you from the vertebrae that it was attached to. One such is the Giraffatitan brancai skull HMN T1, which you’ve seen here before if you’ve been around for a while.
“Sauropods are basically alien animals . . . What can be said of the habits of an animal with the nose of a Macrauchenia, the neck of a giraffe, the limbs of an elephant, the feet of a chalicothere, the lungs of a bird, and the tail of a lizard?
What’s that? You want proof, you say? Well, I find your lack of faith disturbing; but since you asked, you got it! What we have here is the part-way assembled skull of our old friend Veronica, in dorsal view, with anterior to the left. The long pointed bones down there are the nasals: you don’t see their anterior ends in complete skulls because they’re covered by the fused premaxillae.
It’s been a while since we last caught up with my wallaby, which I am suddenly going to decide to call Logan. When we saw him last, I was concentrating on his feet, although the initial post does also include a photo of the partially prepped skull in right lateral view.
Cleaning and bleaching is complete! Here are all the bones of Veronica’s skull [see earlier part one, part two and part three], laid out as they were in life (though of course much more widely separated), all in dorsal view: On the left, we have the bones of the lower jaw, palate and braincase, with the first three and a half vertebrae at the bottom.
After the third simmering, Veronica the Ostrich Head started to come apart beautifully — more so than she should have done in one or two places, as it became apparent that her skull, as well as being incompletely fused due to presumed subadult age at time of death, was slightly damaged.
Yesterday, I followed up Veronica‘s second simmering by taking more flesh off the bones, and in doing this I stared to take apart the bones that constitute the skull.
Please welcome my new best friend, Veronica the ostrich. Well, Veronica the ostrich head , if you want to be picky. She arrived yesterday morning, courtesy of the good folks at Ostrichfayre, very well packaged and still frozen and with a convenient little chunk of distal neck still attached.
This is part 3 of an emerging and occasional SV-POW! series: part 1 was the pig skull, and part 2 was the lizard feet (though not advertised as such because I couldn’t resist the sauropod pun). Bennett's wallaby, right lateral view Today, we’re going to be taking a wallaby apart.