Walking Sledgehammers

Scott Persons and Phil Currie made waves late last year with a study that showed everyone’s reconstructions of dinosaur tail anatomy was wrong. We, they said, had incorrectly measured the mass of the m. caudofemoralis longus, the muscle that runs from the mid-femur and along the transverse processes of the caudal vertebra, and as such had undersized the muscle and thus aspect of the tail. We’d drawn the tail way too thin, as shown here in W. Scott Person’s explanation at Dave Hone’s Archosaur Musings and Brian Switek’s Laelaps, but also Scott Hartman’s great review at Skeletal Drawing and Virginia Arbour’s interview with co-author Scott Persons at Psuedoplocephalus.

Osteological Neutral Pose – WP#16

“Osteological Neutral Pose,” or ONP, was first introduced into the literature by Stevens and Parrish [1] in utilizing a method to attempt a “neutral,” or unbiased, attempt at articulating skeletons from which to then manipulate for range of motion studies. Applied initially to sauropods, it projected that virtually all sauropods had a neutral neck posture that was nearly horizontal, even those with the longest necks, or deflected or curved below the horizontal [2,3]. This idea came under scrutiny from various workers, although formal publication of criticism would not arrive until much later [4,5].