Breaking up the giraffe monotony with my next subject (too long postponed in my research): how awesome crocodile anatomy (and locomotion) is! Just a teaser, using a CT scan of one of my favourite freezer specimens: the enigmatic Crocodylus moreletii. The frozen specimen itself was quite rotten so I won’t put a pic of that up right now (you’re welcome!) but the skeletal anatomy shows up great when all that decay is made transparent– and when the bones are turned a pleasing purple.
The specimen came from La Ferme Aux Crocodiles in France, which very kindly let us drive down there and come back with a vanload of >20 awesome crocs, which now occupy the left side of The Freezer.
Edit: check out the great blog post by Darren Naish on Tetrapod Zoology, about a crocodile dissection and crocodylomorph phylogeny- hopefully the start of a long series on these wonderful critters!
What's In John's Freezer? 
Is there any chance of getting the data?
I’d love to make a clean 3D model out of it. Would share, of course.
Hello David, email me at jrhutch@rvc.ac.uk and we can discuss; I bet we can arrange something.
What strikes me most: the very elevated posture of the neck skeleton, even though you’d never guess guess it from the flesh envelope. (Best visible from 2-4 seconds in the video.) John, is your data good enough for you see whether the neck is in osteological neutral pose, i.e. with the centra not pulled apart and with maximally overlapped zygapophyses?
Yo Mike, so you’re interested in necks now? Fancy that. 😉
Yes, I’d think the data would be good enough for that. Let me have a closer look tomorrow.
We’re starting some experiments very soon in which we load vertebrae to determine their joint stiffness, and how that relates to morphology. Would be very adaptable to necks- and the necks aren’t being used. Hmm, who might want to use them?
Yes, I know comes as a shock, but I am branching out into studying necks. Thanks for looking — I’m not looking for publication-weight information at this stage, just anecdotal data-points (and ideally images that illustrate them).
Hmm, what’s the best way to package a croc-neck for the postal service? 🙂
[…] These come from a breeding centre in southern France. Here is a little, icy box of five Crocodylus moreletii, a species that has featured here before: […]