As promised, another CT slice to ponder! Mystery Dissection images will be back; I want to collect some more cool photos though. Otherwise it will turn into too much “mystery hindlimb muscle of the week”. I welcome “guest posts” of Mystery Dissections if someone wants to try to stump the audience! Anyway, on with the show… This one is not so easy, but not impossible by any means, either. Tell me what you can about this mysterious object!
What's In John's Freezer? 
A vertebra in lateral view?
How about mysticete cetacean vertebra, to be specific?
vertebra in lateral view, visible are the centrum and the transverse process. Could be a theropod ?caudal; the centrum is not long enough for a prosauropod 😉
It’s evidence that in CT scanner or a vacuum all things fall at an equal rate, regardless of size or weight.
Indeed! 🙂
OK, awwwwwwrite, I’ve tormented you for long enough, my poor Freezerinos. Not a lot of guesses this time; maybe the pic was too simple.
But once again there are some very good guesses, and 220mya pretty much nailed it– is cervical vertebra 7 from the neck of a blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus)! (Heinrich has dinos on the brain and needs more mammalification 😉 )
Labels are hardly necessary; the big left object is the centrum (body) of the vertebra– note the fairly dense bony sandwich structure — and on the right there is a lateral part of the neural arch (IIRC).
We’ve scanned several different necks of whales (C1-C7; bones only) for a comparative study on the biomechanics of supporting a giant head in different behaviours. More about that on some later date!
One or two more mystery CT slice pics in the near future, then I’m off to a conference!
[…] At the time, in the jumbled freezers of my mind, they corresponded to Mystery CT Slice(1) and Mystery CT Slice 2. But we can pretend that MD2-3 are just an eternal mystery of this blog, subject of numerous […]