Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

The longest cell in Andy Farke is one of the primary afferent (sensory) neurons responsible for sensing vibration or fine touch, which runs from the tip of his big toe to his brainstem. (NB: I have not actually dissected Andy to confirm this, or performed any viral neuron tracing on him, this is assumed based on comparative anatomy.) Here’s a diagram:

This is what happens when (a) I need to create a diagram to illustrate the longest cell in the human body for my students, and (b) my friends put stuff online with a CC-BY license.

Found this while I was checking out Aquilops art online:

It’s a derivative work by Andy IJReid, from this Wikimedia page, based on two PhyloPic silhouettes Andy created (go here for the pathetically tiny lower vertebrate and here for Aquilops).

From there it was pretty straighforward to mash up Andy’s silhouette with the nerve stuff from Wedel (2012: fig. 2).

So if you want the full deets on licensing – which I am obligated to provide whether you want them or not – the image up top is a derivative image by me, based on work by Andy published at PhlyoPic under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 unported (CC-BY 3.0) license, and based on my own image published in Acta, also under a CC-BY license.

If you’d like to know more about the science behind very long nerves in vertebrates, please see these posts:

• The world’s longest cells? Speculations on the nervous systems of sauropods
• Oblivious sauropods being eaten

Also, keep making stuff and putting it online under a license people can actually use. It’s beneficial for science and education, and hugely entertaining for me.

Reference

Wedel, M.J. 2012. A monument of inefficiency: the presumed course of the recurrent laryngeal nerve in sauropod dinosaurs. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 57(2):251-256.