My cat’s neck skeleton (first five cervicals)
October 27, 2015
When I separated my cat’s head from its body, the first five cervical vertebrae came with it. Never one to waste perfectly good cervicals, I prepped them as well as the skull. Here they are, nicely articulated. (Click through for high resolution.) Dorsal view at the top, then right lateral (actually, slightly dorsolateral) and ventral view at the bottom.
Or you may prefer the same image on a black background:
For those of us used to sauropod necks, where the atlas (C1) is a tiny, fragile ring, mammal atlases look bizarre, with their grotesque over-engineering and gigantic wings.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
October 27, 2015 at 11:45 pm
Beautiful preparation! What techniques do you use?
October 27, 2015 at 11:46 pm
Nothing sophisticated, just two or three simmerings, followed by removal of cooked meat. Once that’s done, I bleach in diluted H2O2. Thanks for the kind words, though!
October 28, 2015 at 7:58 am
nice!
If you want a full 3D mesh, make photogrammetry compatible series of pics and I’ll make the mesh.
October 28, 2015 at 10:44 am
Thanks, David, I really appreciate that offer. But I do keep thinking this is a skill that I really ought to master for myself (especially as Heinrich Mallison and Peter Falkingham have both written detailed tutorials).
October 28, 2015 at 12:29 pm
Really nice and clean shots of those beautiful cervicals! I really appreciate your effort to prepare and share them with us. I assert that they are way better than anything else found on the web.
I don’t know if you aware of it but next week is a course, about 3d model generation in biosciences, held in Sabadell, near Barcelona. http://www.transmittingscience.org/courses/draw/3d-model/
They will be talking about CT scanning, photogrammetry and others. I’ll be there.
October 28, 2015 at 12:33 pm
Thanks, Oliver. Having cleaned the vertebrae, it would seem foolish not to publish the photos at full resolution — I can’t understand why more people don’t do it. But, yes, they do seem to be the best of their kind that’s out there — what photos I could find were very small.
It would be lovely to pop over to Barca for the 3d course, but alas the demands of Real Life (not least, my actual job) make it a non-starter.
November 10, 2015 at 1:35 am
Beautiful preparation. I’m glad you posted these photos as it seems there is a lack of good-quality photos of individual bones of any given vertebrate group (funnily enough, while searching for papers on Pleistocene squamate assemblages from the Northeastern US, I came across a picture of an apatosaur cervical from this site).
November 22, 2015 at 3:05 am
Those funny necks are impossible to tell what sauropod it came from . Good work!
November 26, 2015 at 4:07 am
I can not figure out what part of the sauropod it came from.