Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

One of the benefits of being me is that my friends often make me cool dino-themed stuff for my birthday (f’rinstance). This year, it was this dinosaur dig cake from my friend Jenny Adams. Yes, it’s a vulgar, overstudied theropod,* but I take the requisite amount of joy from how thoroughly blown apart its skeleton is. Plus, the skull and cervicals are pneumatic (in vivo, if not in choco), so it’s a least plausibly interesting (i.e., not an ornithopod), and it looks cool (i.e., not Camarasaurus).

*I’m morally obligated to thank Paul Barrett for this wonderful phrase, which I use pretty much every chance I get.

Should you want to replicate this glycemic index Chicxulub, here’s the stratigraphic breakdown, starting from the bedrock (bedchoc?):

• base layer is a regular chocolate cake,
• but with added chocolate chips,
• topped with vanilla frosting, to hold down:
• a whole package of Oreos crumbled into faux dirt
• surrounding the vanilla-flavored white chocolate dinosaur bones

Jenny made the dino bones using a set of (new, clean) plastic sand molds, like these:

You can find a zillion like ’em online by searching for ‘dinosaur sand toys’ or ‘dinosaur sand mold’.

Anyway, I can report that the excavation has been most enjoyable, but with about half the ‘quarry’ left to explore, the number of fossils recovered intact continues to hover near zero — we’ve been grinding them up to use as dietary supplements. Good thing it’s just a theropod!