Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

The polished face of the block, 1.5″ tungsten cube for scale. The bowtie shapes are the two biconcave vertebral centra.

It is pretty darned satisfying to be heading to the Isle of Wight for SVPCA next week. My only other visit was in the spring of 2004, when Vicki and I were in England on a spring break vacation/research trip. We spent a night at a bed and breakfast in Sandown and visited the Dinosaur Isle museum, where I got to see “Angloposeidon” and the Barnes High brachiosaur in person.

My most tangible memento of that trip is this cut and polished block with two vertebral centra from what I’m guessing is an ichthyosaur. It has a little story.

While we were at Dinosaur Isle I got to see another cut-and-polished specimen, the partial titanosauriform centrum shown above (and memorialized on the blog way back in 2008, when SV-POW! was about 6 months old). I’ve seen others since (like this one), but that was the first such specimen I’d seen in person, and it captured my imagination.

Vicki and I took a bus to get back to the ferry from Sandown, and somewhere in the island interior there was a bus stop at a small collection of buildings, maybe just two or three? One was a rock shop, and I really wanted to pop in and see what they had. The bus driver warned me, sternly, that the bus would be stopped for precisely two minutes, and that if I was not back on board in 120 seconds I’d be left behind.

So I sprinted inside the shop, found this block behind the counter, paid, and dashed back to the bus, arriving with a few seconds to spare. For four years it sat on my desk or on our mantle, then it got boxed up with a bunch of other natural history stuff and was buried in a closet for a decade. I didn’t get around to unboxing it until January, 2018 — you can spot it in the second photo down in this post. Since then it’s lived on my desk at work, or on a bookshelf adjacent to my desk.

One of the things I love best about it is that even in these somewhat weathered, almost certainly non-diagnostic shards of adequacy, the internal structure is beautifully preserved.

This chunk of rock embodies a lot of time — developmental time for the ichthyosaur, to grow such beautiful bones; deep time for these vertebrae, voyaging to us across millions of years; and personal time. In the fifteen-and-a-half years since my last visit to the Isle of Wight, I’ve gone from being a grad student to a professor at a med school (which I did not see coming back in 2004), and Mike and I have gone from being pen pals to frequent coauthors and co-travelers (and we’re still pen pals).

I think it’s only right that I pressure Mike into stopping at that rock shop, if it’s still there, so I can find a companion piece. Stay tuned.