We’re all happy to talk blithely of a vertebra being oriented horizontally, but what exactly do we mean by “horizontal”? If we don’t know, we can’t meaningfully compare vertebrae in the same orientation, nor determine characters like the slope of a neural arch.

We set out to solve that problem: first with series of blog-posts; then with a talk at the 1st Palaeontological Virtual Congress; then with a preprint; and finally (still to come) with a published paper.

Published artifacts

• Video of the talk for 1VPC [14m22s]
• Slides from that talk as a PowerPoint deck and as a PDF document
• PeerJ preprint of the abstract for the talk
• PeerJ preprint of the full paper

SV-POW! posts

• What does it mean for a vertebra to be “horizontal”?
• When is a vertebra “horizontal”, part 2
• The proximal caudals of Brachiosaurus altithorax, FMNH P25107
• Vertebral orientation: Varanus komodoensis would like a word
• Vertebral orientation, part 3: Matt weighs in
• Our presentations are up at the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress
• Writing the vertebral-orientation paper in the open
• The vertebral orientation presentation from the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress is now a PeerJ Preprint
• Print your manuscripts before submitting them
• Our vertebral orientation paper is up as a preprint