SV-POW! at 19, and trying to see what’s not there

Where it all began, from a certain point of view. Today is SV-POW!’s birthday. Not a nasty, dirty, wet birthday, like a 2nd or a 13th, nor yet a grand, nice-round-number birthday like a 10th or a 20th: it is our 19th birthday, and that means we’ve been around a while. I decided to celebrate by posting surprising facts about RNA. Nah, that was a transparent and rather feeble misdirect. It’s going to be sauropod vertebrae! (Although if you were really hoping for a surprising fact about RNA, hit me up in the comments.) We’ve talked here about sauropod neck muscles, most recently in the posts linked here, and for obvious reasons. Witmer (1997) evocatively described the form of pneumatic bones as the result of a sort of morphogenetic tug-of-war, in which pneumatic diverticula expand opportunistically and invasively and tend to resorb bone tissue that isn’t actively being maintained, and bone tissue grows and is maintained in response to biomechanical stress. That paper landed almost 30…