A few nice jig grinding pictures I located:
Mis-shapes
Image by Mark Witton
I dance a lot in secret. I like dancing, see, but I’m too nervous to do it frequently in public. With an iPod beaming music into my head virtually all the time, I’d be dancing in extremely inappropriate areas if I have been totally unabashed about dancing in front of other people – grooving along the fruit aisle in Tesco, sliding about Portsmouth’s Guildhall Square and that sort of thing. No, I hold my public dancing subtle – little flairs of my hands when typing, striding in time with the beat when walking, virtually indiscernible wiggles of my hips when at the health club (whoever created exercising machines clearly believed nothing of their far more flamboyantly minded customers, I inform you – try wiggling your ass to David Bowie’s Cracked Actor on a cross trainer and you’ll see what I mean).and so fourth. The story only adjustments in two locations: if I think I’m on my own, abruptly, cooking dinner resembles the end of Saturday Evening Fever or when I’m out with chums at some retro-music evening, and maybe somewhat jollier for my intake of beverages. There, and usually to the sounds of The Rolling Stones far more than other people, my shyness disappears and my mojo, what ever I might have of 1, does its stuff. My dancing, similarly to my good buddy Richard Hing, calls for lots of space: there’s all sorts of sliding, strutting, leg crossing, kneeling, huge arm/hand movements and no shortage of considerable movement about the dance floor. Overlook receiving my PhD: my favourite memory of final Christmas was actually clearing a dance floor while jaggering around with my girlfriend to Brown Sugar. Not numerous folks I know have accomplished that, and I didn’t even have any footwear on.
Factor is, I require a specific variety of music to dance. I require one thing with beats that you can move among, some alter in tempo, a small melodrama and, far more crucial than something else, a dash of flamboyance. Yer glammy Bowie tracks, much less pretentious Doors numbers and Beatles singles are perfect dancing fodder. You can imagine my dismay, then, that nowhere, practically nowhere plays this stuff. Yes, all appropriate, I’m a number of decades late to such a celebration but, really, would it kill people to throw these items onto their playlists as soon as in a even though? Alternatively, we have to make-do with clubs that play the tightest, most repetitive dancey-trancey tracks you could possibly picture, the sort of issue that you could either subtly bounce to if you are shy, go all trippy and arm wavy if you want as you loose yourself to the deafening beat or, if you are of a looser disposition, grind your nether regions against these of a best stranger in the hope that they’ll take you property for cookies and beer later on. The flamboyant dancer is left out in such a place: there’s no musical or physical space to do something, and defying your surroundings to be all flamboyant would almost definitely land you in a fight. In years gone by, I would’ve thought there was some thing wrong with me and shuffled about the edges of the venue till, at last, my less self-conscious buddies left and I could escape with them beneath the guise of still being well-known. Now, at the confidently cynical old age of 25, I happily left the final club I went to early. Let the fools dance their tight, constrained jigs as lengthy as they want, thought I. Place on some Pulp or Iggy Pop and I’ll show them how it is completed. So, I wound my way house to the planet of bad late night Tv and nice beer, content material with the truth that I’m various to the rest of the world.
Predictably, this extended tale has some relevance to the planet of palaeontology. Ages and ages ago, some chums of mine decided that they just weren’t content with the low cost beer, crap music and overcrowding of the surprisingly controversial dance club of sauropod dinosaur neck posture and decided to do their own factor. The quick version of the tale, covered in significantly much more detail here, is that most folks for the final twenty years have assumed that extended-necked dinosaurs habitually held their necks slung out horizontally from their bodies – you know, like they did in Walking with Dinosaurs. This was in stark contrast to how sauropods were initially reconstructed when, for giggles, they were usually reconstructed with their necks arching into the air. The horizontal sauropod neck idea wheeled out in the 1980s sort of created sense in a strictly mechanical way: neck bones, like most vertebrae, have overlapping processes identified as zygapophyses that, if you had been to style such a technique, would be in their most energetically powerful position when they were held halfway in between flexion and extension (the so-named neutral posture). This way, muscles operating along the neck could be relaxed, letting the sauropod nuchal ligament (the powerful, elastic tissues running along the upper surface of a tetrapod neck – you can feel your personal on the back of your neck or, alternatively, go pinch the leading of a horse’s neck) hold the vertebrae with minimal effort from the neck musculature. Each actual fossils and sexy computerised versions had been believed to verify this posture and, just before you new it, each and every sauropod from here to the Caucus Mountains was getting reconstructed with a extended, horizontally held neck.
Nonetheless, at least 3 sauropodophiles weren’t keen to dance to this track. The chaps in query are the proud owners of the SV-POW! weblog or, in complete, Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week. For these of you unfamiliar with their neck of the interwoods, SV-POW! is an, uh… dedicated site dealing virtually exclusively with the vertebrae of sauropod dinosaurs. You can tune in each and every week and see a new view of a Camarasaurus fourth cervical or something and discover a new reality or two about dinosaur anatomy. Clearly, it’s completely barmy and has no appropriate to be anyplace close to as very good as it is, but the talents of Mike Taylor, Matt Wedel and Darren Naish somehow maintain it not only informative and fascinating, but enjoyable and thrilling. These guys have a passion for sauropod vertebrae that truly makes you wonder if their wives know what they’re obtaining up to: sooner or later, one particular of them is bound to leave a note addressed to their household on their kitchen table explaining that they’ve run off with the Xenoposeidon variety specimen or something. Anyway, the SV-POW!-er Rangers decided to test the notion of habitual horizontal neck postures in sauropods via some forehead-slappingly clear science: how to modern day tetrapods hold their necks?
Nicely, from salamanders to bunnies and crows to cattle, the answer is that practically all extant tetrapods necks are almost usually extended at their bases, with the skulls flexed on the foremost vertebra. In upright-standing critters such as mammals and birds, the neck is held vertically at rest even if the rest of the physique is held horizontally (as is the case for most tetrapods – we have a quite weird posture, soon after all). This has really, extremely few exceptions, so we can infer that fossil terrestrial tetrapods should’ve had inclined neck postures and flexed skulls as well or, to put it yet another way, would have habitually have held their necks above their backs and rotated their heads downwards to see what was in front of them. Now, sauropods have crazylong necks, but there is no purpose at all to assume that they had been any different from modern animals: they also most likely held their heads up high a lot of the time, bringing them down to earth when they had to drink or (in some circumstances) feed or what ever. What’s more, the concept of a horizontal neck being mechanically advantageous just ain’t correct: as we all know from carrying practically any heavy object, it is far less difficult to assistance the load when it is close to your centre of gravity than when held as far away as possible, which is the impact achieved with a horizontal neck. In my view, it all tends to make perfect sense and, due to the fact the SV-POW!-erpuff Girls have truly gone to town on explaining their paper in outstanding detail, I suggest that you point your browser this way to study all they have to say about it.
Now, I was privileged sufficient to be invited to the initial official SV-POW!-wow dance before most other people when the chaps asked me to draw their massive press release image. Becoming asked to draw dinosaurs is very a large deal for me: there are not that many chaps out there specialising in pterosaur art, but there is a entire truckload of truly, genuinely outstanding dinosaur artists. A lot of of them handle to combine a real artistic flair with pinpoint anatomical accuracy: they will not put claws on (most) titanosaur hands or leave the jaw of Tyrannosaurus with out an massive, bulging posterior pterygoideus muscle. This stuff is essential: irritatingly, a lot of palaeontologists spend small consideration to such information when working with artists: they give them a skeletal reconstruction, leave them to their paintbrushes and then come back later with a pat on the back regardless of no matter whether the depicted animal looks something like it ought to or not. Positive, there may be talk of colour and composition, but scientific accuracy is pushed down the list of importance. A very good palaeoartist, then, can almost function independently of a scientist (even though, certainly, excellent communication between the two is best) and folks like Todd Marshall, Mike Skrepnick, Luis Rey and numerous far more handle to make perform that is not appears exquisite, but also is scientifically savvy. In such business, then, it is anything of a surprise that all these people were bypassed for the palaeoartist hack writing this. Perhaps they created a error when sending the E-mail and didn’t want to feel embarrassed right after I’d mentioned yes to the commission. Maybe all the other palaeoartists had been busy. Or perhaps they liked my price tag tag.
What ever the explanation, as soon as the neck-posture paper was in the publication mill, we started the approach of putting the image with each other. A surprising quantity of believed went into most aspects of it: Diplodocus was selected as the animal due to the fact of its familiarity and to counter the BBC-developed low-slung versions appearing everywhere. Colour was unanimously decided as becoming drab: we all consider sauropods are fascinating, but large animals have a tendency to be significantly duller than their smaller counterparts, so their shades of integument possibly weren’t a lot to write home about. The position of the soft-tissue spines along the neck was debated, as was the position of the nostrils. With all of us getting as well geeky to resist at least one particular in-joke, we discussed the possibility of like a tiny, red Rhamphorhynchus alongside a sauropod neck a la Rudolph Zallinger’s Age of Reptiles mural. Alas, the Diplodocus bearing Morrison Formation hasn’t however yielded any rhamphorhynchine pterosaurs, but, happily, we could substitute this for the Morisson rhamphorhynchid Harpactognathus – the truth that these pterosaurs are tiny specks on the web page is certainly irrelevant. Different genders for the sauropods and a tripodal Diplodocus in the background had been also discussed, but all have been abandoned in favour of keeping the image as basic as possible. A drinking sauropod was realised as mandatory early on: we all figured that people would nearly definitely misread the press releases and start off harping on about sauropods needing to drink and all that. Therefore, putting 1 slap-bang in the middle of the image graphically demonstrates that the SV-POW!-busters never ever stated sauropods held their necks erect all the time, just that they would do by default. Even purely arty factors like the framing of the animals in the background and the degree of contrast to loose when viewing sauropods from a distance was considered. Trees and other vegetation were included for scale and, for kicks, I went to town with some wibbly-wobbly reflections in the water. Possessing completed work with a number of various palaeontologists now, I can reflect on this image as a single of blissful efficiency: happily, the very first notion sketch I drew was accepted as what we wanted (in fact, Mike was a little bummed that he couldn’t show the development of the concept in a series of blogposts) and, in contrast to some pictures I’ve drawn where individuals have established very hard to please or prone to changing their thoughts till you ultimately refuse to hold modifying the damn factor, the SV-POW!-trotters basically said what they wanted, what they liked and didn’t like and, effectively, we had the whole thing wrapped up within 10 days or so. The benefits, as you may have guessed, are above, and you can find a high-resolution version right here.
And there, dear close friends, ends the story of how to be various in the world of palaeontology and have an individual with chronic verbal diarrhoea draw you a image about it. Apologies to Mike who asked me to create up my thoughts on this way back in early July: blame all the dancing I’ve been doing in a particular workshop on my supersecret project involving my personal lengthy-necked creatures. What workshop and supersecret project is this? Point your interweb viewer at this and then join me in reciting my new mantra: No Stress.
Puzzling
Image by the justified sinner
Giant jig-saw puzzle piece on the ground in Dennistoun.
Taken with Minolta MD Macro Zoom 35-70mm f3.5 on Panasonic G1.