text:
This Long Afternoon
billowy white clouds
floating free—unlike their souls
this long afternoon
12th August, 2014
Hanging by a Thread
She is hanging
onto a thread of sanity,
before falling
into a sea of anxiety.
10th August, 2014
unbeknownst to us
are the mysteries of life
sūratu al-Kahf
7th April, 2014
seasons come and go
births rejoiced and deaths mourned
suspended in time
2nd April, 2014
Bubble Girl
seasons come and go,
births rejoiced and deaths mourned
suspended in time
12th July, 2013
three lines of haiku:
discovered by a poet's hand
love is in the air
quill halts on parchment
golden words become silent
haiku, forgotten
the ice of stillness defrosts
silent words, no more
three lines of haiku:
once more found by the poet's hand
flowers bloom anew
31st December, 2010
bubbles and rainbows:
effervescent, beyond reach—
colour me passive
28th December, 2010
Semakin Hampir, Semakin Jauh
tangan kiriku
nak mencapai sesuatu—
kanan menepis
6th November, 2009
'Tis an Egress!
I am free! I am free!
I declare with full of glee
It's the sense of liberation inside of me
Ah! Finally…finally…!
Freedom has cost me more than you know
For my being was full of pain and sorrow
Never in my life had I felt so low
And now sadness and hurting no more!
16th November, 2008
Breaking Out
(Inert spin-off)
In a state of despair and doubt
He is trying so hard to find a way out
Wishing everything would come to a halt
So he could fathom what this is all about
Along comes Reality, knocking on the door
But Dream will not let It enter her core
Seems like It would never let her go
Why is it so? Oh, why is it so?
There is nothing but stale questions
Being played repeatedly like an overused caption
He truly believes the answers are non-existent
What he doesn't know, they are uttered in silence
"Cease these sufferings!" He prays on his knees
Little does he know that, this is The Finale
And he'll embark on a new life, a new journey
At last…he will have his very own happy story
16th November, 2008
Basking in Silence
silence is golden
just like autumn's fallen leaves
I feel peacefulness
12th September 2008
Reality knocks on his door
But Dream won't let It in
Why is it so?
Oh, why is it so?
22nd July, 2008
Granny the Poet
Completely nothing is what on Gran's A4 paper
Well looks like she hasn't found any brilliant idea
to write a poem with lovely lines that rhyme together
She wants it to be like 'Pray' sung by MC Hammer
Deep in thought, she scratches her head till the skin peels off
while awaiting for her good ol' muse named Sir Christophe
Gramps wants to help her but she retorts, 'Punkin…BUG OFF!'
Bet she wouldn't say that if he were D. Hasselhoff
She doesn't eat, rest, even turns down a Bingo game
so she can finish a poem that'll bring her the fame
She wants to be famous and put Will Shakespeare to shame
but her paper's still blank and Sir Christophe is to blame
Alas, her frail sixty year-old body can't take it no more
So obsessed with poetry she didn't smoke crack at four
She's shaking so much she'll probably drop on the floor
But she won't cause her will is as strong and tough as Thor
30th March, 2008
In the Balance
I am here
waiting still
for the answers to the indefinite questions
But I am feeling restless
as the barrenness within is calling out
wanting to be liberated from the grasps
of qualms
of cloudiness
Yet surrendering to despair and anguish I am not
As time will not be there to comfort anyone
As time will never stop to wait for someone
I am here
hoping still
for the answers to the indefinite questions
and in spite of everything…
the sun arises
28th March, 2008


text:
Two weeks after the plane ride back to California, we took off again.
What? You can't blame us for having itchy feet! Fortunately for our funding, this place is just an eight hour drive away yet is still one of the top world destinations and completely free. I'll give you a hint, before I actually saw it, I always imagined it would look something like this in the ground:
Thank God I was wrong. The Grand Canyon was more like a hundred butt-cracks all mashed together, especially if you recently sat in some dirt.
But I guess describing it as your rear end doesn't really do it much justice; I was truly caught off guard by the regal, indomitable way the ancient canyon rose from the thread-like Colorado River snaking through the valley thousands of feet below. It wasn't just gritty brown either, the range of purple hues softened the coarse landscape while deep crimsons evoked mystery and prestige. One of the most remarkable things to me about the canyon was the horizon line that seemed to cut through the land as if the top of the canyon had been shaved off with a ruler, but in fact the North Rim rises an astonishing thousand feet higher than the South Rim, where we camped.
Yep, we camped. The sleep-like-sardines, if-someone-farts-you're-screwed tent camping, along with our posse of friends turned family for our annual camping trip.
We set up tents in the Grand Canyon National Park, in a campsite called the Sage Loop. For the first two days, it seemed the Sage Loop was the only area among the surrounding "loops" that was plagued with dust storms the Tasmanian Devil would have been proud of. On the second day it got so dusty, we ate lunch in our car. Due to the dust, our late afternoon trip to the showers that day was a must, I realized as I watched murky water swirl down the drain.
But don't get me wrong: our five days in the Canyon were exquisite. Especially knowing that what the travel brochures don't say (as you peer precariously over the edge) is the number of deaths that occur there each year. Day 1 consisted of arriving, unpacking, and catching up with our "cousins". In all, our camping posse for this year included eight families; or 15 kids and 15 adults. The second day was a little more exciting as we all hopped onto the painstakingly packed bikes and cruised a few miles around the National Park. A typical viewpoint flaunted landscapes something like this:
Unfortunately, during this time of the year there is a fire hazard, so the most commercialized aspect of camping- late night campfires- was a no-go by order of the Park. Well that wasn't going to fly with us, so Dominique whipped up some smores on a camper-stove and we all pigged out. At night when the temperature plummeted from mid-80s to 40s, I bundled up in two pairs of sweats, Tomb Raider boots, a ski jacket, and a beanie and the kids all crowded up on each other's laps in camping chairs while we farted on each other and laughed. During the down hours, the kids of our group played poker, cut down National Park wildlife, sharpened sticks, kicked around Flapjack, and played more cards. *Flapjack is a baby doll that has been on countless camping trips with us. He has been burned, stabbed, thrown into water, bucked off cliffs, rolled in dirt, and stoned.
On day 3, I biked something around 6 miles with the guys after a three mile hike straight into the Canyon with the group. On the way back up, my friend Morgan and I played an alphabet game, naming every animal we could think of that started with a chosen letter. Somehow Morgan was right: the whimsical bantering ended up taking our minds off the uphill battle as we- plus other friends shouting out their input- tackled letters from A (aphid, arthropod, anteater) to Q (quail…quail……….quuaaill).
When day 4 rolled around, I ended up going for a strenuous bike ride with the worst possible people to bike ride with (no offense guys, I still love you.) Brent is the Mr. Mountain-Biker/ unnamed leader-of-all-bike-rides. He's the kind of person who will tell you to keep on going even if it's hailing and you have to carry your bike while hiking uphill on the edge of a cliff. Micah is kind of like me on the competitive count, except I don't think he's learned to recognize his limits. So he pushes himself just as hard as the person biking in front (aka Brent). Basically, you don't want to end up on a bike ride alone with Brent and Micah, or you will fall far behind and they probably won't notice for a while. Lori and Christy went as well, and although they weren't biking too competitively, they are both ripped and work-outy so it's pretty plain to see they do not mess around. Then there's Papa, who was an actual biker at one point with those gloves with the fingers cut off and everything, so you know he could cream everyone if push came to shove.
The best person to bike ride with is Tio Tony. He talks most of the ride, which is a tried and true tactic like Morgan's alphabet game. Besides that, he is the only person who vocalizes any signs of strenuosity ("Oh man- huff, huff- how big- huff- is this hill?") which makes me feel a lot better because I know I'm not the only one who's thighs are burning like hellfire. But despite his pains, he continues to ride just as fast as everyone else, which begs the question: why are all my friends so tough? It would be nice to have a couple lackeys so I wouldn't look so average when the fitness scale shakes out. (Just kidding, the challenge is fantastic and who wants lazy friends anyway?)
After twelve-ish mile biking, the group all perused down to the iMax theatre to watch to the Grand Canyon film, which is actually the most viewed iMax movie ever. It focused on the evolution of human history in the butt-crack, from original native tribes to the early exploration of the 1800s to today's technology- flight- that allows the world to completely explore every crevice of the world's most revered crevice. In addition to the theatre, there was a spacious souvenir shop and restaurant, interspersed with informative wall-decorations and the like.
Day 5 was our last at the canyon. We packed, ate breakfast, and headed our separate ways- which actually turned out not to be that separate. Most of the clan drove down to various hotels in Palm Springs, where we got our much sought after shower time plus food service, drink service, cleaning service, and every other service that we did ourselves while camping. So I guess even my tough friends can lazy it up from time to time. Thanks guys for another amazing year of camping and all the family memories that go with it. Like Blake's answer to this question: "So, Blake, would you ever take your kids back here?"
B: "No I'll just go on google, look up pictures of the canyon, get a bowl of dirt and a fan and turn the fan on high then make them squint while they try to look at the picture."
"What about when it wasn't dusty?"
B: "Then I'll turn the fan to low.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Writing Workshop: Citation Formatting Campus CalendarEvent Website
Tuesday, April 21, 2020
11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Location: Moon 19
Event Description:
WRC tutors will review both in-text citation formats and reference list formatting for research papers, essays, and reports. We will address the basics of citation, as well as the unique challenges (No author? No date? No problem!). Students are encouraged to bring their questions and papers for review and discussion.
Karin Patzke
Sponsor: The Writing Resource Center
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Tuesday, March 31, 2020
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Any ESF student, faculty or staff member with a valid username and password for the following systems is welcome to submit an event, announcement or news item for sharing on the web and social media.


text:
Fourth Quarter Net Sales Grow 12.2% to $197.3M; Increase 6.4% to $716.2M for Full Year. EPS from Continuing Operations Rise 10.3% to $1.07; Grow 12.8% to $3.89 for Full Year. Non-GAAP EPS from Continuing Operations Increase 25.3% to $1.24; Rise 17.2% to $4.22 for Full Year
SALEM, NH – August 27, 2014 . . . . Standex International Corporation (NYSE:SXI) today reported financial results for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2014 ended June 30, 2014.
Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2014 Results from Continuing Operations
A reconciliation of net income, earnings per share and net income from continuing operations from reported GAAP amounts to non-GAAP amounts is included later in this release.
Management Comments
"Standex closed fiscal 2014 with a strong fourth quarter, resulting in double-digit growth in both sales and non-GAAP operating income," said David Dunbar, Standex President and CEO. "While achieving our goal of delivering organic growth in excess of underlying market growth, the business also performed well from a bottom-line perspective. We generated $37.1 million in cash from operating activities and $34.0 million in free operating cash flow, ending the quarter with a net cash position of $29.2 million on the balance sheet after divesting our AFS business and acquiring UltraFryer Systems. For the fiscal year, net sales were up 6.4%, non-GAAP operating income grew 14.7%, and adjusted EBITDA increased 12.4%."
Segment Review
Food Service Equipment Group sales increased 11.1% year-over-year, and operating income was up 9%.
"On the refrigeration side of the business, our growth was largely driven by continued strength in our new line of value engineered endless merchandising cabinets sold into the dollar store segment," Dunbar said. "In the quick service restaurant segment, our order flow benefited from pent-up demand due to adverse weather earlier in the year. In cooking solutions, sales were down slightly from the fourth quarter of fiscal 2013, reflecting slower store rollouts compared with a year ago. We completed the consolidation of our Cheyenne, Wyoming cooking solutions facility into Nogales, Mexico on schedule during the quarter. Although delayed shipments negatively affected our fourth-quarter margins, we continue to expect the consolidation to generate targeted cost savings in fiscal 2015.1"
Engraving Group sales increased 26.8% year-over-year, and operating income grew 74.7%.
"This was another record quarter for our Mold-Tech business," said Dunbar. "Mold-Tech is continuing to ride the wave of record automotive model launch activity in all three of our regions -- North America, Europe and Asia. Our Asia business continues to grow and sales were up more than 25% during the fourth quarter of fiscal 2014. We also approved two new sites to begin operations in fiscal 2015, one in Eastern Europe and one in Southeast Asia. Although we expect Mold-Tech to continue delivering strong results in fiscal 2015, automotive model launches are likely to begin tapering down from this year's record pace as we move through the year.1Nonetheless, we are planning major growth-focused investments in this business in fiscal 2015, and we expect it to continue to have a positive impact on our future growth.1"
Engineering Technologies Group sales increased 5.6% year-over-year, and operating income declined 14.5%.
"The Engineering Technologies Group's fourth-quarter performance was primarily driven by increased orders in the space market," Dunbar said. "Our Spincraft business is now shipping under a multiyear contract with Boeing and Lockheed Martin's United Launch Alliance joint venture related to the Atlas V and Delta IV launch vehicle programs. In addition, we recently began shipping to Virgin Galactic for their next-generation spaceship program. The lower operating income we reported for the quarter reflected a difficult comparison due to the large volume of oil and gas business in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2013, as well as higher levels of development work currently in our product sales mix.
Electronics Products Group sales were up 7.4% year-over-year, with operating income increasing 17.7%.
"Our Electronics Products Group continues to be very effective in managing the evolution of its end markets, addressing new applications and winning new customers," said Dunbar. "New sensor program launches in the white goods, HVAC and recreational markets, together with reed-switch wins, improved our product sales mix and operating income leverage in the quarter. We're continuing to see strong demand across the combined Standex-Meder product line, particularly in North America and Europe. As a result, the Electronic Products Group reported its second consecutive quarter of record sales and profitability."
The Hydraulics Products Group reported an 18.4% year-over-year sales increase, while operating income rose 29.6%.
"As our results demonstrate, everything came together for the Hydraulics Products Group this quarter," Dunbar said. "Hydraulics responded to the falloff in the North American construction market and the resulting decline in dump truck and dump trailer demand during the 2008-2009 recession by penetrating the solid waste and refuse market with a range of well-received new products. Now, driven by steady improvement in North American construction activity, our traditional dump truck and dump trailer markets are recovering.1 As a result, we're experiencing stronger customer demand in both the refuse and dump truck and trailer sectors."
Business Outlook
"Standex concluded a record year in the fourth quarter with solid growth and continued improvement in our operating leverage," said Dunbar. "Our opening backlog is higher on a year-over-year basis in all of our businesses, and we are optimistic about fiscal 2015 as end market conditions are healthy1. Customer activity remains strong, and incoming orders are at a robust rate. At the same time, we are actively pursuing multiple avenues to capitalize on the strength of our markets and our balance sheet to deliver greater shareholder value.1"
Conference Call Details
Standex will host a conference call for investors today, August 27, 2014 at 10:00 a.m. ET. On the call, David Dunbar, President and CEO, and Thomas DeByle, CFO, will review the Company's financial results and business and operating highlights. Investors interested in listening to the webcast should log on to the "Investor Relations" section of Standex's website, located at www.standex.com. The Company's slide show accompanying the webcast audio also can be accessed via its website. To listen to the playback, please dial (800) 585-8367 in the U.S. or (404) 537-3406 internationally; the passcode is 78777961. The replay also can be accessed in the "Investor Relations" section of the Company's website, located at www.standex.com.
Use of Non-GAAP Financial Measures
EBITDA, which is "Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization," non-GAAP income from operations, non-GAAP net income from continuing operations and free cash flow are non-GAAP financial measures and are intended to serve as a complement to results provided in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States. Standex believes that such information provides an additional measurement and consistent historical comparison of the Company's performance. A reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is available in this news release.
About Standex
Standex International Corporation is a multi-industry manufacturer in five broad business segments: Food Service Equipment Group, Engineering Technologies Group, Engraving Group, Electronics Products Group, and Hydraulics Products Group with operations in the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, South Africa, India and China. For additional information, visit the Company's website at http://standex.com/.
1 Safe Harbor Language
Statements in this news release include, or may be based upon, management's current expectations, estimates and/or projections about Standex's markets and industries. These statements are forward-looking statements within the meaning of The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may materially differ from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are difficult to predict. Among the factors that could cause actual results to differ are the impact of implementation of government regulations and programs affecting our businesses, unforeseen legal judgments, fines or settlements, conditions in the financial and banking markets, general domestic and international economy including more specifically increases in raw material costs, the ability to substitute less expensive alternative raw materials, the heavy construction vehicle market, the ability to continue to successfully implement productivity improvements, increase market share, access new markets, introduce new products, enhance our presence in strategic channels, the successful expansion and automation of manufacturing capabilities and diversification efforts in emerging markets, the ability to continue to achieve cost savings through lean manufacturing, cost reduction activities, and low cost sourcing, effective completion of plant consolidations, successful completion and integration of acquisitions and the other factors discussed in the Annual Report of Standex on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2013, which is on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and any subsequent periodic reports filed by the Company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, any forward-looking statements represent management's estimates only as of the day made and should not be relied upon as representing management's estimates as of any subsequent date. While the Company may elect to update forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company and management specifically disclaim any obligation to do so, even if management's estimates change.


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The staff of Oakland Animal Hospital is deeply committed to improving the well-being of not just their clients, but to the lives of the animals within the community. That commitment is demonstrated by our support for local shelters, our Food for Fido Program and our latest outreach program, PetOx which provides oxygen masks for dogs and cats to emergency responders in the community.
Oakland Animal Hospital works with the Ramapo Bergen Animal Refuge (RBARI) and the Friends of the Wayne Animals (FOWA). Assistance to these organizations is provided by participating in the donation of veterinary services such as discounted spays and neuters, individual fundraising events like tricky trays, walks and pet "make-overs" before adoption as well as annual food drives.
If you are looking to add a member to your family, we encourage you to visit one of our local shelters and adopt an animal who needs your love and care.
Whether you are looking for the next member of your family or want to support a local charity, we encourage you to support our local animal shelters.
Ramapo-Bergen Animal Refuge
Bergen County Animal Shelter
Friends of Wayne Animals
Wayne Animal Shelter


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A massive outdoor production of the life of Jesus Christ set in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas provides a spectacular, often comedic backdrop to a passionate examination of American Christianity. In juxtaposing evangelical Christian actors in and out of character with unlikely Christian voices in the LGBT community, the filmmakers reveal numerous conflicts within contemporary Christianity and a surprising number of parallels in the way faith is celebrated and performed.
This is a sponsored project of Film Action Oregon, DBA Hollywood Theatre, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.


text:
Environmental Care
Corporate identity
Realized projects:
Reduction in paper consumption: communication with our customers and suppliers as much as possible is done via email, all catalogs are available online and should therefore not be printed, default print settings are on both sides as well as on black and white instead of color.
- .be medical helps to reduce waste by household waste, PMD, to sort paper and cardboard and empty laser cartridges to raise funds for recycling.
- Recycling of packing materials.
E-invoicing: invoices are sent by e-mail to customers as much as possible.
- Purchasing policy: purchase of recyclable packaging and environmentally friendly products such as CO2 neutral stamps, PVC-free gums, printing paper produced in factories where the environment priority is number 1, ...
Payment of the annual contributions to Recupel and Valipac.
Travel: for short travel distances are train tickets reserved instead of flight tickets, accomodations are booked in hotels which are situated at walking distance from the Convention, ...
- Suppliers: we only collaborate with environmentally conscious suppliers


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Stay lively on your feet and don't get knocked out, with our great selection of boxing boots. Our boxing boots will be able to help you train, prepare and fight better. The range of boxing boots includes great brands like Lonsdale and adidas, to ensure you will be one step ahead of your opponent.
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South of 101st St. (New Orleans) between 129th E. Ave. (Olive) & 145th E. Ave. (Aspen)
Street names above are on the Tulsa (Broken Arrow) map. Street signs often use both names. If you are by the schools on 101st, you are too far west. If by the library, you are too far east.


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This up-and-coming Marylebone venue delivers inventive dishes with a dash of New York style
Recently opened on Orchard Street, conveniently near to Selfridges, is Hotel Chantelle London. With the owners' first branch proving a great success in New York, this is their first international opening.
Hotel Chantelle London (not actually a hotel) is named after a World War II safe house and is much like the rooftop dining space that Chantelle occupies in New York. The menu is French/American-inspired and can only be described as a gastronomic marvel, offering an innovative and surprising twist on a range of classics.
After locating the rather inconspicuous entrance, we headed up several dark flights of stairs and into the restaurant area. Upon entering, we were greeted by attentive (and extremely beautiful) staff in a space that screamed New York chic. Being devotees of the City that Never Sleeps, we immediately decided this was our kind of place.
To start, it was cocktails at the bar while taking in our surroundings: dimly lit with an airy, spacious feel. We noticed the elegant, covered outdoor dining area, which would be great for a special occasion in the summer months. The cocktail menu is extensive and includes all the classics plus some original creations by the venue's master mixologist.
We finished our drinks and were seated at one of the tables at the back, not only comfortable but excellent for people-watching. The menu may be a little difficult for some to interpret (with choices like the Tuna Tartare Cigar – sushi-grade chopped tuna served inside a crisp "cigar" shell – and the Chicken and Waffles – waffle-crusted chicken bits with maple syrup floss and cola chilli reduced drizzle), but our server put us completely at ease. He advised us that all the plates were designed for sharing, so we followed his recommendations and went for the tuna and the chicken plus a token healthy option of the Summer Watermelon Salad, which featured heirloom tomato, oregano compressed charred cucumber, feta snow, olive gelee, red onion crisp and olive oil powder, and packed a real punch in flavour.
The tuna, looking exactly like a cigar, was certainly a standout dish, with the incredibly delicate fish being complemented beautifully by the crisp shell. Our only disappoint was that we hadn't ordered two. The chicken and waffles were equally impressive, served on lollipop sticks and wrapped in candy floss. This took the concept of sweet and savoury to a whole new level.
We then opted to share a large plate, the Nori Ash Monkfish, pan-seared with roasted fennel, vine tomatoes, ginger and lemongrass veloute, accompanied by Truffle Mac 'n' Cheese and Grilled Asparagus Madame. These were all insanely delicious, but the mac and cheese was in a league of its own.
We were feeling pretty full when it came to dessert, wishing we had saved enough room for the Fill Your Own Donuts: mini-brioches served warm and coated in cinnamon sugar, filled with a selection of different sauces such as salted caramel. Instead we opted for the White Chocolate Passion Fruit Mousse and the Chocolate Peanut Molten Cake, which were perfectly sized and ideal to cap off the night after eating some of the tastiest and most creative food this side of the pond.
With so many restaurants in London to choose from it can be tricky to find one that truly stands out, but we think we've discovered something pretty unforgettable here. As a date location, Hotel Chantelle can't fail to impress!
Join Guardian Soulmates today and find that special someone in London.


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Polish frigate integrates into NATO's SNMG2
Polish frigate ORP General Tadeusz Kosciuszko joined Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 (SNMG2) on July 7.
The former U.S. Navy Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate, one of two in the Polish Navy, will spend the next few months under NATO flag providing support to NATO maritime activities.
ORP General Tadeusz Kosciuszko left homeport in Gdynia on June 29 and headed west through the Baltic Sea, crossed the Kiel Canal, the North Sea, Biscay Bay and the Mediterranean to meet with the NATO Maritime Group.
Kosciuszko joins the ships already deployed to the Aegean Sea to support Allies Greece and Turkey, as well as the European Union's border agency Frontex, in their efforts to tackle the refugee and migrant crisis.
One of the frigate's main tasks will be to conduct reconnaissance, monitoring and surveillance in the Aegean. As part of SNMG2, Kosciuszko will provide real-time information to the coastguards and other national authorities.
This is the third time a Polish frigate has joined a NATO Standing Group – previously (in 2006 and 2008). ORP PULASKI served within SNMG1 during Operation Active Endeavour and since 2002 the Polish Navy has regularly dedicated mine hunters to Standing NATO Mine Countermeasures Group One (SNMCMG1), and was twice (2010 and 2013) entrusted with the Command over one of the four Standing NATO Groups.


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This creation is made possible for Stephanie and her husband, Kelvin. I had asked for "weird ingredients" to work with and they offered to let me experiment with this small jar of anchovy paste they had brought back from South Africa. I've been dragging my feet over working with this ingredient for a while due to work and I'm glad that I've finally gotten round to it.
Tag Archives: peanut butter
Banana & Choc Chip Cupcakes with Peanut Butter & Jelly Frosting
I discovered peanut butter pretty late in my life. But it was love at first taste. For me, I prefer the crunchy variety more than the creamy ones. I mean, seriously, it's peanuts! Nuts ARE supposed to be crunchy, no? The creamy ones just taste over-processed. This recipe uses crunchy peanut butter – unsweetened. The jelly part of the frosting involves mixing your favorite berry jam into half the buttercream.
Baby Cakes
So last week, my sister and brother-in-law mentioned how I should make cakes that a one-year-old baby can eat. I thought about it, did some research and decided to make these "baby cakes" today. Instead of white flour and sugar, I substitute them with coconut flour (not cheap!) and maple syrup.
Lemon Bar with Peanut Butter and Shredded Coconut
I was inspired to make myself some lemon bars after seeing a picture of them on my best friend Jing's Facebook Wall. I had never tasted lemon bars my whole life so I was curious about them. She took hers to a BBQ party and it did sound like a refreshing end to a smoky meal! Upon further research, I discovered they are quite easy to make and are great as a party treat!
Flavor Notes:
Instead of dusting the bars with icing sugar, I sprinkled mine with dried coconut flakes. I was craving for something richer too so I added a thin layer of unsalted peanut butter between the crust and the lemon curd.


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For all the music fans. Let the handbag tune you UP.
Carry it to upgrade your everyday looks.
Complete with:
- one zipped pocket (19 cm); two smartphone leather pockets,
- silver colour metallic pieces,
- one external pocket (33 cm).
Handle for arm or hand carry (55 cm with rings).
UP Design delivers art and a positive attitude through unique, handmade leather handbags.
Created to lift you UP into positive thinking and personal growth.
Our creativity was blended with grace and the intelligence of dolphins into high-quality, daring and original handmade leather handbags.


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Here's our collection of cancer-related stories. We sift through a variety of stories and share the issues that we think matter to cancer patients, caregivers, healthcare providers and survivors. Learn about current events in the cancer community, human interest stories, and promising technology and treatment advances. Tell us what you think in the Comments section at the bottom of each post.
Note: The information contained in this service is not intended nor implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider prior to starting any new treatment or with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Nothing contained in the service is intended to be used for medical diagnosis or treatment of any illness, condition or disease.
This weekend you can expect to see thousands of bikes on the roads of Massachusetts. Approximately 5,500 cyclists from 36 states and 8 countries are expected to ride in this year's Pan-Massachusetts Challenge.
The goal of the event, now in its 29th year, is to raise $34 million for cancer research and treatment.
Beginning in 1980, the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge started with a handful of cyclists (36 to be exact) who successfully raised more than $10,000 for cancer research. By the mid 1990's the popularity of the PMC increased to more than 1,000 riders raising $3.5 million.
According to a PMC press release, the annual bike-a-thon raises and contributes more than twice the sum of any athletic fundraising event in the country.
For more information on the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge, visit PMC.org.
According to a statement released by his press office, the growth that Republican presidential candidate John McCain had removed from his upper right cheek on Monday shows no evidence of skin cancer.
McCain, who has a history of melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer, downplayed the visit explaining that he visits his dermatologist every three months for routine visits because of his increased risk of a subsequent melanoma.
Many skin cancer experts had predicted that the growth would be benign, or that if it was malignant, it would be a non-melanoma form of skin cancer such as squamous cell or basal cell carcinoma. Squamous cell and basal cell carcinomas account for over a million cancer diagnoses a year, according to the American Cancer Society.
A resident of Austin, Texas is offering quite a financial incentive to anyone who discovers a cure for breast cancer. 48-year-old Mike Dewey says he will award $1 billion to the first person who finds a cure for the disease.
After learning that his daughters were at a greater risk of developing breast cancer following his wife's battle with the disease, Dewey created a nonprofit foundation to fund the award.
According to an ABC News article, Dewey's foundation has already raised $90,000 in donations and $22 million in pledges from businesses around the world.
Dewey's wife Barbara successfully overcame her breast cancer following surgery.
For more information, visit DeweyFoundation.org.
It's easily mistaken for a real-life Barbie car, and it's not the most masculine-looking ride either, but Patrick Rangel's hot pink 1978 Chevrolet Monte Carlo convertible does have hydraulics.
Rangel, 38, tells The Lawrence Journal-World that he transformed his college ride into a dedication to his wife Carrie, who received a breast cancer diagnosis just two weeks after they were married.
From the white and pink interior with pink ribbons stitched on, to the "Breast cancer survivor" license plate holder, it is clear, this car has a purpose.
The purpose, according to Patrick: "I think the car is going to make people think, 'Hey, I can relate to that car and I can relate to the person driving it because they are young like me, so maybe I should actually take the time and check myself for breast cancer too.'"
The car just recently made its debut at Lawrence Memorial Hospital where Patrick dropped Carrie off for the 10th annual Betsy Beisecker Memorial Tea, a benefit for breast cancer awareness.
The couple plan to sport the vehicle at other breast cancer events and parades.
According to the results of a Phase I clinical trial published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, a once-a-day pill was able to significantly shrink the tumors of men with advanced prostate cancer that had not responded to other forms of treatment.
The pill, Cougar Biotechnology Inc's abiraterone, delayed a worsening of the disease by a median of 400 days. All the volunteers in the study had an aggressive form of prostate cancer in which some researchers believe the tumor tissue is able to produce its own supply of the hormones that fuel the disease. Abiraterone targets an enzyme called CYP17, which researchers believe plays a role in this process.
In the study, 70 to 80 percent of the men showed declines in prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, levels and their tumors shrank, even when the cancer had spread to other parts of the body.
According to researchers, some volunteers have been on abiraterone for over two years, and were able to control the disease with minimal side effects. Those side effects included fatigue and weight gain.
Abiraterone is now in Phase III trials and the hope is that the drug will be on the market in 2011.
I'll be posting weekly at the CancerCompass blog and I look forward to connecting with you. I've been writing about health and wellness for nearly 10 years, including several books.
Helping and empowering cancer patients and caregivers is my passion. I enjoy connecting individuals to support each other and to share information.
We care about your feedback. Let us know how we can improve your CancerCompass experience.


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December 2010
La MaMa, E.T.C.
New York City
Dana Boll
Kaylin Lee Clinton
Catherine Correa
Marie Cuatero
Markus Hirnigel
Sunrise Marks
Florencia Minniti
BJ Rubin
Peter B. Schmitz
Jeanne Lauren Smith
Chris Tanner
The Möbius strip, named for German mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius, is a surface with only one side. Most objects have at least two sides: a back and a front (inside and out). Because of the way it twists, a Möbius strip has only one. An ant moving along the "inside" would find itself "outside"; an ant moving along the "outside" would find itself "inside" again.
In Mapping Möbius, this concept informs the journey of an introspective scientist who feels overwhelmed by his own inescapable interiority. Nearing the end of his career, he comes to the realization that his life's work -- objective study -- is misguided. He recruits a young girl to help him explore the mysteries of the mind, reasoning that this is where all his models of the world originate. Together they embark on a tour of universal history, making stops to take in the inchoate, pre-linguistic world of plankton; the stories told by dinosaur bones; the electioneering of colonial ants; and the cynical business lectures of a world-weary bee.
But they are entering dangerous territory. It's not only the objections of an alarmed lawyer that warn what they are doing is transgressive; the scientist himself is increasingly disturbed by the experiments and all they stir up. As cool observation slides into personal chaos, it becomes clear there's no map for this territory.
This project is made possible in part by the Nancy Quinn Fund and with public funds from the Fund for Creative Communities, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts, the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and administered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
Production design support provided by The Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation.
|Jollification | Mortification
|Garden of Delights
|Hypnotik: The Seer Will Doctor You Now
|Mapping Mobius
|Oh, Those Beautiful Weimar Girls!
|The Round of Pleasure
|Some Historic, Some Hysteric 2006
|Come & Go
|First Ladies
|Electronic City (2016)
|Electronic City (2019)
|What Elsas Knew in a Peril


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After being nominated as one of the best original games at Brazil Game Show 2015...
indie game developer Smyowl is proud to announce the official release of Super Button Soccer. The action-strategy game is playable now on Steam for PC.
Super Button Soccer is based on using buttons and collectible cards for online multiplayer soccer matches.
These items directly influence how you play the game, making for a fun new way to experience soccer. For example, different cards can change the physics of the arena or ball, keeping you on your toes and alert to what is at play. The game is relatively easy to learn, but also offers a challenging side as you plan to create your perfect team.
The move to release on Steam comes after a successful run during Early Access where the audience for the game provided feedback to give Super Button Soccer the best experience it could possibly bring. Smyowl VP of Games, Mauricio Alegretti said, "The feedbacks and suggestions from visitors at BGS 2015, BIG 2016 and of all online players during Early Access were crucial for evolving the game and getting to the point that we are right now. We all love soccer here in the studio, and aimed to create the game that we always wanted to play when we were kids. We are very confident that this passion will be felt by players all over the world now, and that someday the competitions may even evolve into an interesting e-Sport"


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Teen Murdered By Best Friend Over YouTube Music Video
29 June 2016, 11:22 | Updated: 17 July 2017, 12:17
The details are heartbreaking.
An argument between two friends in Sacramento, Northern California, ended in tragedy this month - allegedly started by a disagreement over a YouTube video. At the court hearing of the accused 23 year old Fredrick Marshall on Monday, a judge heard how Fredrick argued with Deston Garrett, shot him in the torso and fled the residence before the police arrived.
According to the parents of deceased 19 year old Deston, the teen had been excited about his homemade music video gaining a number of hits on the YouTube platform. At approximately 9pm on June 9, 2016, Deston had been listening to music in his room with Fredrick - a friend of the family for a number of years - when a dispute about the video broke out between the two. The exact subject of the argument is yet to be revealed, however we have heard that Deston had asked Fredrick to leave the residence before the shooting took place.
Deston's parents told KTXL-TV's news bulletin that they had no reason not to trust the long-time family friend in their home, even stating that Fredrick had joined them on a family camping trip mere weeks before the incident. It has not yet been revealed where the culprit obtained the weapon used to shoot his friend. Mrs.Garrett added, "My son died over a freaking view on a song on YouTube. It's like, you open your door to the devil and you let him in. That's what I feel like I did."
Parents of Deston Garrett thank all for outpouring of support. Sacramento HS senior died from gun shot... pic.twitter.com/vYOVpKRTOc
— Joe Davidson (@SacBee_JoeD) June 13, 2016
On his funeral day...an arrest has been made. 19yo Deston Garrett was a beloved Sac High football player. https://t.co/MDSQDK8nDl @ABC10 — Frances Wang (@ABC10Frances) June 24, 2016
Fredrick Weston was located and arrested on Friday 24 June, 2016 - the morning of Deston's memorial service, where his classmates from Sacramento City Unified School District's Accelerated Academy paid tribute to him. He was due to graduate from the academy around the time of his death, with his sights set on playing football for the NFL. The accused was held at a $100,000 bail.


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Balls danced in the gloaming sky at Copacabana Beach, a few hundred yards down from the Beach Volleyball Arena.
Brazil's men's beach volleyball team was playing for a spot in the Olympic finals, but players on the beach were more interested in knocking the balls around themselves.
Beach volleyball is woven into the fabric of Brazilian life and it's no more evident at Copacabana Beach, where the locals have taken over what was supposed to be a volleyball teaching area for tourists.
Hundreds of players, most of them local teens, have dotted the sand courts between Avenue Atlantica and the Atlantic Ocean every day of the Rio Games. They come in all shapes and sizes, but all know how to play, setting and spiking with perfect form over the lowered nets at Copacabana.
A handful of tourists occasionally get their chance to play, but Copacabana Beach was the place to play for the locals before the Olympics and the start of the Games has done nothing to change that.
This is their game and their home.


text:
In the first installment in this series (link), we looked at a couple of weird sauropod vertebrae with neurocentral joints that were situated either entirely dorsal or ventral to the neural canals. This post has more examples of what I am calling "offset" neurocentral synchondroses.
I decided it made more sense to refer to the synchondrosis as being offset, instead of referring to the neural canal as offset. Because the neural canal in all of these vertebrae is right where it pretty much always is, just dorsal to the articular surfaces of the centrum. In an adult, fused vertebra, there'd be no sign that anything unusual had ever happened. So I think it makes more sense to talk about the neurocentral joint having migrated dorsally or ventrally relative to the canal, rather than vice versa. If you know differently, or if these weirdos have been addressed before elsewhere and I've just missed it, please let me know in the comments!
Here's a plate from Marsh (1896) showing caudal vertebrae of Camarasaurus ("Morosaurus" in O.C. Marsh parlance), which echo the Alamosaurus caudal from the first post in having the neurocentral joint almost entirely ventral to the neural canal. The neural arch here doesn't just arch over the canal dorsally, it also cuts under it ventrally, at least in part.
This plate is also nice because it shows the relationships among the arch, centrum, and caudal ribs before they fuse. Here's the caption, from Marsh (1896):
Here's the preceding plate, Plate 33, with illustrations of an unfused Camarasaurus sacrum.
And its caption:
This plate not only shows how the sacral ribs fuse to the arch and spine medially, and to each other laterally (forming the sacrocostal yoke), it also shows a last sacral that is very similar to the aforementioned caudals in the position of the neurocentral joint. But interestingly that neurocentral joint offset only seems to be present in the last
caudal sacral – the lower figure shows widely-separated neurocentral joint surfaces in the more anterior centra, indicating that the neural arches (not figured in this dorsal view) did not wrap around the neural canal to approach the midline. (I think we're looking at S2 through S5 here, and missing a dorso-sacral.)
So now I'm freaked out, wondering if this neural arch wrap-around in the caudals is common to most sauropods and I just haven't looked at enough juvenile caudals to have spotted it before. As always, feel free to ablate my ignorance in the comments, particularly if you know of more published examples. I'm a collector.
The neural canal of that last sacral also has a very interesting cross-sectional shape, like a numeral 8. I have some thoughts on that, but they'll keep for a future post in this series.
Inconsistent fusion in Haplocanthosaurus sacra
April 29, 2012
Matt and I have been looking in more detail at indications of maturity in sauropod skeletons, as we prepare the submission of the paper arising from our response to Woodruff and Fowler (2012) [part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6]. Here is an oddity.
H. priscus is the type species of Haplocanthosaurus; H. utterbacki is the second species, named by Hatcher in the 1903 monograph that described the original material in detail. As previously noted, the type species is based on adult material, and the referred specimen on subadult material. This is shown by their different stages of neurocentral fusion, and corroborated by the size of the specimens as indicated in the composite illustration above.
There is a lot of fusion going on in the sacra of dinosaurs:
- sacral neural arches fused to their centra
- consecutive sacral centra fused together
- consecutive sacral neural spines fused together
- sacral lateral processes fused to ilia
As we would expect, the less mature of the two Haplocanthosaurus individuals is less fused in most respects: none of the centra were fused either to each other or their respective neural arches, and the ilium was not fused to any of the lateral processes, whereas in the adult all neural arches are fused to their centra, the five sacral centra are all fused together, and the ilium is fused to the lateral processes.
How strange, then, that the consecutive neural spines are more fused in the juvenile! Not only are spines 1, 2 and 3 fused along their entire dorsolateral length, as in the adult, but spine 4 is similarly fused. And more: the neurapophysis of spine 5 is fused to that of 4, even though the spines are not fused more ventrally.
What does this mean? Hatcher (1903:27-28) took it as indicative of species-level separation. After briefly noting that the posterior dorsal centra of H. utterbacki are more opisthocoelous than those of H. priscus, and speculating that the adult of the referred species was probably larger than that of the type, he continued:
But the most distinctive character is to be found in the sacrum which, in the present species, has the five neural spines normally coössified. The first four are cocoössified throughout their entire length, forming a long bony plate. The union between the fourth and fifth is limited to the extremities while medially [sic, presumably meaning half way up the spines] they are separated by an elongated foramen. In H. priscus only the spines of the three anterior sacrals are coössified, those of the first and second [sic, presumably intending fourth and fifth] sacrals remaining free. This difference exists notwithstanding that the type of the present species was scarcely adult, the sacral centra being neither coössified with one another nor with their neural arches. By some this character might be considered as of generic importance although I prefer to consider it as of only specific value since in all other parts of the skeleton preserved, there are no distinguishing characters which could be considered as of generic value.
At present, however, the synonymy of H. utterbacki with the type species, proposed by McIntosh and Williams (1988:22), seems to be universally accepted. If they truly belong to the same taxon then the only realistic possibility is that we are seeing individual variation in the timing of fusion. That certainly seems to have been the opinion of McIntosh and Williams (1988:14), writing about the sacrum of their own specimen, the H. delfsi holotype CMNH 10380:
As in CM 572 the short to moderately long spines of sacrals one through three are firmly united throughout, and those of sacrals four and five are firmly united to midheight. In CM 572 spines four and five are free, but this is probably an individual character because in the even younger CM 879 all five spines are united.
All of which means: we need to be really careful when drawing conclusions about taxonomy or ontogeny from individual observations of skeletal fusion.
Bonus Pneumaticity Observation: In the image at top, you'll see that the centrum of sacral 4 in CM 879 has a couple of pneumatic fossae. For more than you probably wanted to know about those specific holes in that specific bone, see this post and the linked paper.
- Hatcher, J.B. 1901. Diplodocus (Marsh): its osteology, taxonomy, and probable habits, with a restoration of the skeleton. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 1:1-63.
- McIntosh, J.S., and Williams, M. E. 1988. A new species of sauropod dinosaur, Haplocanthosaurus delfsi sp. nov., form the Upper Jurassic Morrison Fm. of Colorado. Kirtlandia 43:3-26.
- Woodruff, D.C, and Fowler, D.W. 2012. Ontogenetic influence on neural spine bifurcation in Diplodocoidea (Dinosauria: Sauropoda): a critical phylogenetic character. Journal of Morphology, online ahead of print.
In the previous post in this series I looked at the some of the easily available raw data on neural spine bifurcation in Morrison sauropods. In this post I'll explain how serial variation–that is, variation along the vertebral column in one individual–is relevant to the inferences made in the new paper by Woodruff and Fowler (2012). But first, a digression, the relevance of which will quickly become clear.
How do you recognize an adult sauropod?
There are only a handful of criteria that have been used to infer adulthood in sauropods. In rough order from least to most accurate–so far as I can tell!–they are:
- sheer size
- fusion of the neural arches to the centra
- fusion of the sacral vertebrae to each other, and fusion of the sacral ribs to form the sacricostal yoke
- fusion of the cervical ribs to the centra and neural arches
- fusion of the scapula to the coracoid
- presence of an external fundamental system in the cortices of the long bones
I'll discuss each one in turn. (Please let me know in the comments if I've missed any.)
1. Size alone is pretty useless. The mounted Giraffatitan is a pretty damn big animal by anyone's standards, but it's demonstrably smaller than another individual from Tendaguru, and the scap-coracoid joint is unfused. On the other hand, there are things like dicraeosaurids that apparently matured at relatively small sizes (for sauropods). There is definitely some individual or low-level taxonomic variation. Marsh's "Brontosaurus" excelsus holotype YPM 1980 is an adult but about the same size as the subadult Apatosaurus ajax holotype YPM 1860 that it ended up being generically synonymised with (see the sacra of the two taxa compared below). The giant Oklahoma Apatosaurus is about 1.4 times the size of A. louisae CM 3018 in most linear measures, but some of the neural arches and cervical ribs are unfused (the vertebra in the linked post is only a quarter bigger than the corresponding element in CM 3018, but there are other elements of the Oklahoma Apatosaurus that are proportionally even larger). On the flip side, I have seen some comparatively tiny Diplodocus material at BYU in which all of the neural arches are fused to the centra, despite the vertebrae being about half the size of those in the mounted D. carnegii CM 84/94. So I am very leery of size as a reliable indicator of age in sauropods. It is a bad criterion in general, and especially bad for cervical vertebrae, which can change so much along the column. C15 of D. carnegii CM 84/94 has a cotyle diameter almost four times that of C3 in the same animal.
2. People often cite closure of the neurocentral synostoses* as an indicator of adulthood, but again I am skeptical. There's no doubt that the neurocentral synostoses do eventually close; my skepticism runs the other way, in that there are sauropods with closed neurocentral synostoses that do not appear to have reached full size. The HM SI** individual of Giraffatitan is one example–it's about 75% of the size of the mounted (SII) individual, and only 66% the size of the giant HM XV2 (by cross-scaling through HM SII; SI and XV2 share no overlapping elements), and yet the neurocentral synostoses are all closed. Same deal with Apatosaurus CM 555, which has open joints as far back as C8 but is between one-half and two-thirds the size of A. louisae CM 3018. If you found a posterior cervical or anterior dorsal of CM 555 by itself, without the open joints on the more anterior vertebrae to guide you, you'd think it was full grown based on arch fusion. So it seems safest to say that neurocentral synostosis closure is a necessary but not sufficient condition for inferring adulthood.
* Hat tip to Jerry Harris, who alerted me that the term 'sutures' is reserved for skulls only, and that the joints between neural arches and centra are properly called synostoses. Thanks also to physical anthropologist Vicki Wedel, who confirmed this.
** Yes, I'm using the old Humboldt Museum numbers here, out of convenience, and because HM SII probably means more to more readers than the correct M.B. R. number that only six people have memorized.
3. Coalescence of the sacrum and formation of the sacricostal yoke have intuitive appeal. The sacricostal yokes are banana-shaped bars of bone formed by the union of the sacral ribs that articulate with the ilia–you can see them on either side of the apatosaur sacra in the image above, and in this post on the sacrum of Camarasaurus lewisi. Since the sacricostal yokes are the bony interfaces between the axial skeleton and the hindlimb girdles, we might expect them to be biomechanically important and for their formation to be closely related to the attainment of adult size. But I'm putting them fairly low on the list for reasons both practical and theoretical. On the practical side, fusion of the sacral vertebrae and ribs is hard to assess unless the sacrum has fallen apart. An intact sacrum might be intact because the bones were actually fused together, or because the unfused bits just happened to hang together through the process of fossilization (if that sounds unlikely, just remember that it's true of almost every articulated fossil skull you've ever seen). On the theoretical side, the timing of sacral fusion seems to be variable. A. ajax YPM 1860 has fused neural arches and cervical ribs but a very incompletely fused sacrum, whereas D. carnegii CM 84/94 has the five sacral centra coossified and a sacricostal yoke uniting the ribs of S2-S5*, but some of the cervical ribs are unfused. Yes, I realize that discounting this criterion because it conflicts with other mutually conflicting criteria is a bit wonky, but (1) that's the essential challenge of doing non-histological skeletochronology on sauropods–none of the signs seem to tell us what we want–and (2) I'm happy to fall back on the practical reason if you find the theoretical one unconvincing. Last item: I have seen both 'sacricostal' and 'sacrocostal' used in the literature–can anyone make a case for one being more correct than the other? 'Sacrum' is from the Latin sacer, 'sacred', apparently because the sacra of animals used to be sacrificed to the gods (not sacroficed–maybe there's my answer?).
*Hatcher (1901) described an 11th dorsal and four sacral vertebrae, but he noted that the 11th dorsal "functions as a sacral" and "is coossified by the centrum with the true sacrals". The D. carnegii holotype was one of the first nearly complete sauropod skeletons to be monographically described, and it was not yet clear that the typical number of sacrals for the North American diplodocids–and indeed for most other sauropods–is five (some primitve taxa have four, many titanosaurs have six).
4. Cervical rib fusion might be better. Giraffatitan HM SI and Diplodocus CM 84/94 both have their cervical neurocentral synostoses closed, but both have unfused cervical ribs as far back as C5. This suggests that cervical rib fusion proceeded from back to front (in at least those taxa) and that it followed neurocentral fusion. The sole exception that I have seen is a subadult Apatosaurus cervical from Cactus Park in the BYU collections, which has fused ribs but open neurocentral joints.
5. It's hard to tell if fusion of the scapula to the coracoid is better or worse than cervical rib fusion, because the timing varies among taxa (hence the caveat that these criteria are in rough order). Giraffatitan HM SII has fused neural arches and fused cervical ribs but open scap-coracoid synostoses (yes, again, synostoses rather than sutures) ; Diplodocus CM 84/94 has a fused scap-coracoid but some unfused cervical ribs. This is probably another necessary but not sufficient condition.
6. The gold standard for determining cessation of growth is the formation of an external fundamental system (EFS) in the outer cortex of a bone. Unfortunately that requires destructive sampling (even if only drilling), is time-consuming, and has been done for few individual sauropods.
The upshot of all of the above is that the readily available ways of determining adulthood in sauropods are all inexact and frequently conflict with each other. Neural arch fusion does not indicate full growth–some sauropods appear to have fused their neurocentral joints when they were only two-thirds grown (in linear terms; 30% grown in terms of mass).
For the purposes of this post and the next, I am going to refer to the big mounted skeletons–Apatosaurus louisae CM 3018, Diplodocus carnegii CM 84/94, etc.–and individuals of like size as 'adults' to indicate that they had attained adult morphology, without implying that they were done growing or had EFSs, and also not implying that smaller individuals were necessarily subadult. 'Adult' here is used a term of convenience, not a biological fact.
Implications of serial changes in bifurcation for isolated elements
From here, this post picks up right where the last one in this series left off, so feel free to refer back to the previous post for any points that are unclear.
In the diplodocids, adults are expected to have unsplit spines as far back as C5, C6 may be only incompletely bifid (e.g., D. carnegii CM 84/94), and the spines in the posterior dorsals are expected to be either very shallowly notched at the tip or completely unsplit. Therefore it is impossible to say that an isolated vertebra belongs to a juvenile individual on the basis of neural spine bifurcation alone. Depending on how one defines "anterior cervical", one half to one third of anterior cervicals are expected to have unsplit spines even in adults.
In Camarasaurus the picture is less clear. The immense C. supremus AMNH 5761 has unsplit spines in C3-C4 and in the last three or four dorsals, but some of those very posterior dorsals have extremely shallow depressions in the tips of the spines, with little consistency among the four individuals that somewhat confusingly make up that specimen. In the geriatric C. lewisi all of the post-axial presacral neural spines are at least incompletely bifid. Even in the very posterior dorsals there is still a distinct notch in the neural spine, not just a very slightly bilobed tip as in the posterior dorsals of C. supremus. Either this is an interspecific difference or some amount of ontogenetic bifurcation happened well into adulthood; current evidence is insufficient to falsify either hypothesis. (That's the trouble with n=1.)
A final thing to note: as I briefly mentioned in the earlier post, it is easier to detect deep bifurcations than shallow ones if the material is broken or incomplete. The neural spine tips are usually narrow, fragile, and easily broken or lost. If a vertebra is missing the top half of its spine but the bottom half is not split, it is usually impossible to say whether it would have been bifid or not. But if the spine is deeply bifurcated, even a small piece of bone from the base of the trough or one of the metapophyses is enough to confirm that it was bifid.
"Primitive" morphology can be an effect of serial position
Even in 'adult' sauropods like the big mounted Apatosaurus and Diplodocus skeletons, the anterior cervicals are less complex than the posterior ones. Compared to posterior cervicals, anterior cervicals tend to have simpler pneumatic fossae and foramina, fewer laminae, and unsplit rather than bifid spines. In all of these things the anterior cervicals are similar to those of juveniles of the same taxa, and to those of adults of more basal taxa. This is also true in prosauropods–in Plateosaurus, the full complement of vertebral laminae is not present until about halfway down the neck (see this subsequent post for details).
An important implication of this is that an isolated cervical might look primitive (1) because it comes from a basal taxon, or (2) because it is from a juvenile, or (3) because it is from near the front of the neck.
In their Figure 2, Woodruff and Fowler (2012) compare an adult Mamenchisaurus cervical, an isolated cervical of a putative juvenile Diplodocus (MOR 790 8-10-96-204), and a cervical of D. carnegii CM 84/94. The point of the figure is to show that the isolated 'juvenile' vertebra is more similar in gross form to the Mamenchisaurus cervical than to the adult D. carnegii cervical.
Unfortunately the figure confuses ontogenetic and serial variation. Based on the proportions of the centrum and the shape of the neural spine, the isolated MOR cervical is probably from a very anterior position in the series. No measurements are given in the paper or supplementary information (grrr), but using the scale bar in the figure I calculate a centrum length of about 28 cm, a cotyle height of 7 cm, and an elongation index (EI, centrum length divided by cotyle diameter) of 4. That EI, combined with the overall shape of the neural spine and the very long overhang of the prezygapophyses, make the vertebra most similar to C4 and C5 of D. carnegii CM 84/94. But the D. carnegii cervical included in the figure is C12. It differs from the isolated cervical in having a forward-leaning, bifurcated neural spine, a much more complicated system of laminae with many accessory laminae, and more complex pneumatic sculpturing. All of these differences are more likely to be caused by serial variation than by ontogeny–the same characters separate C12 from C4 and C5 in the same individual.
So here's how that figure would have looked, had the comparable C5 of CM 84/94 been used instead of C12:
It's now immediately apparent B more closely resembles C than A, in the possession of overhanging prezygapophyses, non-overhanging postzygapophyses, elongation index, anterodorsal inclination of the cotyle margin, lack of anterior deflection of diapophysis, etc. The biggest differences between B and C are the shape of the neural spine and, for want of a better word, the 'sinuosity' of the ventral centrum margin in lateral view. Both characters are highly variably serially within an individual, among individuals in a species, and among species in Apatosaurus and Diplodocus, so it is hard to attach much weight to them.
What is MOR 790 8-10-96-204?
It gets more complicated. The isolated MOR vertebra is presented as an example of juvenile morphology. But does it actually belong to a juvenile?
Here's what we know for certain about the vertebra:
- it has an EI of 4 (this is a proportion, so it's still accurate even if the scale bar is off)
- the cervical ribs are fused to the neural arch and centrum
In addition, the figure appears to show that:
- it has a centrum length of 28 cm, although this could be off if the scale bar is incorrectly sized (which is why I prefer measurements to scale bars)
- the neural arch appears to be fused to the centrum. Admittedly, the image in the figure is small and I haven't seen the specimen in person. But we know this much: the centrum and neural arch stayed together through the process of preservation and preparation, which does not usually happen unless they have at least started coossifying; the photo does not show an obvious line of fusion between the centrum and neural arch; and the cervical ribs are fused, which in almost all sauropod vertebrae happens after closure of the neurocentral synostoses.
Now, as we've just seen above, the morphology of MOR 790 8-10-96-204 is indistinguishable from the morphology of an anterior cervical vertebra in an adult, and it compares especially well to C4 and C5 of D. carnegii CM 84/94. The apparent centrum length (measured from the scale bar in the figure) of MOR 790 8-10-96-204 is 28 cm, compared to 29 cm and 37 cm for C4 and C5 of D. carnegii CM 84/94, respectively. So MOR 790 8-10-96-204 is roughly the same size as the adult C4 and about 80% of the size of the adult C5. Furthermore, its neural arch appears to be fused and its cervical ribs are fused to the neural arch and centrum, whereas the cervical ribs of the 'adult' D. carnegii CM 84/94 are not yet fused in C2-C5.
In sum, the isolated MOR vertebra shown in Woodruff and Fowler (2012:Fig. 2) is most likely a C4 or C5 of an adult Diplodocus similar in size to D. carnegii CM 84/94, and based on cervical rib fusion it may be from an individual that is actually more mature than CM 84/94. All of the differences between that vertebra and the D. carnegii C12 shown in the same figure are more easily explained as consequences of serial, rather than ontogenetic, variation.
MOR 790 8-10-96-204 and the Mother's Day Quarry
MOR 790 8-10-96-204 is from the Mother's Day Quarry (Woodruff and Fowler 2012:Table 1), which is supposed to only contain juvenile and subadult sauropods (Myers and Storrs 2007, Myers and Fiorillo 2009). Myers and Fiorillo (2009:99) wrote:
The quarry has a strikingly low taxonomic diversity, with one sauropod taxon and one theropod taxon present. However, the relative abundance of elements from these taxa is so uneven – diplodocoid sauropod material comprises 99% of the recovered bones – that the quarry is effectively monospecific (Myers and Storrs, 2007). The theropod material consists of isolated teeth only and is probably related to scavenging of the sauropod carcasses. All identifiable sauropod elements belong to either juvenile or subadult individuals (Fig. 2); none is attributable to a fully-adult individual (Myers and Storrs, 2007).
The Figure 2 cited in that excerpt shows two sauropod centra, a dorsal and a caudal, both with unfused neural arches. And yet here is MOR 790 8-10-96-204, similar in size and morphology to D. carnegii CM 84/94, and with at least partially closed neurocentral synostoses and fused cervical ribs. By all appearances, it belongs to an adult or nearly adult animal. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Mother's Day Quarry includes at least one adult or near-adult Diplodocus. The only alternative is that MOR 790 8-10-96-204 is a juvenile in which the neural arch and cervical ribs fused very early.* But if that were the case, what basis would we have for thinking that it belonged to a juvenile, other than that it came from a quarry that only produced juveniles up until now? I trust that the circularity of that logic is clear. It is much more parsimonious to infer that MOR 790 8-10-96-204 is just what it appears to be–an anterior cervical of an adult or near-adult Diplodocus–and that the Mother's Day Quarry is not exclusively filled with juvenile sauropods.
* Another wrench in the gears: if MOR 790 8-10-96-204 is a juvenile that had freakishly early fusion of its various bits, then clearly its ontogeny has departed from that of Diplodocus, all bets are off about developmental timing, and we shouldn't be using it to make inferences about the normal ontogeny of diplodocids anyway. It's damned if you do (it's an adult), damned if you don't (it's a freak).
I'm not criticizing the work of Myers and Storrs (2007) on the taphonomy of the Mother's Day Quarry or Myers and Fiorillo (2009) on age segregation in sauropod herds, by the way. It's possible that they never saw MOR 790 8-10-96-204, or that if they did see the specimen they mistook it for a juvenile vertebra based on its size. All it takes is one bone to show that an animal is present in a quarry, and no number of other bones can prove that said animal is absent; if they only saw juveniles, the inference that the quarry only contained juveniles was sound (the operative word is was). If MOR 790 8-10-96-204 is a C5, it's still only 80% the size of the same vertebra in D. carnegii CM 84/94, so maybe it was the oldest one in the group, or maybe it was an adult slumming with the juveniles, or maybe groups of juvenile sauropods often had one or more adults present to keep an eye on things. Or maybe it happened along earlier or later and just got buried in the same hole. There are a host of possibilities, most of which do not contradict the general conclusions of Myers and Storrs (2007) and Myers and Fiorillo (2009).
Size matters. Size alone is a horrible, horrible criterion for inferring age, especially in a clade (Diplodocoidea) in which adult size is known to vary, and especially with vertebrae. We should expect cervical vertebrae in a single individual to differ in diameter by a factor of 4.
Serial position matters. Not all vertebrae turn out the same. Even in adults, anterior cervicals look very different from posterior cervicals, and have different character states. Anterior cervicals and cervicals of juvenile individuals often look similar. The best way to tell them apart is to rely on articulated series–which is why I went to the trouble of writing the first post in this series.
Skeletochronology matters. The fact that MOR 790 8-10-96-204 has an apparently fused arch and fused cervical ribs should have been huge red flag that maybe it wasn't actually a juvenile.
I went through that example at length because it shows how serial changes in size and morphology can mimic or suggest ontogenetic changes. In the next post I will examine the rest of the data Woodruff and Fowler (2012) used to support the hypothesis of ontogenetic control of neural spine bifurcation.
The rest of the series
Links to all of the posts in this series:
- Part 1: what we knew a month ago
- Part 2: why serial position matters
- Part 3: the evidence from ontogenetic series
- Part 4: is Suuwassea a juvenile of a known diplodocid?
- Part 5: is Haplocanthosaurus a juvenile of a known diplodocid?
- Part 6: more reasons why Haplocanthosaurus is not a juvenile of a known diplodocid
and the post that started it all:
- Hatcher, J.B. 1901. Diplodocus (Marsh): its osteology, taxonomy, and probable habits, with a restoration of the skeleton. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 1:1-63.
- Myers, T.S., and Fiorillo, A.R. 2009. Evidence for gregarious behavior and age segregation in sauropod dinosaurs. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 274:96-204.
- Myers, T.S., and Storrs, G.W. 2007. Taphonomy of the Mother's Day Quarry, Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation, south-central Montana, U.S.A. PALAIOS 22:651–666.
- McIntosh, J.S., Miller, W.E., Stadtman, K.L., and Gillette, D.D. 1996. The osteology of Camarasaurus lewisi (Jensen, 1988). BYU Geology Studies 41:73-115.
- Osborn, H.F. and Mook, C.C. 1921. Camarasaurus, Amphicoelias, and other sauropods of Cope. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History 3:247-287.
- Ostrom, John H., and John S. McIntosh. 1966. Marsh's Dinosaurs. Yale University Press, New Haven and London. 388 pages including 65 absurdly beautiful plates.
- Woodruff, D.C, and Fowler, D.W. 2012. Ontogenetic influence on neural spine bifurcation in Diplodocoidea (Dinosauria: Sauropoda): a critical phylogenetic character. Journal of Morphology, online ahead of print.
In a comment on the initial Shunosaurus tail-club post, Jaime Headden pointed out the passage in the Spinophorosaurus paper (Remes et al. 2009) that discusses the club of Shunosaurus (as justification for positioning the Spinophorosaurus osteoderms on the end of its tail):
With the holotypic skeleton, two closely associated dermal ossifications were found originating from contralateral sides (Fig. 4A–C). These elements have a subcircular base that is rugose and concave on its medial side, and bear a caudodorsally projecting bony spike with a rounded tip laterally. Although these elements were found in the pelvic region under the dislocated scapula, we regard it as most probable that they were placed on the distal tail in the living animal for the following reasons: First, the close association of the contralateral elements indicates they were originally placed near the (dorsal) midline of the body. Second, the stiffening of the distal tail by specialized chevrons is also found in other groups of dinosaurs that exhibit tail armor [42,43]. Third, osteoderms of similar shape are known from the closely related basal eusauropod Shunosaurus [26]. In the latter form, these elements cover the middle part of a tail club formed by coalesced distal vertebrae; however, the decreasing size of the distal-most caudal vertebrae of Spinophorosaurus indicate that such a club was not present in this genus. The right osteoderm is slightly larger and differs in proportions from the left element, indicating that, as in Shunosaurus [26], originally two pairs of tail spines were present (Fig. 5).
— Remes et al. (2009:6-8)
And this gives the reference that I needed for the Shunosaurus tail-spikes (as opposed to the club) — reference 26 is Zhang (1988), which, embarrassingly, we've featured here on SV-POW! in our first Shunosaurus post. Evidently I was so focussed on preparapophyses when I looked at that monograph that I completely failed to register the tail-club spikes — but then, which of us can truly say he has not made that mistake?
Anyway, here's what Zhang has to show us:
And here's that tail again, this time from the poorly reproduced photographic plate 12, part 1, and in right lateral view:
It's apparent that this really is the other side of the distal tail (rather than a reversed image of the same side) because the osteoderms are in front of the club vertebrae in the left-lateral figure, but behind them in the right-lateral plate.
It would be great to say more about these, but the English language summary of Zhang's monograph is understandably brief, constituting six pages of the 90. What's not quite so understandable is that neither the diagnosis of the genus Shunosaurus nor that of the species S. lii mentions the tail-club or spikes, which are arguably the most distinctive features. The "revised diagnosis" on pp. 78-79 does, however — just:
Posterior caudals platycoelous, with small cylindrical centra; neural spines low, rod-like. In several last caudals swollen ralidly [sic] and forming "tail-mace"; in addition there are two pairs of little caudal spines, being analogous to that of stegosaurs.
Not much to go on, but something. That's all, though — there is no further description, and crucially, no indication of whether the tail elements were found articulated or whether the spikes were found isolated and subsequently moved to the end of the tail. It may be that Remes at al. know something I don't, of course — they might have a translation of Zhang (1988) — but if not, then it's amusing to consider that the spikes on the tail of Shunosaurus may or may not be supported by evidence, and that the inference of tail-spikes on Spinophorosaurus might be based on dodgy premises.
The other thing that struck me forcibly, as I looked at the figure and plate above, is that the caudal vertebrae remain fairly complex all the way to the end: they retain distinct and prominent neural spines, unlike the distal caudal vertebrae of diplodocids and brachiosaurs. I notice that the distal caudals of Spinophorosaurus also seem to be complex, based on fig. 3H-I and also on the skeletal reconstruction that is fig. 5 — both of which we've reproduced before, in our old Spinophorosaurus article.
So what's going on here? Are Shunosaurus and Spinophorosaurus unusual in having distal caudals that retain complex neural spines? If so, is this property correlated with the possession of a tail-club and/or spines? Is it causally related? Or could it be that this is normal for basal eusauropods, and my ideas of sauropod tails have been too coloured by extreme neosauropodocentricity? Clearly I ought to go and look at a lot more basal sauropods' distal tails before publishing this post. And prosauropods', theropods', ornithischians', pterosaurs', crocadilians' and lizards' distal tails.
As it happens, the one non-neosauropod group of reptiles whose distal tails I do know something about is monitor lizards, thanks to my adventures with the corpse of "Charlie". And those caudals do maintain astonishingly detailed structure right to the end of the tail, with even absolutely tiny caudals having distinct processes. Here are some photographs that show this.
First, one showing all 56 caudal vertebrae (the 1st is half in frame at top right, next to the sacrum; the rest read from left to right on successive rows, like words on a page).
Now here are five representative caudals from different regions on the tail — the last ones from each row in the picture above, as it happens: caudals 1, 10, 21, 30, 42 and 56. They are in more or less dorsal view, though caudal 1 has fallen forward onto its anterior face. In this and subsequent pictures, caudal 10 (the second shown) is for some reason back to front.
Now here are the same vertebrae, in the same order and orientation, but now in left dorsolateral aspect (except caudal 10 which is of course in right dorsolateral):
Finally, here are the three smallest of these vertebrae (numbers 30, 42 and 56) in close-up, again in left dorsolateral view, so you can more easily see how much structure even the distalmost caudal has:
That last caudal is about 2.5 mm long.
(It's interesting that caudals 30 and 42 have those cute fused chevrons.)
So anyway: we know that caudal vertebrae retain distinct structure all the way down to the tip of the tail in monitor lizards at least some basal eusauropods: could it be that this is the primitive state, and that degenerate caudals are found only in neosauropods and mammals? Gotta prep out some more animals' skeletons and find out!
- Remes, Kristian, Francisco Ortega, Ignacio Fierro, Ulrich Joger, Ralf Kosma, Jose Manuel Marin Ferrer, for the Project PALDES, for the Niger Project SNHM, Oumarou Amadou Ide, and Abdoulaye Maga. 2009. A new basal sauropod dinosaur from the Middle Jurassic of Niger and the early evolution of Sauropoda. PLoS ONE 4(9):e6924. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0006924
- Zhang Yihong. 1988. The Middle Jurassic dinosaur fauna from Dashanpu, Zigong, Sichuam, vol. 1: sauropod dinosaur (I): Shunosaurus. Sichuan Publishing House of Science and Technology, Chengdu, China.
What's the deal with your wacky tail-club, Shunosaurus?
June 11, 2010
In a comment on an earlier article, What's the deal with your wacky postparapophyses, Shunosaurus?, brian engh asked:
What's the deal with most Shunosaur "life restorations" showing spikes on the tail club? I can't find a picture anywhere of a skeleton with any indication of spikes, and yet almost every fleshed-out illustration of Shunosaurs has spikes on it's tail. Anybody know what that's about?
It seems we've never actually featured the famous Shunosaurus tail-club here before — an amazing oversight, and one that I'm going to remedy right now, thanks to Dong et al. (1989). This short paper is written in Chinese, so I can't tell you anything beyond what's in the figures, captions and English-language abstract.
First up, though, here is his illustration of the famed tail-club:
I can't help noticing, though, that although the fused clump of enlarged distal caudal vertebrae constitutes a nice club, it's noticably devoid of spikes. So it remains a mystery why so many restorations show a spiked club. Anyone out know why?
Dong et al. (1989) also obligingly includes a figure of the tail-club of Omeisaurus:
And also a photographic plate showing both clubs (though, as is so often the case, the scan has lost a lot of details):
Now, the big question is: why do Shunosaurus and Omeisaurus — and Mamenchisaurus, for that matter — have tail-clubs when they are not closely related, according to modern phylogenies such as those of Wilson (2002) and Upchurch et al. (2004)? [To be precise, Wilson (2002:fig. 13) had Omeisaurus and Mamenchisaurus clading together, but that clade well separated from Shunosaurus; and Upchurch et al. (2004:fig. 13.18) had all three separate, though with the former two as consecutive branches on the paraphyletic sequence leading to Neosauropoda.]
One possibility is just sheer coincidence: but it's asking a lot to believe that of the 150 or so known sauropods, the only three for which tail-clubs are known just happened to live more or less at the same time and in the same place.
Another option is some oddity in the environment that strongly encouraged the evolution of tail clubs. Yes, this is wildly hand-wavy, but you can sort of imagine that maybe all the local theropods thought it was cool to hunt sauropods by biting their tails, and the clubs evolved in response to that. Or something. There's a similar, but even more mystifying, situtation in the late Early Cretaceous Sahara, where the theropod Spinosaurus, the ornithopod Ouranosaurus and arguably even the sauropod Rebbachisaurus all evolved sails. Why then? When there? No-one knows and no-one's even advanced a hypothesis so far as I know.
Getting back to Jurassic Chinese sauropod tail-clubs, though, there is a third option: could it possibly be that Shunosaurus, Omeisaurus and Mamenchisaurus all form a clade together after all, as proposed back in the day by Upchurch (1998:fig. 19)? Upchurch's pioneering (1995, 1998) analyses both recovered a monophyletic "Euhelopodidae" — a clade of Chinese sauropods that included the three genera above plus the early Cretaceous Euhelopus, also from China. The existence of this clade was one of the two major points of disagreement between Upchurch's and Wilson's phylogenies (the other being the position of the nemegtosaurids, Nemegtosaurus and Quaesitosaurus, which Upchurch placed basally within Diplodocoidea but Wilson recovered as titanosaurs).
Upchurch himself has abandoned the idea of the monophyletic Euhelopodidae, as seen in that 2004 analysis and also in Wilson's and his joint (2009) reassessment of Euhelopus: everyone now agrees that Euhelopus is a basal somphospondyl, i.e. close to Titanosauria, which is a looong way from the basal position that the other Chinese sauropods hold within Sauropoda.) And so the name Euhelopodidae is no longer used. But could it be that Upchurch was half-right, and that when Euhelopus is removed that the group that was named after it, a clade remains?
[If so, then that clade is called Mamenchisauridae: as noted by Taylor and Naish (2007), this name was coined by Young and Zhao (1972) and so has priority over the Omeisauridae of Wilson (2002), as Wilson himself now recognises. Mamenchisauridae was phylogenetically defined (or, as they have it, "diagnosed") by Naish and Martill (2007:498) as "all those sauropods closer to Mamenchisaurus constructus Young, 1954 than to Saltasaurus loricatus Bonaparte".]
As already noted, Omeisaurus and Mamenchisaurus are close together in the recent analyses of both Upchurch and Wilson, so the question becomes: how many additional steps are required to recover Shunosaurus as a member of their clade rather than in its usual more basal position (in the the case of Upchurch's analysis, to move Omeisaurus up a node)? And to this, I do not know the answer — to the best of my knowledge, it's never been tested (or if it has, the result has never been published). I'd test it myself, but I need to stop working on this post and watch Inca Mummy Girl soonest. If , say, 20 additional steps are needed, then forget it. But if we only need, say, three steps, then maybe someone should look at this more closely. Back in 2004, when he was Young And Stupid, Matt Wedel wrote to me, in a private email which I now quote without permission because I am pretty sure he's not going to sue me:
Now that I've defended the status quo [of using unweighted characters in cladistic analysis], there are some things I'd be happy to bend the rules for. If an Omeisaurus pops up with a tail club, then Wilson and Sereno be damned, Omeisaurus and Shunosaurus belong in the same clade. […] So my final word is unweighted characters, please, except for sauropod tail clubs.
Food for thought.
Finally, I leave you with the skeletal reconstruction of Omeisaurus from Dong et al. (1989:fig 3). Long-time readers will notice a more than passing resemblance to the reconstruction from He et al. (1988:fig. 63), which you can see in Omeisaurus is Just Plain Wrong.
It looks very much as though Dong et al. produced their reconstruction by flipping that of He et al. horizontally and pasting on a tail-club. Well, we can't hold that against them — I'd have done the same.
- Dong Zhiming, Peng Guangzhao and Huang Daxi. 1988. The Discovery of the bony tail club of sauropods. Vertebrata PalAsiatica 27(3):219-224.
- He Xinlu, Li Kui and Cai Kaiji. 1988. The Middle Jurassic dinosaur fauna from Dashanpu, Zigong, Sichuan, vol. IV: sauropod dinosaurs (2): Omeisaurus tianfuensis. Sichuan Publishing House of Science and Technology, Chengdu, China. 143 pp. + 20 plates.
- Naish, Darren, and David M. Martill. 2007. Dinosaurs of Great Britain and the role of the Geological Society of London in their discovery: basal Dinosauria and Saurischia. Journal of the Geological Society, London, 164: 493-510. (Bicentennial Review issue.)
- Taylor, Michael P. and Darren Naish. 2007. An unusual new neosauropod dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Hastings Beds Group of East Sussex, England. Palaeontology 50 (6): 1547-1564. doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4983.2007.00728.x
- Upchurch, Paul. 1995. The evolutionary history of sauropod dinosaurs. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B, 349: 365-390.
- Upchurch, Paul. 1998. The phylogenetic relationships of sauropod dinosaurs. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 124: 43-103.
- Upchurch, Paul, Paul M. Barrett and Peter Dodson. 2004. Sauropoda. pp. 259-322 in D. B. Weishampel, P. Dodson and H. Osmólska (eds.), The Dinosauria, 2nd edition. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles. 861 pp.
- Wilson, Jeffrey A. 2002. Sauropod dinosaur phylogeny: critique and cladistic analysis. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 136: 217-276.
- Wilson, Jeffrey A. and Paul Upchurch. 2009. Redescription and reassessment of the phylogenetic affinities of Euhelopus zdanskyi (Dinosauria – Sauropoda) from the Early Cretaceous of China. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 7: 199-239. doi:10.1017/S1477201908002691
- Young, Chung-Chien, 1954. On a new sauropod from Yiping, Szechuan, China. Acta Palaeontologica Sinica II(4):355-369.
- Young, Chung-Chien, and X. Zhao. 1972. [Chinese title. Paper is a description of the type material of Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis]. Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology Monograph Series I, 8:1-30. English translation by W. Downs.
Mamenchisaurus tail club, again
March 30, 2010
In color, this time, with multiple views, thanks to Xing et al. (2009). They also did a finite element analysis of the tail club and concluded that it was a fairly pathetic weapon. Xing et al. closed by supporting the contention of Ye et al. (2001) that the tail club was a sensory organ. As they stated at the end of the abstract:
The tail club of Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis probably also had limitations as a defense weapon and was more possibly a sensory organ to improve nerve conduction velocity to enhance the capacity for sensory perception of its surroundings.
One thing Xing et al. (2009) cite in support of this is the expanded neural canal inside the club, which they compare to the sacral enlargement in stegosaurs and to the glycogen bodies of birds. They rule out a glycogen body on the grounds that the sacral enlargement in stegosaurs is much bigger than the brain volume, whereas the neural canal enlargement in the M. hochuanensis tail club is much smaller (if you don't follow that logic, don't worry, neither do I).
I'm not sure what to make of this thing. On one hand, it would be nice to have more than one club available to rule out the possibility that it's just a weird paleopathology. On the other hand, it looks oddly regular to be pathological, and the definitive clubs in Shunosaurus and Omeisaurus are at least weak support for this being a genuine feature, although the clubs of the former taxa look very different.
Furthermore, I don't understand how the authors can rule out the presence of a glycogen body based on the size of the neural expansion alone–especially since the functions of glycogen bodies in extant taxa are very poorly understood (as you may remember from this dustup). Nor can I fathom how a titchy little nerve bundle–if such existed–down at the end of the tail could do much to improve nerve conduction velocity up the rest of the tail. Either my understanding of neuroscience is completely shot, or this hypothesis…lacks support. I am open to being enlightened either way.
Finally, I am disappointed that the authors didn't pursue the cutting-edge pseudohead hypothesis that has figured prominently here and elsewhere in the blogosphere. There's a Nobel lurking in there, I just know it.
- Xing, L, Ye, Y., Shu, C., Peng, G., and You, H. 2009. Structure, orientation, and finite element analysis of the tail club of Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis. Acta Geologica Sinica 83(6):1031-1040.
- Ye, Y., Ouyang, H., and Fu, Q.-M. 2001. New material of Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis from Zigong, Sichuan. Vertebrata PalAsiatica 39(4):266-271.
Um, dude, there's a thing on your neck
March 15, 2010
On the off chance that the postparapophyses of Shunosaurus weren't enough to sate your appetite for Sino-pod rib-related weirdness, here are a couple of fused cervicals of Klamelisaurus, from the Middle Jurassic of China (from Zhao 1993:plate 1). These are weird for a couple of reasons. First, although fused caudals are pretty common in sauropods (see here), and fused dorsals turn up a lot (see discussion here), and the fusion of the atlas to the axis is not unheard of (see here and here), fusion of the middle or posterior cervicals is rare. Which makes intuitive sense–presumably fusing up your food-reaching organ is counterproductive. The only other example I know of is the pair of fused posterior cervicals in the AMNH 5761 Camarasaurus supremus (which, oddly enough, I don't think we've covered yet on SV-POW!). If you know of others, please let me know.
Anyway, what's really weird about the Klamelisaurus verts is not the fusion but the bar of bone connecting the cervical rib of the first vertebra back to one or more of the centra. I think that the weird pseudo-parapophysis-thingy is not the parapophysis of the second vert, which is hanging down just behind, but some kind of extra ossification off the postero-ventro-lateral corner of the first vert's centrum. Admittedly, that's a lot of interpretation to hang on one grainy photo of a specimen I've never seen. But I've seen something similar in some bird cervicals, where there is sometimes a prong or hook of bone from that corner of the centrum sweeping down and out to brace against the longus colli ventralis tendon that comes off the cervical rib. One of the Apatosaurus cervicals on the wall at Dinosaur National Monument has a similar pair of hooks on its posterior centrum. Irritatingly, I don't have any digitized photos of the Apato vert, and I can't find any photos at all that show what I'm talking about in birds. Sorry to tantalize, I learned it from Darren. When I get pix, I'll post 'em.
In the meantime, you can amuse yourself by pondering the strangeness of the fused Klamelisaurus verts, and by watching the Dinosaur National Monument Quarry Visitor Center get demolished here.
Zhao X. 1993. A new mid-Jurassic sauropod (Klamelisaurus gobiensis gen. et sp. nov.) from Xinjiang, China. Vertebrata PalAsiatica 31(2):132-138.


text:
While in London promoting her sophomore album Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, Nicki Minaj appeared on the Graham Norton Show. Nicki told Graham, "A voice in my head told me to delete my Twitter and that's what I did. I had 11 million followers and I hope they will wait for me."
Graham also asked the Hip-Hop queen if she'd return to twitter…"I don't know yet, I'm thinking about it," she said. "I miss my Barbz, please bear with me."
Nicki Minaj Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded slipped to number 3 this week after debuting at number 1.
Enjoy the video below, great interview especially the 'nictionary' segment!
[youtube id="Ib7XYdCte3M" width="600″ height="350″]


text:
As we learn on page 2 of Emily Brontë's famous novel,
Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr Heathcliff's dwellings, "wuthering" being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather.
The Online Etymology Dictionary tells us that
N. England dial. variant of Scottish and dial. whithering, rushing, whizzing, blustering, from a verb whither (1375), used in ref. to gusts of wind and coughing fits, from O.N. *hviðra (cf. Norw. kvidra, to go quickly to and fro, related to O.E. hwiþa, air, breeze.
This Old Norse origin didn't surprise me; the Viking invasions have left their mark in the North of England, particularly in its various dialects and place names (particularly names ending in -by and -thorpe and of course York, which used to be called Jorvik). This excellent site gives maps of the North-East with places names and their origins.
I read Wuthering Heights when I was a teenager and loved it, so I couldn't wait to go to Haworth, near Leeds, where the Brontë family lived, and discover the landscapes that inspired so many exceptional novels.
I wasn't disappointed.
This is the view on the way to Top Withens, the house that, they say, inspired Wuthering Heights.
And this is Top Withens, which looks nothing like the description of Wuthering Heights in the book.
On a lighter note, my friend Jo asked me whether I danced and wailed around the house in a white dress and was horrified to hear that I didn't know the Kate Bush song. Just when I thought I was getting to grips with this country's culture. In fact, I had heard it, I just had no idea it was about Heathcliff and Catherine. How embarrassing.