A Tale Of Two Ribs - Big Ribs

[tracer]

ok, look, here's the deal. i end up with a fair amount of things over time that annoy me due to their stubborn insistance upon remaining unidentified. and so i think about them. constantly. yes, i wake up in the middle of the night, sit up in bed, take off my infielder's glove, and just sit there, thinking about all the fossils that i have that i don't know what are but if i did and they were cool, tj would have them, but that's a separate problem.

so that's where these two ribs come in. they both have angled thingamajigs on the end that informs my informedness that they must be proximal ends where the ribs attach to the animal vertebratedness. the shorter piece of rib is wide and flattened and shaped in cross-section like an airplane wing. as an aside, have you ever noticed that a lot of skeletal bones seem almost "aerodynamic", in that they're more wide toward the "front" (cranial) end and taper on the caudal side. oh, well, forget all that point. where was i? oh! um, so anyway, the other, long piece of rib i posted a while back and got the impression that maybe it was from a mammoth or some other elephantinosity, and put it away in the trumpeter schnoz section of the palace. but then i got a couple of flatter rib pieces that were of the humongous persuasion and went, hey, what's the dang deal here? and then, along comes tj and his mother of all rare teeth from a slothly eremotherium. so whilst trying to research the heck dog out of eremotheriumusses-i (latin plural plural), i got to noticing that the ribs on the emo skeletons i was looking at were rounder and looked maybe knobby-ended, like the one in the trumpeter schnoz section of the palace.

so the thought has crossed my mind (every night right after i take off the infielder's glove), what if i should move that rounder rib section to the giant rare sloth nook in the foyer by the drawbridge entrance?

i mean, i don't want to throw a big masked ball and have everyone tittering at my lack of appropriate rib locations.

so, like, what do all you earth creatures think about this? and auspex, please jump in if it's neither of the above and is some sort of 20-foot-tall bird.

[Napoleon North]

Birdlike dinosaur = bird

Interesting bone.

[Auspex]

I think it'll take a pretty advanced bone-whisperer to place those in a taxon with confidence.

[tracer]

I think it'll take a pretty advanced bone-whisperer to place those in a taxon with confidence.

well, yes i know that, but i also accept wild-eyed suppositions, and mastercard. sometimes kicking something out of a taxon also has value. and sometimes, just the analysis is its own reward.

tracer livingston me-no-gull

[Xiphactinus]

Tracer - they are pretty honkin big, and to me, pretty honkin big = elephant!

(Either that, or contact Nat. Geo, come up with a sexy name and make a Discovery Channel event out of it.)

"Coming up at 8, 7 Central on Discovery -- a shocking discovery that will set science on its ear. Forget everything you ever thought you knew about prehistory. Introducing: "Herbivore X!" With ribs the size of tennis ball cans, we have reconstructed the entire animal. State of the art CGI will show why no prehistoric plant was safe."

[JohnJ]

Tracer - they are pretty honkin big, and to me, pretty honkin big = elephant!

(Either that, or contact Nat. Geo, come up with a sexy name and make a Discovery Channel event out of it.)

"Coming up at 8, 7 Central on Discovery -- a shocking discovery that will set science on its ear. Forget everything you ever thought you knew about prehistory. Introducing: "Herbivore X!" With ribs the size of tennis ball cans, we have reconstructed the entire animal. State of the art CGI will show why no prehistoric plant was safe."

:geek:

Ohh, you're good...I could hear it in your announcer voice.