February 23, 2009...9:33 am

Wise Up, Mamenchisaurus

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So I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m probably going to have to start sleeping with a whole lot more palaeontologists at this point because I’m totally not as in with the dinosaur crowd as I should very much like to be. What a shame indeed that it’s taken me this long to find out that there is a blog that posts a different sauropod vertebra picture each week. I’m all about niche dinosaur websites, so how has this eluded me thus far? Slutty agendas aside, my favourite SV-POW! post to date is this one, which features the fused distal caudals from a Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis specimen, Doctor Matt Wedel noting that its publishers have suggested, “the expanded neural canal… (in) the tail club fin thingy served as some kind of special sense organ.” He goes on to postulate that this tail-club acted as a kind of “Pseudohead” not unlike that of the southern California centipede, only in this case it had infrared pseudoeyes and a pseudomouth made of a giant nerve bundle, causing it to evolve from being a simple predator-confusion mechanism to a freely-thinking and largely disagreeable appendage which drove the unfortunate Mamenchisaurus to tred in his own feces before ultimately rendering itself extinct. It probably looked something like this:

mamenchisaurus-pseudohead-in-charge1

But hey, listen, Mamenchisaurus, it doesn’t have to be like that. Look at the Pokémon, they have to exist within a Pokéball’s distance of each other and they get along okay. You’ve got a whole 72 feet worth of sauropod body to keep your Realhead and your Pseudohead from bickering, you just need to be more regimented. You see, the Pokémon, they share their battle-fighting duties, so they don’t get all jealous and bitchy with each other to the point that they inevitably drive their entire operation to extinction. Alright, so maybe the really ugly/gaseous ones end up getting less face-time than the cute ones, but that’s natural section for you. And sure, Pseudohead, it can get pretty boring while Realhead is navigating Rest-O-Body through the Tithonian, biting the knees of carnosaurs and the like, but that’s what hobbies are for. Get an ant farm, knit a pair of mittens, or even write a science fiction novel about what would happen if you and your dinosaur friends rise up from under the streets of Paris and wreak havoc on its residents. The possibilities are endless, Pseudohead! You might even enjoy them more than trying to swallow a mouthful of Late Jurassic fern though the tailbone. Think about it. …Erm, Broadway? Well, probably not, Pseudohead, because you kind of still have to be present and attached during your time off. Sorry. (Seriously, Mamenchisaurus, you don’t really want to end up like those tiny modern lizards who can’t jump without having their in-air stability fucked with because their tails are off doing other things, do you? Exactly.) Let me know when you get back from extinction if you’d like to discuss this further.

- bec

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Filed under Archosaurs, Fossils, Museum Stuff, Science

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