Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

We all know what turkeys look like, right?

Turns out that two thirds of that bird is a lie. Here’s a diagram produced for hunters on which part of the turkey to shoot. (It’s all over the Internet, and I can’t trace the original source, but I got it from here):

Bascially, if you fire an arrow at a visible turkey, there’s a 2/3 chance that it’ll pass straight through feathers and completely miss the actual bird.

Now, then: what do we think a theropod looked like in life? Probably not much like what skeleton reconstructions show as the flesh envlope, as for example in Scott Hartman’s Guanlong:

Instead, it might have looked like this:

(Note: this is not in any way a criticism of Scott’s fine work, which is a scientific restoration of the soft tissue, and does not address integument at all.)

And now that pterosaurs have feathers, too(*), we have to assume that they, too, probably had body outlines bearing little resemblance to the flesh-on-bone shapes we’ve been used to seeing.

(*) As Matt pointed out: “I can’t be bothered to write “integumentary structures” when I mean “feathers”. I realize they may be independently derived, but eyes evolved independently like 40 times and we don’t refer to the other 39 instances as “photoreceptive structures”.” (He actually wrote “I can’t be arsed”, but I changed it to “bothered” to make him appear more professional.)