5th Palaeontological Virtual Congress: Neural canal ridges in crocs
When our paper on neural canal ridges came out last year (Atterholt et al. 2024), I hoped that it would inspire other people to go peer inside neural canals and discover a lot more of them. My wish was granted, and quickly. In early October I was contacted by William Jude Hart, then an undergrad at Hofstra University in New York (he graduated in December). He was making a poster for the upcoming SVP meeting on a specimen of the large tomistomine crocodilian Thecachampsa, specifically an anterior caudal vertebra with pretty darned unambiguous neural canal ridges:
Since then we’ve found more examples, in both extinct and extant crocodilians, and William invited me to be his coauthor on the description. Our first salvo, Hart and Wedel (2025), is a slide presentation at the 5th Palaeontological Virtual Congress, which is going on right now. Find us in the thematic session, “Unraveling crocodylomorph evolution: insights from fossils and new methodologies“. All of the 5PVC presentations will be up for another week, and registration is measly 5 Euros, so if you’re curious about our findings — and a great many other fascinating paleo things — go check it out.
More 5PVC news shortly. And if you’re interested in neural canal ridges, or neural canal anything, or pretty much any kind of anatomy whatsoever, I have good news: there are tons of things waiting to be discovered by curious folks. I mean, heck, the first neural canal ridges in crocs — not an obscure or understudied clade — were found by an observant undergrad.
Come play.
References
- Atterholt, J., Wedel, M.J., Tykoski, R., Fiorillo, A.R., Holwerda, F., Nalley, T.K., Lepore, T., and Yasmer, J. 2024. Neural canal ridges: a novel osteological correlate of postcranial neuroanatomy in dinosaurs. The Anatomical Record, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.25558
- Hart, W.J., and Wedel, M.J. 2025. First report of neural canal ridges in fossil crocodilians. 5th Palaeontological Virtual Congress. [NB: you will probably need to be registered for 5PVC to follow that link.]
Source: https://svpow.com/2025/03/19/5th-palaeontological-virtual-congress-neural-canal-ridges-in-crocs/
