Summary: Looking for Reference Works

[Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com>]

Last week, I posted the following query:

        > Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2003 13:44:00 GMT
        > From: Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com>
        > 
        > There are two books (or maybe papers) I'd dearly like to own
        > if anyone's ever put them together.  They would be
        > invaluable for all sorts of studies.  I'll briefly describe
        > them, and if anyone knows whether they exist you can let me
        > know.  I'll summarise on-list.
        > 
        > First one, a table of body-part measurements and masses for
        > various animals.  I'm talking about a book where, when I
        > want to know the length of a weasel forelimb, the diameter
        > of a water buffalo's belly or the mass a heron's neck, I can
        > just look it up.
        > 
        > Second one, a set of X-rays of various animals' necks,
        > ideally showing the extent of soft tissue as well as the
        > morphology of the cervical vertebrae.
 
The results are in, and they can be summarised as follows:

Ken Carpenter said (as I had feared) that the works I'm looking for
don't really exist.  The information is all out there, but it's
scattered throughout various publications, for example Walker's
_Mammals of the World_ and Damuth & MacFadden's _Body Size in
Mammalian Paleobiology_.

Rob Gay suggested that I might find what I'm looking for on the
Digital Morphology web-site (http://www.digimorph.org/) -- but, while
it's a fascinating site, it seems woefully lacking in necks, which is
what I'm interested in.

And that's pretty much it.  Sorry I don't have more to report.

 _/|_    _______________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor  <mike@indexdata.com>  http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
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