Cervical vertebra 7 of the turkey, Meleagris gallopavo

[Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com>]

Dear colleagues,

For a paper I'm working on, with my occasional colleague Matt Wedel, I
needed nice multi-view images of a cervical vertebra from a bird --
any bird -- for comparison with sauropod vertebrae.  It found it
surprisingly hard to dig up useful images on Google (by which I mean
of high enough quality to use in the figures of a paper).

So I took my own photos, using the seventh cervical vertebra of a
domestic turkey, Meleagris gallopavo. The bone is pretty small -- the
centrum is 42 mm long -- which makes it tricky to get good
images. Using a tripod-mounted Nikon Coolpix 4500, in "flower mode",
and taking plenty of shots so I could choose the ones that came out
best, I was able to assemble photos from all six cardinal
directions. Using the GIMP, a free PhotoShop-alike, I scaled these
photos to equivalent size, colour-balanced them and composited them
into a single image. Then I placed the photos on three different
backgrounds, white, 50% grey and black.

Anyone who wants to is welcome to use these images.  I've made them
available at full resolution (5405x4432) under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Non-Commercial licence. This means that you are welcome to
make whatever non-commercial use you like with these images, so long
as you attribute me. Specifically, you are free to use these images in
scientific publications, modified or not, so long as you mention where
you got them in the acknowledgements. Also, if you want to print them
out and hang them on your wall just because they're so darned
beautiful, feel free (yes, someone did ask!) -- I just don't want
Athena making a fortune selling Meleagris C7 posters based on them
without giving me a cut.

http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/dino/turkey-cervical/

Enjoy.

 _/|_    ___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor    <mike@indexdata.com>    http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  "Religion is what you sing on Sunday.  Your true faith is what
         you do all week." -- Parke Godwin.