A bad night last night. I was, shall we say, unwell and, as a result, did not get to sleep until sometime after 1 a.m. Which lead to me sleeping until 8:45 a.m., when I'd meant to be up at 6:30 a.m., so that I might actually get some fiction writing done. Yeah, well. That didn't happen. Stress has wrecked my body in ways it has not been wrecked since the stress of college (which I might have said before). At least when it was wrecked for college, there was a point to it all. Alabama, and the Deep South in general, continues to see COVID-19 hospitalizations skyrocket while our governors, the tyranny of evil men and women like Rick DeSantis and Kay Ivey, Tate Reeves and Greg Abbott*, sip their mint julips and Southern Comfort, nibble BBQ, complain about football, and look for new ways to suppress PoC votes and own the Dems – by pushing COVID mortality rates as high as possible. No, it makes no sense. None whatsoever. Especially since so many of the people who voted for them continue to support them and their policies. I cannot decide if this is genocide or a really weird brand of suicide. I mean, after all, in theory, "Republican" voters are at greater risk than all those silly liberals who've fallen for masks and vaccines and science. As I said on Twitter today, if this civilization survives and the dust ever settles, these men and women need to be tried by the ICC for crimes against humanity. How about we talk about anything else but the blood on the hands of these...people. Part of the research I'm currently doing with mosasaurs involves the anatomy and functional morphology of a bone called the quadrate. See the diagram below. The quadrate is that tall bone, sorta shaped like a question mark, that connects the back of the skull to the rear of the mandibles. Mosasaurs, unlike most lizards, exhibit a condition that we call steptostyly, which Wikipedia (sorry, it was handy) describes as "the fore-aft movement of the quadrate about the otic joint (quadratosquamosal joint)." Streptostyly aids in muscular abduction, protraction, and retraction. Normally, this doesn't happen, because the quadrate is firmly fused to the back of the skull in most tetrapods. But not in mosasaurs. Likely, this was part of a suite of characteristics in mosasaurs that aided in feeding without the help of gravity, a problem the terrestrial ancestors of mosasaurs didn't have. This is all part of a larger phenomenon biologists call cranial kinesis, which allows various bones within the mosasaur skull to move independently of one another. Think about snakes ( possibly a relatively close cousin of mosasaurs, actually), how they can swallow things larger than their heads. Well, that's cranial kinesis at work. Snakes have gravity, but no limbs, and so you get the same assist with feeding. Yeah, I know, I'm boring the shit out of you, but at least it's not...you know. Anyway, today's photograph consists of six on the many specimens I'm working with. All of these belong to a relatively common mosasaur called Platecarpus tympaniticus , except for the specimen in the lower right corner, which is from the closely related Plioplatecarpus primaevus. That specimen, by the way, is part of my "first mosasaur," which is to say the first mosasaur I found. I was still in high school when I found it, in July 1980, near Demopolis, Alabama, and, about two years later (I think) I prepped it out on the chalk just before I started college. The were "blobby" stuff on it is the mineral pyrite, which often adversely affects fossils from certain geological units. The two white specimens are plaster casts from Kansas mosasaurs. All the rest are from the basal Mooreville Chalk of Greene and Hale counties, Alabama. There, don't you say I never taught you nothin'. Later Tater Beans, Aunt Beast 5:18 p.m. * No, Texas is not part if the geographic region known as the Deep South, but whatever.