Talus, System of measurements
Fossil tali are often well preserved and one would hope them to be very valuable for species determination. Unfortunately it is not quite the case.
Ratio diagrams in Fig.1 show that average tali of all extant species are very much alike when compared to E. hemionus (...)
A lower P2 is not hard to distinguish from a lower M3 (Fig.1). Actually these differences are caricatures of differences between other lower premolars and molars. About seventy years ago Gromova noted them: develoment of the hypostylid (short, wide and flattened on premolars, elongated and (...)
Basilar Length (BL) and Metapodial articular and supra-articular breadths (MC10, MC11, MT10, MT11)
It may be useful to know what metapodials are likely to belong with a given size of skull. Figure 1 shows how distal breadths of MC and MT are related to cranial basilar lengths on extant (...)
INTRODUCTION
Simpson’s ratio diagrams (Simpson 1941, Large pleistocene felines of North America. American Museum Novitates, 1136, p.1-27, 11 fig., New York) provide rapid and easy comparaisons, both of size and shape, for a single bone or a group of bones.
The reference is provided by a single (...)
WITHERS HEIGHT
The height at the withers of a horse used to be expressed in "hands" (one hand = 4 inches) or in “feet†(one foot = 12 inches), and in "inches". Since one inch = 25,4 millimeters, a horse "21 hands high" or “7 feet high†stands 213, 4 cm at the withers. According to Willoughby (...)
VARIABILITY SIZE INDEX (VSI)
The Variability Size Index (VSI) is one of the size index scaling techniques used by archeozoologists (Uerpmann 1982, 1986; Meadow 1986, 1999). Using this technique, global size comparisons are possible even of samples of various but fragmentary and not numerous (...)
WEIGHT ESTIMATIONS
Various attempts are possible, in particular those based on the surface of the upper M1, and on some distal metapodial dimensions. No kind of estimation is really good because species do differ by the relations between their anatomical parts and their weight. This is (...)
BASILAR LENGTH AND MAXIMAL MANDIBULAR LENGTH IN ALLOHIPPUS AND EXTANT EQUUS: SKULL-MANDIBLE CORRELATIONS
1. Skull and Mandible lengths
For a sample of 375 various extant Equus skulls and mandibles, the correlation is good: R2=0.97.
Regressions are:
Basilar length of the skull (1) = (...)