There’s Big News In Necks

If you are anything like me, you probably have a neck—a neck you take for granted. Maybe you do not think often about having a neck, given said neck’s relatively unobtrusive placement below your head and out of your line of sight. Maybe you are trying to look at your neck right now, pressing your chin against your neck, which remains obscured below your chin, which you also can’t see. And yet your ability to even attempt to see your neck is made possible by your neck. Neck-less animals such as valiant Jimothy or every jellyfish have no such rotational privilege.

Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that science has long neglected the humble neck. “There have been a multitude of studies on the development and evolution of the head and pectoral girdle but little on the region in between,” scientists wrote in a 2012 paper about the vertebrate neck in the Journal of Anatomy. Only in the last 30 years has scientific interest in the neck awakened, the researchers write. We here at Defector do not wish to neglect the neck any longer. So please gather round for a long-overdue neck report, because there is breaking neck news.

“Think that fishes and amphibians don’t have necks? Think again”