fossae

Arsia Mons, he said, is home to the biggest mountain glacier on Mars now buried, but as much as three miles deep when snow was falling in ancient times, climate modelers have concluded, and the area is filled with hundreds of miles of deep fractures in the ground, or “fossae,” as such Martian features are called.

First Contact Marc Kaufman 2011

Arsia Mons, he said, is home to the biggest mountain glacier on Mars now buried, but as much as three miles deep when snow was falling in ancient times, climate modelers have concluded, and the area is filled with hundreds of miles of deep fractures in the ground, or “fossae,” as such Martian features are called.

First Contact Marc Kaufman 2011

I worked out that about 60% of each of its lateral surfaces was occupied by the fossae that housed lateral air sacs, and because the specimen is broken in half I could also see that very little of its interior was filled up by internal bony struts: most of it would have been air.

Archive 2006-07-01 Darren Naish 2006

Importantly, the fossae are connected (via openings on their bony walls) to large internal chambers.

Archive 2006-07-01 Darren Naish 2006

The thing was a complex mess of bony laminae and concavities (termed fossae), few of which were symmetrical when you compared the two sides.

Archive 2006-07-01 Darren Naish 2006

And the presence of the glands in this location might explain another unusual aspect of metriorhynchid cranial anatomy, namely the strange elongate, groove-like antorbital fossae present in these animals (the antorbital fossa is an accessory opening present on the side of the skull in archosaurs).

Archive 2006-07-01 Darren Naish 2006

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about sauropod vertebrae is how pneumatic they were – the lateral fossae, and the interior of the vertebrae, were occupied, in life, by air sacs.

Archive 2006-07-01 Darren Naish 2006

Bony struts, called laminae, divide the fossae and connect the main ‘landmarks’ of the bone (such as the pre - and postzygapophyses), and each of these laminae has a name.

Archive 2006-07-01 Darren Naish 2006

A recently taken high resolution stereo camera picture shows the Mangala fossae trough, which is a system of outflow channels on Mars.

Photos Show Evidence of Water on Mars 2008

The thing was a complex mess of bony laminae and concavities (termed fossae), few of which were symmetrical when you compared the two sides.

‘Angloposeidon’, the unreported story, part I Darren Naish 2006