Muscle · Thoracic spine

Rotatores thoracis longi

Musculi rotatores thoracis longi

The long members of the same deep pair — identical in position and direction to the short rotatores beside them, but skipping a vertebra, so each slip runs from a transverse process to the lamina of the second vertebra above rather than the first. That one extra segment is the only difference between the two records, and it is also the only thing it buys: a slightly longer lever on a joint that still barely moves. Like their short partners they sit at the very floor of the back, immediately against the vertebral arches, under multifidus and semispinalis, and they belong to the spine's positional sense as much as to its movement.