Tutorial 2: Basic vertebral anatomy
October 4, 2007
At the risk of turning this blog into Brachiosaurus brancai 8th Cervical Picture of the Day, here’s a quick tutorial on your basic sauropod vertebral anatomy, using everyone’s favourite cervical vertebra.
This picture shows the same vertebra as was photographed in the very first SV-POW! entry. I’ve composited the figures of this element from Janensch (1950), an exhaustive and lavishly illustrated monograph on the vertebrae and ribs of B. brancai. Parts of this vertebra’s right-hand side are missing, as is apparent in the anterior and posterior views, but most of it is excellently preserved.
First things first: directions. In standard anatomical descriptions of dinosaurs, the direction towards the front is called anterior, and towards the back is posterior — so an anterior view (such as the top left part of this picture) is looking at the front of the vertebra. Upwards is dorsal, downwards is ventral. Sticking out sideways is lateral, and towards the midline is medial. These directions can be combined into single words that describe oblique directions such as anteroventral, posterolateral and anteroventromedial. (Some poor misguided souls use “cranial” and “caudal” in place of “anterior” and “posterior”, but we’ll have none of that here.)
The main body of the vertebra, the roughly cylindrical part, is called the centrum. At the front of the centrum in sauropod cervicals and most dorsals is a ball which fits into a corresponding socket at the back of the preceding one. The ball is called a condyle, the socket is called a cotyle.
Dorsal to the centrum is the neural arch, which is surmounted by the neural spine. A hollow passageway runs through the neural arch from front to back: this houses the spinal cord, and is called the neural canal. (You can’t really see it in the pictures above; you can make it out much more clearly in the BMNH R2523 photos, anterior and posterior.)
Two processes (which just means pointy bits) project laterally from each side of the vertebra: in cervicals they mostly hang downwards a bit, i.e. they project ventrolaterally. (It is a bit of a mystery to me why we say “project ventrolaterally” in scientific writing instead of “hang down”, but there it is.) The dorsal pair of processes are the diapophyses (singular diapophysis, pronounced dye-a-POFF-a-siss). The ventral pair are the parapophyses. They are the articulation points for the ribs. In cervical vertebrae, the ribs are often fused to the processes that support them; in dorsal vertebrae they are free, attached only by soft tissue. (In the pictured specimen, the ribs are broken off very close to their point of origin. In life, they would have projected backwards as thin cylinders a couple of meters long.)
As you see, the diapophysis, parapophysis and fused cervical rib form a loop lateral to the centrum. This loop doesn’t really have a name — it’s called the ansa costro-transversaria in birds, but very few palaeontologists use avian anatomical nomenclature for sauropods. So we three just call it the “cervical rib loop”.
Finally (for now), we have the zygapophyses. There are two pairs of these: prezygapophyses at the front, and postzygapophyses at a location that I will not insult your intelligence by stating. When vertebrae are strung together in a line, their zygs articulate, but they can slide past each other to a limited degree, allowing some flexibility. How much flexibility is a matter of some debate which we may revisit in another post. The facets of the prezygs always face anteromedially (that’s upwards and inwards, remember?) and the postzygs ventrolaterally, although their precise orientation varies along the spinal column.
That it for now. Coming soon in subsequent tutorials: fossae and foramina; laminae; variation along the column; and much, much more. Remember to tell all your friends that this is where the party is.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
October 5, 2007 at 4:21 am
Thanks for the pronunciation tip on diapophysis. Being able to pronounce things helps a lot to cement them in the mind. To that end, is the first “y” in zygapophysis long or short? In my job in government contracting policy, zygapophysis doesn’t come up in conversation, though once I know how to pronounce it, I’ll find a way to work it in. ‘How’re you doing, Mike?’ ‘OK, I guess but one of my zygapophyseal joints is acting up on me’ ‘Must be this damp humid weather eh.’
Oh, and you were worried about insulting our intelligence. After this post, I’m sure we’ll hear no more of that! :-)
October 5, 2007 at 6:26 am
Dye-a-POFF-a-siss? Not dye-a-pof-I-siss? Dang! I’ve had it wrong all along… How does one pronounce zygapophysis then?
Avian anatomical terms do not seem to work with sauropods, for some reason.
October 5, 2007 at 7:42 am
Emile,
I think most scientific terms — anatomical and taxonomic — are open to a certain amount of leeway in how they’re pronounced. You can go to a conference and hear the name Diplodocidae pronounced anywhere between Dip-loh-DOCK-i-day and Dip-loh-duh-SIDE-ee. Often there is no definitively correct pronunciation. That said, I’ve heard POFF-a-siss much more often than pof-I-siss, and that applied for dia, para- and zyga- versions.
When Jerry Harris named the sauropod Suuwassea (Harris and Dodson 2004) he did the world a big favour by explicitly stating in the paper how that name is intended to be pronounced (SOO-oo-WAH-see-uh). But I’ve heard even that name mispronounced. It’s not the end of the world, is all I’m saying.
October 5, 2007 at 4:28 pm
Never mind the -pophyses (wasn’t that a punk album title?), is the y in zyg pronounced like the i in “zigzag” or like the y in xylophone?
October 5, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Xylophone.
October 5, 2007 at 5:41 pm
Merci beaucoup!
October 6, 2007 at 6:50 am
Got it. Thanks!
October 22, 2007 at 2:34 pm
[…] articular surface, while the concave cotyle is located on the anterior articular surface (see Turotial 2 if you need help with these terms). Vertebrae that have their concave articular faces positioned […]
October 22, 2007 at 8:52 pm
Avian anatomical terms do not seem to work with sauropods, for some reason.
They do work most of the time. They are mentioned here because they are standardised and much more easily applicable than the human terms, which are also standardised.
The one in question should be “ansa costotransversalis”, though, if I’ve correctly guessed that “ansa” is singular.
October 24, 2007 at 8:38 am
I am not going to get into Jerry Harris Wars here, but maybe some time in the future we’ll do a post on why, for such a smart person, Jerry did such a dumb thing when he renamed all the laminae :-)
October 30, 2007 at 7:01 pm
Pleeease, give me an idea about the size of this vert!!!I am working with vertebrae very similar to the wealden bmnh 90, and wondering how they compare, size-wise.
thanks, maria
October 30, 2007 at 8:52 pm
Hi, Maria, nice to hear from you. According to Janensch (1950: 44), this vertebra is 113 cm long from the prezygapophyses to the posterior margin of the centrum. The long prezygs significantly overhang the centrum in Brachiosaurus, though, so the length of the centrum alone is “only” 98 cm. Then again, the “functional length” of the vertebra — the length with which it acts within the whole physical system of the neck — is the length of the centrum minus the condyle, which in life would of course have been buried within the cotyle of the next vertebra. That functional length is 86 cm.
By the way, it’s absolutely typical of Janensch that his table gives all three of these lengths. His work is characterised by a rigour and comprehensiveness that I’ve rarely seen elsewhere. Great papers. If only they weren’t written in German …
It is very interesting that you’re working on vertebrae similar to BMNH R90! Where is your material from, and who are you working with? If you’d like to send us a photo or two, we’ll be happy to post them here. (Plus I’d like to see them for my own curiosity, of course.)
October 31, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Mike – I think Maria’s question about size concerns R90, not the Brachiosaurus cervical vert pictured here. But I could be wrong.
October 31, 2007 at 10:57 pm
Possible. I’ve not measured R90a, but I remember it as being something like 40 cm tall.
November 10, 2007 at 5:14 pm
[…] vertebrawesome. And a nice job it is. Still, I feel funny about you not getting a new picture (ahem), so I’m posting my late entry anyway. For some reason, despite–or perhaps because […]
November 16, 2007 at 10:22 am
[…] need help with some of the following anatomical terms do remember you’ve got our excellent tutorial on vertebral anatomy to help you]. The picture shown here (it’s Fig. 5 from Taylor & Naish 2007) shows […]
November 17, 2007 at 5:07 am
[…] you’ll recall from an earlier post, the neural canal is the hole in a vertebra through which the spinal cord passes. As you can see […]
December 4, 2007 at 12:03 am
[…] version, just in case the verbal description made no sense. I know Mike covered this stuff back in Tutorial 2, but Apatosaurus is frankly pretty freaky in the cervical rib […]
March 7, 2008 at 6:48 pm
[…] sweeping out laterally from the sides of the vertebrae (if you need help with those terms go to Tutorial 2). This mount is nice in showing how wide the neck base was in broad-necked taxa like Camarasaurus […]
May 27, 2009 at 3:02 am
[…] of motion. (”neutral pose” here means that the vertebra are aligned such that the zygapophyses overlap as much as possible.) Diplodocus carnegii, DinoMorph computer model , showing neutral neck […]
June 4, 2009 at 9:11 am
[…] from paired ossification centers on either side of the cartilaginous notochord (see Tutorials 1 and 2 if you need to brush up on vertebral anatomy). The neural arches also start out as left-and-right […]
September 7, 2011 at 11:21 pm
[…] Back in the early tutorials, we covered skeletal details such as regions of the vertebral column, basic vertebral anatomy, pneumaticity and laminae, but we never started out with an overview of the sauropod […]
September 5, 2013 at 7:58 am
[…] Berlin. We spent some time down in the collections, where we were particularly pleased to see the much-admir’d C8 of Giraffatitan‘s paralectotype, MB.R.2181 (previously known as HMN […]
December 13, 2018 at 3:53 pm
[…] The research in this field over the years looked at various methods to determine the neck posture of sauropods in life. Some researchers took the simple route and simply connected the cervical (neck) vertebrae of sauropod dinosaurs and aligned them to have maximum overlap between their zygapophyses. For those unfamiliar with cervical vertebra anatomy, refer to the image below and to the SV-POW tutorial on basic vertebral anatomy. […]
May 28, 2021 at 2:44 pm
[…] of an isolated anterior dorsal, probably the fourth based on the location of the parapophyses (see here for those unfamiliar with vertebral anatomy). It was catalogued BYU 5750 in Jensen’s original […]
October 11, 2021 at 4:38 pm
Dear (Mike or Matt),
I seek your help in something I have been cracking my head about for a while. I have been looking throughout the web for a definite list of all accepted and established vertebral landmarks for sauropods but it seems there is not a comprehensive and exhausted terminology list. I am not only referring to laminar and pneumaticity landmarks and features but also the basic ones. For example, the sides/facets of the ‘centrum’ are named ‘condyle’ and ‘cotyle’; should they be treated and mentioned as distinct anatomical vertebral landmarks, aside of the term ‘centrum’ or are they considered as parts of the ‘centrum’ and thus not be differentiated from it?
Thank you for your time and aid in this conundrum. It may be a stupidly simple or outdated question but there seems not to be a single published paper on sauropod vertebral anatomy out there which would summarize all off the accepted terms. The same issue exists with the term ‘pleurocoel’. Should it be just called something like ‘Lateral pneumatic opening’?
October 11, 2021 at 6:59 pm
Hi, Naomi. Your question is a reasonable one, but to the best of my knowledge no such definitive list exists — the closest thing might be tutorials 3–5 in our own Tutorials section, but I appreciate that that lacks formality. It might be worth our doing another tutorial that aims to be comprehensive. For what it’s worth I think that “condyle” and “cotyle” should definitely be included, but remember they get messed up once you start looking at amphiplatyan posterior dorsals and (even worse) procoelous anterior caudals. (I have on occasion found myself writing nonsense like “In the first caudal vertebra, the condyle is concave”.
On pneumatic openings, Matt and I long ago abandoned the unhelpfully ambigous term “pleurocoel” in favour of the more explicit “pneumatic fossa” and “pneumatic foramen”, since different authors have used “pleurocoel” to refer to both of these. You are right that it would in theory be sensible to use a formalised term like “lateral pneumatic fossa” to distinguish this specific opening from other pneumatic fossae that may exist on the neural arch or elsewhere; in practice, it doesn’t seem to be necessary, and context always makes it clear.
October 1, 2022 at 8:42 am
[…] probably have a category of its own. Among many other appearances it’s popped up in tutorials 2 (Basic vertebral anatomy), 4 (Laminae) and 21 (How to measure the length of a centrum), as well as Bifid Brachiosaurs, […]