Here’s a dorsal vertebra of Camarasaurus in anterior view (from Ostrom & McIntosh 1966, modified by Wilson & Sereno 1998). It is one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen in a sauropod. It makes my skin crawl.
Here’s why: the centrum and the thing we habitually call the ‘neural arch’ aren’t fully fused, and as this modified version makes clear, the ‘neural arch’ is neither neural nor an arch. Instead of being bounded ventrally by the centrum and dorsally and laterally by the neural arch, the neural canal lies entirely below the synchondrosis between the not-really-an-arch and the centrum.
Why?! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT, CAMARASAURUS? This is not ‘Nam. This is basic vertebral architecture. There are rules.
Look at c6 of Apatosaurus CM 555 here, behaving as all good vertebrae ought to. Neural arch be archin’, as the kids say.
And if you are seeking solace in the thought that maybe the artist just drew that Cam dorsal incorrectly, forget it. I’ve been to Yale and examined the original specimen. I’ve seen things, man!
Camarasaurus isn’t the only pervert around here. Check this out:
Unfused neural arch of a caudal vertebra of a juvenile Alamosaurus from Big Bend. And I mean, this is a neural arch. This may be the most neural of all neural arches, in that it contains the entire neural canal. It’s more of a neural…ring, I guess. That’s right, this Alamosaurus caudal is batting for the opposite team from the Cam dorsal above. And it’s a team that neither you nor I play on, because we have well-behaved normal-ass vertebrae with neural arches that actually arch, and then stop, like God and Richard Owen intended.
Scientifically, my question about these vertebrae is: well, that is, I mean to say, what!? I think they have damaged me in some fundamental way.
If you have anything more intelligent to add (or even less intelligent – consider the gauntlet thrown down!), the comment thread is open.
References
- Ostrom, John H., and John S. McIntosh. 1966. Marsh’s Dinosaurs. Yale University Press, New Haven and London. 388 pages including 65 absurdly beautiful plates.
- Wilson, J. A. and Paul C. Sereno. 1998. Early evolution and higher-level phylogeny of sauropod dinosaurs. Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, Memoir 5: 1-68.
Who owns your favourite journal?
May 25, 2017
This is an important question, and one that is all too easy to overlook. No doubt the editorial board of Lingua assumed that they owned and controlled their journal, right up to the moment they decided to find a different publisher who would help them transition to reasonably priced open access. Only then did Elsevier flex their muscles and tell them “no”. Which is why the board left the journal en masse and started a new journal, Glossa, which is the continuation of the old one in everything but name.
An editorial board can influence a journal’s direction; but really, the board, or other representatives of the scholarly community, need to own a journal in order to be free to take it in the direction that best benefits that community.
This is the reason that I can’t quite be completely satisfied by what is unquestionably my favourite journal, PeerJ: it’s privately owned by its two founders, one personal investor and one corporate investor. Everything they have done so far indicates that they are genuinely running the journal in the best interests of the scholarly community: but what happens if Elsevier decides that PeerJ is a threat, and offers the founders $20M each to sell up? We can’t really tell.
This is one area where the older and more pedestrian PLOS ONE still scores over PeerJ, despite its antiquated numbered references and inflated APC: it’s owned by PLOS, which states on its very front page that “PLOS is a nonprofit publisher, innovator and advocacy organization.” The footer of every page on their site says “PLOS is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation, #C2354500, and is based in San Francisco, California, US”.
(In the US, all 501(c)(3) entities — or charities, as we call them in Britain — must disclose their tax-exemption applications on demand, and the IRS can provide copies directly. Though PLOS could get some bonus openness points by putting the relevant documents right there on the site.)
As a palaeontologist, even though I no longer submit to non-open-access journals, I am concerned about ownership of the Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology and of Palaeontology. I know these journals were started by, and are run by, their Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and the Palaeontological Association respectively — but do these organisations own the journals, or do their publishers (Taylor & Francis and Wiley respectively)? It may turn out that it never matters — but it may turn out that it matters enormously. That’s the point, really: we can’t tell.
That’s why a whole section of the Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure — a third of the substance of that document — is dedicated to governance. It’s crucial for real, reliable and sustainable open access. Which leads me to …
Fair OA Principle 1. The journal has a transparent ownership structure, and is controlled by and responsive to the scholarly community.
Step 1: Include the Share-Alike provision in your Creative Commons license, as in the mysteriously popular CC BY-SA and CC BY-NC-SA.
Step 2: Listen to the crickets. You’re done. Congratulations! No-one will ever use your silhouette in a scientific paper, and they probably won’t use your stuff in talks or posters either. Luxuriate in your obscurity and wasted effort.
Pachyrhinosaurus canadensis by Andrew A. Farke, CC BY 3.0, courtesy of PhyloPic.org.
Background
PhyloPic is the incredibly useful thing that Mike Keesey made where makers upload silhouettes of organisms and then people can use them in papers, posters, talks, on t-shirts, bumper stickers, and so on.
At least, they can if the image license allows it. And tons of them don’t, because people include the stupid Non-Commercial (NC) and even stupider Share-Alike (SA) provisions in their image licenses. (Need a refresher on what those are? See the tutorial on licenses.)
Why are these things dumb? Well, you could make a case for NC, but it will still probably kill most potential uses of your images. Most journals are run by companies — well, most are run by incredibly rapacious corporations that extract insane profits from the collective suckerhood that is academia — and using such an image in a for-profit journal would break the Non-Commercial clause. Even open-access journals are a bit murky.
But Share-Alike is way, way worse. What it means is that any derivative works that use material released under CC-BY-SA have to be released under that license as well. Share-Alike came to us from the world of software, where it actually has some important uses, which Mike will expand upon in the next post. But when it comes to PhyloPic or pretty much any other quasi-academic arena, including the Share-Alike provision is misguided.
As of this writing, PhyloPic has two silhouettes of Panphagia. I can actually show you this one, because it doesn’t have the Share-Alike license attached. The other one is inaccessible. Image by Ricardo N. Martinez and Oscar A. Alcober, CC BY 3.0, courtesy of PhyloPic.org.
Why not Share-Alike?
Why is Share-Alike so dumb for PhyloPic? It’s a viral license that in this context accomplishes nothing for the creator. Because the downstream material must also be CC BY-SA (minimally, or CC BY-NC-SA), almost any conceivable use is prevented:
- People can’t use the images in barrier-based journals, because they’re copyrighted.
- People can’t use the images in almost all OA journals, because they’re CC BY, and authors can’t just impose a more restrictive license on them willy-nilly.
- People can’t use the images in their talks or posters, unless they want to make their talks and posters CC BY-SA. Even people who do release their talks and posters out into the wild are probably going to use CC BY if they use anything; they care about being cited, not about forcing downstream users to adopt a pointlessly restrictive license.
- People probably can’t use the images on t-shirts or bumper stickers; at least, I have a hard time imagining how a physical object could meet the terms of CC BY-SA, unless it’s being given away for free. And even if one could, most downstream creators probably won’t want the headache — they’ll grab a similar image released under a less restrictive license and move on.
- I can’t even blog the CC BY-SA images because everything we put on this blog is CC BY (except where noted by a handful of more restrictive museum image use policies), and it would more than a little ironic to make this one post CC BY-SA, which it would have to be if it included CC BY-SA images.
You may think I’m exaggerating the problem. I’m not. If you look at the Aquilops paper (Farke et al. 2014), you’ll see a lot of ceratopsian silhouettes drawn by Andy Farke. We were making progress on the paper and when it came time to finish the illustrations, most of the silhouettes we needed had the Share-Alike provision, which made them useless to us. So Andy drew his own. And while he was doing that, I took some of my old sauropod drawings and converted them to silhouettes and uploaded them. Both of us used CC BY, because all we care about is getting cited. And now people are using — and citing! — Andy’s and my drawings in preference to others, some arguably better (at least for the sauropods), that have pointlessly restrictive licenses.
So we have this ridiculous situation where a ton of great images on PhyloPic are essentially unusable, because people put them up under a license that sounds cool but actually either outright blocks or at least has a chilling effect on almost any conceivable use.
Is this a good silhouette of Camarasaurus? Maybe, maybe not. But that’s beside the point: this is currently the only silhouette of Camarasaurus on PhyloPic that you can actually use. By Mathew Wedel, CC BY 3.0, courtesy of PhyloPic.org.
What I do about this
Here’s my take: I care about one thing and one thing only, which is credit. All I need is CC BY. If someone wants to take my stuff and put it in a product and charge a profit, I say go for it — because legally every copy of that product has to have my name on it somewhere, credited as the creator of the image. I may not be making any money off that product, but I’m at least getting exposure. If I go CC BY-NC, then I also don’t get any money, and now I don’t even get that exposure. Why would I hack my own foot off like that? And I don’t use CC BY-SA because I don’t write software, so it has only downsides to offer me.
Now, there are certainly artists in the world with sufficient talent to sell t-shirts and prints. But even for them I’m skeptical that CC BY-NC has much to offer for their PhyloPic silhouettes. I know we’re all nuts around here for monochrome filled outlines of dead animals, but let’s be real, they’re a niche market at best for clothing and lifestyle goods. Personally I’d rather get the citations than prevent someone in Birmingham or Bangkok from selling cladogram t-shirts with tiny copies of my drawings, and I think that would still be true even if I was a professional artist.
What you should do about this
I suspect that a lot of people reading this post are dinosaur enthusiasts. If you are, and you’d like to get your name into published scientific work (whether you pursue writing and publishing yourself or not), get drawin’, and upload those babies using CC-BY. Make sure it is your own original work, not just a skin thrown over someone else’s skeletal recon, and don’t spam PhyloPic with garbage. But if you can execute a technical drawing of a critter, there’s a good chance it will be used and cited. Not only because there are still holes in PhyloPic’s coverage, but because so many otherwise great images on PhyloPic are locked up behind restrictive licenses. To pick an example nearly at random, PhyloPic has two silhouettes of Pentaceratops, and both of them are useless because of the Share-Alike provision in their licenses. You have an opportunity here. Don’t tarry.
If you already uploaded stuff to PhyloPic using CC BY-SA for whatever reason (it sounded cool, Joe Chill murdered your folks, you didn’t realize that it was academic reuse equivalent of radioactive syphilis), change it or replace it. Because all it is doing right now is driving PhyloPic users to other people’s work. Really, honestly, all you are doing is wasting your time by uploading this stuff, and wasting the time of PhyloPic users who have to hover over your pictures to find out that they’re inaccessible.
You don’t get any credit if no-one ever uses your stuff. Or, more precisely, you get 100% of a pie that doesn’t exist. That’s dumb. Stop doing it.
Reference
Hey sports fans! I met David Lindblad at Beer ‘N Bones at the Arizona Museum of Natural History last month, and he invited me to talk dinosaurs on his podcast. So I did (LINK). For two hours. Some of what I talk about will be familiar to long-time readers – dinosaur butt-brains and the Clash of the Dinosaurs saga, for example. But I also just sorta turned off my inhibitions and let all kinds of speculative twaddle come gushing out, including the specter of sauropod polyphyly, which I don’t believe but can’t stop thinking about. David was a gracious and long-suffering host and let me yap on at length. It is more or less the kind of conversation you could have with me in a pub, if you let me do most of the talking and didn’t want to hear about anything other than dinosaurs.
Is it any good? Beats me – I’m way too close to this one to make that call. Let me know in the comments.
Oh, I didn’t have any visuals that really fit the theme so I’m recycling this cool image of speculative sauropod display structures by Brian Engh. Go check out his blog and Patreon and YouTube channel.
OMNH 2162, probable dorsal 2 of the big apatosaur
May 23, 2017
Anterior view. Dorsal is to the upper right. The neural spine and left transverse process are missing.
Here’s a closeup of the condyle. The outer layer of cortical bone is gone, allowing a glimpse of the pneumatic chambers inside the vert. The erosion of the condyle was probably inflicted post-excavation by relatively unskilled WPA workers, whose prep tools were limited to chisels, penknives, and sandpaper. Because the bones from the Kenton localities are roughly the same color as the matrix, the preparators sometimes did not realize that they were sanding into the bones until the internal structure was revealed. Bad for the completeness of this specimen, but good for pneumaticity junkies like me, because this baby is too big to be scanned by any but the largest industrial CT machines.
For other posts on the giant Oklahoma apatosaur, see:
Owl legs lie
May 12, 2017
Here is your occasional reminder of how very misleading feathers can be in understanding the true shape of an animal. An owl:
And the same owl showing a bit of leg:
And here are the two photos side by side:
We’ve often told you here on SV-POW! that necks lie. But legs lie, as well. Not to mention arms. Which is why so most of our life restorations of dinosaurs (theropods at least) probably look nothing like these animals looked in life.
Credit: I got the owl images from this Japanese page, but I have no idea where they originated. There are copies all over the Web, and figuring out which are the originals — if they’re even still up — would be a major research project. At any rate, you ought to be told that they are not my photos.
This tired old argument came up again on Twitter this evening, in light of Elsevier’s me-too announcement of a preprint archive:
Brian Nosek: Elsevier enters the biology #preprints space: https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/ssrn/biorn
Me: KILL IT WITH FIRE
Brian Lucey: I’ve used SSRN from its inception. Never ever felt it as anything but useful. That’s not changed with Elsevier.
And elsewhere in the same thread:
Me: We want preprints to be supported by community-owned initiatives that will not try to take total control.
William Gunn: Well, you said the same stuff about Mendeley and it wasn’t true then, either, so…
So what’s the problem? Mendeley and SSRN are still around, right
Yes, they are. But they continue to exist only by the grace of Elsevier. At any moment, that could change. And here’s why.
Subway is a chain of fast-food outlets that makes sandwiches. As it happens there is a branch in Cinderford, the nearest town to where I live. Which is nice.
Now everyone knows and understands that Subway is a corporation that exists to enrich its shareholders. That’s fine: no-one resents it, because it’s what it is. If the Cinderford branch makes money for them, they’ll keep it open and everyone will be happy. But if it doesn’t, then they’ll close that branch and no-one will be surprised. Because Subway’s mission is not to bring dining options to rural England, but to make money. No harm, no foul, that is just what they are.
But by the same token, Elsevier is a corporation that exists to enrich its shareholders. That’s not a controversial claim, it’s a simple statement of fact. And it’s not a criticism, it’s just recognising reality. We don’t even need to resent it: we just need to recognise it, and make our choices accordingly.
Now, from Elsevier’s perspective, Mendeley and SSRN, and indeed BioRN, are simply branches of Subway. They exist to make money for their shareholders. That’s their mission. Once more, not a criticism: just a fact.
But what this means is that the moment they are not making money, they will be shut down, just as the Cinderford branch of Subway would be. And, for that matter, just as BioMedNet, ChemWeb and ElsevierEngineering were shut down. Because Elsevier’s mission is not to further scholarship, it’s to make money. Again, not a criticism: just a fact.
What does it mean for Mendeley and SSN to “make money”? It may be that these branches of the Elsevier empire provide very little in the way of direct revenue. But someone will have run the numbers and shown that what they cost to run is less than their value to the corporation in terms of visibility, PR, drawing customers into other Elsevier products, etc. If it weren’t so, then they wouldn’t be running these services — because their responsibility is to shareholders, not scholars.
And you can bet that as soon as they day comes that they conclude Mendeley and SSRN are not paying for themselves, those services will go down in flames.
Now. It’s fine if Subway run their Cinderford branch for eighteen months and then decide it’s not working out. if they close it, I can just go down the road and get a kebab or a Chinese. But it’s not fine if scholarly infrastructure vanishes, or changes its terms, or becomes available only to members, or what have you. We need to be able to rely on scholarly infrastructure. Which is why in the end it needs to be owned and run by the scholarly community.
This is why I am becoming more and more convinced of the importance of the Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure, which lay out the conditions for a service to be reliable, sustainable and safe from hijacking. (I expect to write more about the Principles some time soon.)
The bottom line is just this: Elsevier’s mission is money and their duty is to shareholders. But our mission is research and our duty is to the world. We and they are simply not aligned. That doesn’t mean they can’t provide and charge for useful services. But it does mean that they can’t be allowed to own and control infrastructure.
That’s why no-one should submit preprints to BioRN. Let this effort move directly from cradle to grave without passing Go. There are already plenty of good preprint options for bioscientists: PeerJ preprints, BiorXiv, arXiv’s q-bio category, the whole ASAPbio initiative) and even for palaeontologists in particular (PaleorXiv).
Use those. Don’t give Elsevier control over scholarly infrastructure.
For a long while, there has been a lot of anger among researchers and academic librarians towards the legacy publishers: the big corporations that control access to most of the world’s scholarly output. But what exactly is the problem? Let’s briefly consider several possibilities, and see if we can figure out which ones really matter.
Is it the publishers’ profit margins? As we’ve discussed before, the Big Four publishers all make profits in the region of 35% of revenue, which is more than Google (25%) or Apple (29%) make. Essentially every time you buy something from Elsevier, a third of the money goes straight into shareholders’ pockets.
But as I have previously argued, I don’t think this, in isolation, is a big problem. A company that could make a car for $500, if it sold that car for $1000, would be making a 50% profit: but that wouldn’t matter, because what we actually care about is the price we pay, not whether the price goes on costs or profits.
So is the problem with legacy publishers the sheer cost of their products (whether made up of profit or internal costs)? This is definitely an issue, and has been for a long time: the serials crisis goes back several decades. It certainly seems to be true that publishers are collecting exploitative rent on research outputs that they own, hiking up prices much faster than inflation and using underhand tactics to force renegotiation in their favour. This is underhand and destructive — but not the core of the issue.
Perhaps we get closer to the heart when we consider the provision of free labour by the authors, peer-reviewers and editors who donate their time, effort and professional expertise to enrich the publishers. No-one disputes that publishers add some value to the published work; but clearly 90% of the value is in the author’s submission, and 90% of the remainder in the volunteer-run editorial process. It sticks in the craw that the only people who benefit financially from all this are the ones who contribute least.
All of this so far has been to do with how scholarship is generated and how it then generates revenue. But maybe the real issue is what happens once it’s become a product: almost nobody can actually read the papers. To me, this is a much more fundamental issue. Whatever the academic community spends on subscriptions, the opportunity cost of all the papers we can’t read is far greater — and that is true on an enormously greater scale when we take into account the trifling matter of the world outside academia. (Bonus points: even when you can read the papers you are often limited in what you can do with them due to restrictive licences. Content-mining, data-reuse, lecture preparation, Wikipedia edits and much more are impeded by such limitations.)
But maybe even more fundamental than this is the problem that legacy publishers own and control the scholarly literature. That is the foundational truth that underlies all the other bad things I’ve listed here. They own the copyright because researchers give it to them. And so can we honestly be surprised when corporations, given a resource, then exploit it for financial gain?
—
The solution in the end is very, very simple: we have to stop giving them our good stuff. Just don’t. Don’t give your work to subscription-based journals. Don’t review for them. And don’t act as an editor for them. Scholarship belongs to the world, not to publishers who do the opposite of publishing. Publish your work where it benefits the world.
Two new sauropods in PeerJ today: Galeamopus pabsti (sp. nov) and Vouivria damparisensis (gen. et sp. nov.)
May 2, 2017
The best-preserved presacral vertebra of Vouivria damparisensis (Mannion et al. 2017: fig. 10).
New goodies out today in PeerJ: Tschopp and Mateus (2017) on the new diplodocid Galeamopus pabsti, and Mannion et al. (2017) redescribe and name the French ‘Bothriospondylus’ as Vouivria damparisensis.
C7 of Galeamopus pabsti (Tschopp and Mateus 2017: fig. 24).
Both papers are packed with interesting stuff that I simply don’t have time to discuss right now. Possibly Mike and I will come back with subsequent posts that discuss these critters in more detail. We both have a connection here besides our normal obsession with well-illustrated sauropods – Mike reviewed the Galeamopus paper, and I reviewed Vouivria. Happily, both sets of authors chose to publish the peer-review histories, so if you’re curious, you can go see what we said.
For now, I’ll just note that C7 of Galeamopus pabsti, shown above, is intriguingly similar in form to Vertebra ‘R’ of YPM 429, the ‘starship’ Barosaurus cervical (illustrated here). Mike and I spent a lot of time puzzling over the morphology of that vert before we convinced ourselves that much of its weirdness was due to taphonomic distortion and a restoration and paint job that obscured the fact that the metapophyses were missing. Given our ongoing project to unravel the wacky morphology of Barosaurus, I’m looking forward to digging into the morphology of G. pabsti in more detail.
I’ll surely irritate Mike by saying this, but my favorite figure in either paper is this one, Figure 4 from Tschopp and Mateus (2017). I can’t remember ever seeing an exploded skull diagram like this for a sauropod before, but it’s extremely helpful and I love it.
And that’s all for now. Go read these papers – they’re both substantial contributions with intriguing implications for the evolution of their respective clades. Congratulations to both sets of authors for producing such good work.
References
- (2017) The earliest known titanosauriform sauropod dinosaur and the evolution of Brachiosauridae. PeerJ 5:e3217 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3217
- (2017) Osteology of Galeamopus pabsti sp. nov. (Sauropoda: Diplodocidae), with implications for neurocentral closure timing, and the cervico-dorsal transition in diplodocids. PeerJ 5:e3179 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3179
Turns out that if Mike and I don’t post about sauropods for a while, people start doing it for us! This very interesting project by Tom Johnson of Loveland, Colorado, first came to my attention when Tom emailed Mark Hallett about it and Mark kindly passed it on to me. I got in touch with Tom and asked if he’d be interested in writing it up for SV-POW!, and here it is. Many thanks to Tom for his willingness to share his work with us. Enjoy! – Matt Wedel
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
The sauropod formerly known as Apatosaurus in the American Museum of Natural History was the first permanently mounted sauropod dinosaur in the world, and for many years, the most famous (Brinkman 2010). The greater part of the skeleton consists of the specimen AMNH 460 from the Nine Mile Crossing Quarry north of Como Bluff, Wyoming, supplemented with bones from other AMNH specimens from Como Bluff, Bone Cabin Quarry, and with plaster casts of the forelimbs of the holotype specimen of Brontosaurus excelsus (YPM 1980) at the Yale Peabody Museum.
A herd of Brontosaurus skeleton models parading before four box covers issued between the 1950s and 1990s.
Like many aging boomer dinophiles, my dinosaur epiphany was the result of books, movies, and toys available in the 1950s, but especially a series of plastic model dinosaur skeletons that appeared around 1958. The Brontosaurus was my personal favorite, and, like the Tyrannosaurus and Stegosaurus models in the series, was very obviously based on the AMNH mount. The models were reissued at least three times over the years and can still be found either “mint in box” or more often in various stages of completion.
Apatosaurus lousiae 1/12 scale skeleton, modelled by Phil Platt, assembled and photographed by Brant Bassam. Image courtesy of BrantWorks.com.
The crème de la crème today, of course, is the 1:12 scale Apatosaurus skeleton model by Phil Platt, available from Gaston Design in Fruita, Colorado. A particularly nice example is the one completed and mounted by Brant Bassam of BrantWorks. The Platt skeleton is a replica in the true sense of the word. The plastic models are pretty crude in comparison, as cool as they appeared to us as kids.
I was interested in skeletal illustrations I have seen of Tyrannosaurus rex, which compare the completeness of various specimens by showing the actual bones included by coloring them red. A 2005 study of Apatosaurus by Upchurch et. al. examined eleven of the most complete Apatosaurus individuals, and I was interested to see the actual bones known for each specimen. Using published descriptions, red markers, and copies of a skeletal silhouette of Apatosaurus (permission obtained from the artist), I prepared a comparison of the most completely known Apatosaurus specimens. It was clear, of course, that Apatosaurus louisae (CM 3018) is the most complete specimen of the Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus group. But it also was apparent that old AMNH 460 included a substantial portion of the skeleton, even if it is a composite.
I grabbed some additional markers and, using the illustration of the mount in William Diller Matthew’s popular book Dinosaurs (Matthew 1915, fig. 20, which I trust is in the public domain by now), I color-coded the bones according to the composition as listed in Matthew’s (1905) article:
- AMNH 460, Nine-Mile Crossing Quarry: 5th, 6th, 8th to 13th cervical vertebrae; 1st to 9th dorsal; 3rd to 19th caudal; all ribs; both coracoids; “parts of” sacrum and ilia; both ischia and pubes; left femur and astragalus; and “part of” the left fibula. RED
- AMNH 222, Como Bluff: right scapula, 10th dorsal vertebra, right femur and tibia. GREEN
(Visitors to AMNH: you can see the rest of AMNH 222 under the feet of the hunched-over Allosaurus) - AMNH 339, Bone Cabin Quarry: 20th to 40th caudal vertebrae. LIGHT BLUE
- AMNH 592, Bone Cabin Quarry: metatarsals of the right hind foot. VIOLET
- YPM 1980, Como Bluff: left scapula, forelimb long bones (casts). YELLOW
- The remaining parts of the skeleton are either modeled in plaster or are unspecified (“a few toe bones”). BLACK
It occurred to me that I might have sufficient spare parts of old ITC and Glencoe Brontosaurus models to create a three-dimensional version. I did, and painting prior to assembly definitely made the job easier.
There are obviously limitations to using Matthew’s (1915) reconstruction (e.g., only 13 cervicals) and the model (12 cervicals). It is also not clear from Matthew’s description how much of the sacrum and ilia were restored. Nevertheless, the painted model does provide a colorful, if crude, visualization of the composition of the composite.
Here are some more photos of the finished product:
A view from the front of the model, compared with a historical AMNH photo of the forelimbs and pelvic girdle.
Long considered a specimen of Brontosaurus excelsus or Apatosaurus excelsus, AMNH 460 was referred to Apatosaurus ajax by Upchurch et. al. in 2005. In the most comprehensive analysis of diplodocid phylogeny to date, Tschopp et. al. (2015) found AMNH 460 to be an “indeterminate apatosaurine” pending a “detailed analysis of the specimen.” What to call it? Oh, yeah, that’s been covered in another post!
This is a nostalgia shot for the old brontophiles. Notice that the Triceratops is entering the lake for a swim!
Tom Johnson with the mounted skeleton of Amphicyon, a Miocene “bear-dog”,
in the Raymond Alf Museum of Paleontology in Claremont, California.
References
- Brinkman , Paul D. (2010). The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush, University of Chicago Press, 2010.
- Matthew, William Diller, (1905). “The Mounted Skeleton of Brontosaurus,” The American Museum Journal, Vol. V, No. 2, April.
- Matthew, W.D. (1915). Dinosaurs, With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections, American Museum of Natural History, New York.
- Tschopp, Emanuel, Octávio Mateus, and Roger Benson. (2015). “A Specimen-Level Phylogenetic Analysis and Taxonomic Revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda).” Ed. Andrew Farke. PeerJ 3 (2015): e857.
- Upchurch, P., Tomida, Y., Barrett, P.M. (2005). “A new specimen of Apatosaurus ajax (Sauropoda: Diplodocidae) from the Morrison Formation (Upper Jurassic) of Wyoming, USA”. National Science Museum Monographs (Tokyo) 26 (118): 1–156.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 