Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

This is the second post in the “bird neural canals are weird” series (intro post here), and it covers the first of five expansions of the spinal cord or meninges in the lumbosacral regions of birds.

The lumbosacral expansion of the spinal cord is not unique to birds and doesn’t require any special explanation. As noted in the slide, all limbed tetrapods and some fishes with sensitive fins have adjacent segments of the spinal cord correspondingly expanded. These expansions house the extra afferent neurons needed to collect sensory inputs from the limbs, the extra efferent neurons needed to provide motor control to the limbs, and the extra interneurons needed for sensory and motor integration (including reflex arcs) – ‘extra’ here meaning ‘more than are required for non-limb neck, trunk, and tail segments’.

Borrowed from http://humanorgans.org/spinal-cord/

Humans have these, too, in our lower cervical vertebrae to run our forelimbs, and in our lower thoracic vertebrae to run our hindlimbs. Recall that the segmental anatomy of the adult human spinal cord corresponds increasingly poorly to the vertebrae the farther we are from the head because of our child-sized spinal cords (see this post for more).

So if the lumbosacral expansion is present in all tetrapods with hindlimbs, why bring it up? My goal is to develop a set of criteria to distinguish the various spinal and meningeal specializations in birds, in part because it’s an interesting challenge in its own right, and in part because doing so may help illuminate some unusual features in sauropods and other non-avian dinosaurs. If we want to be able to detect whether, say, a glycogen body is present, we need to know how to tell the impression left by a glycogen body from the more generalized lumbosacral expansion present in all limbed tetrapods. The key characteristics of the lumbosacral expansion are that the cord (and hence the canal) expands and contracts gradually, over many segments, and that the expansion is in all directions, radially, and not biased dorsoventrally or mediolaterally.

Numbering reflects spinal nerve count – 8 cervical, 12 thoracic, 5 lumbar, and 5 sacral spinal spinal nerves. Cervical expansion for the forelimbs is roughly C5-T1, and lumbosacral expansion for hindlimbs is L2-S3. Gray (1918 image 665).

The one way in which the lumbosacral expansion of birds is weird, at least compared to mammals, is that the magnitude of the change is so great in hindlimb-dominant flightless birds like the ostrich. Here’s a graph from Gray’s Anatomy showing the cross-sectional area of the human spinal cord in square mm, with the head on the left. Note that the swellings for the limbs bump up the cross-sectional area by a quarter to a third, relative to adjacent non-limb areas.

Streeter (1904: fig. 4)

Here’s the same diagram for an ostrich, again in square mm, again with the head to the left. The lines here are a little different – the “substantia grisea” is the gray matter (mostly neuron cell bodies), and the white matter (axons, mostly myelinated) is divided into the large ventrolateral funiculi (descending motor, ascending pain, temperature, and unconscious proprioception) and the much smaller dorsal funiculi (ascending touch and conscious proprioception). Here the lumbosacral expansion maxes out at more than double the cross-sectional area of the cord in the inter-limb torso segments – and this is just the white and gray matter, and does not include the glycogen body (which is proportionally small in the ostrich, as we’ll see in a future post).

Note that the ostrich does have a much smaller expansion of the spinal cord associated with the forelimbs, but one glance at the graph will tell you that the hindlimbs are a lot more important. This too has implications for fossils. Because the cross-sectional area of the neural canal tends to track the cross-sectional area of the spinal cord (despite the cord not filling the canal), it is possible to make inferences about limb use in fossil taxa based on the relative cross-sectional area of the neural canal along the vertebral column. Emily Giffin published several papers about this in the 1990s (e.g., Giffin 1990, 1995), all of which are worth reading.

Next in this series: the glycogen body.

References

• Giffin, E.B. 1990. Gross spinal anatomy and limb use in living and fossil reptiles. Paleobiology 16(4):448-458.
• Giffin, E.B. 1995. Postcranial paleoneurology of the Diapsida. Journal of Zoology 235:389-410.
• Gray, H. and Lewis, W.H. 1918. Anatomy of the human body, 20th ed. Lea & Febiger, Philadelphia, 1248 pp.
• Streeter, G.L. 1904. The structure of the spinal cord of the ostrich. American Journal of Anatomy 3(1):1-27.