Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

We all know that apatosaurines have big honkin’ cervical ribs (well, most of us know that). But did they also have unusually large neural spines?

The question occurred to me the other day when I was driving home from work. I was thinking about C10 of CM 3018, the holotype of Apatosaurus louisae, and I thought, “Man, that is a lot of neural spine right there.”

Why was I thinking about C10, particularly? I traced and also stacked Gilmore’s (1936) drawing for my 2002 paper with Kent Sanders, and recycled the trace for my 2007 prosauropod paper, and recycled the stack-o-C10s for my 2013 PeerJ paper with Mike. So for better or worse C10 is my mental shorthand for A. louisae, the same way that their respective C8s seem to capture the essence of Giraffatitan and Sauroposeidon.

I decided that the quick-and-dirty solution was to compare the vertebrae of A. louisae with those of Diplodocus carnegii, the default reference diplodocid, and see how they stacked up. With the cotyles scaled to the same vertical diameters, this is what we get for C9 and C10 of CM 3018 (lighter gray, background, traced from Gilmore 1936) vs CM 84/94 (darker gray, foreground, traced from Hatcher 1901):

The A. louisae verts are a hair taller, proportionally, than those of D. carnegii, but not by much. The difference is trivial compared to the differences in centrum length and cervical rib size.

So where did I get this apparently erroneous impression that Apatosaurus had giant neural spines? Maybe it’s not that the neural spines of apatosaurines in particular are so large, but rather than diplodocids of all types have large neural spines compared to non-diplodocids. Here are the same vertebrae compared for D. carnegii (dark gray, background) and Camarasaurus supremus (black, foreground, traced from Osborn and Mook 1921):

I deliberately picked the longest C9 in the AMNH collection, and the least-distorted C10. The first surprise for me was how well this C. supremus C9 hangs with D. carnegii in terms of proportions. That is one looooong Cam vert. In any other sauropod, it would probably be beautiful. But because it’s Camarasaurus it attained its length in the most lumpen possible way, with the diapophysis way up front, the neural spine apex way at the back, and in the middle just…more vertebra. Like a stretch limo made from a Ford Pinto, or Mike’s horrifying BOBA-horse.

Inevitable and entirely justified Cam-bashing aside, it’s striking how much smaller the whole neural arch-and-spine complex is in C. supremus than in D. carnegii. And remember that D. carnegii is itself a bit smaller than Apatosaurus, spine-wise. Is this maybe a diplodocoid-vs-macronarian thing, at least in the Morrison? Here’s the C10 stack with Brachiosaurus included, represented by BYU 12867 (which I think is probably a C10 based on both centrum proportions and neural spine shape – see Wedel et al. 2000b for details), and with labels added because it’s getting a little nuts:

I like this; it shows a lot. Here are some things to note:

• The diplodocids don’t just have taller neural spines, their pre- and postzygapophyses are also higher than in the macronarians. That’s gotta mean something, right? All else being equal, putting the zygs farther from the intervertebral joints would reduce the flexibility of the neck. Maybe diplodocoids could get away with it because they had more cervicals, or maybe their necks were stiffened for some reason.
• The zygs being set forward of their respective centrum ends in the macronarians really comes through here.
• The Brachiosaurus vert isn’t that different from a stretched (and de-uglified) Cam vert, with a slightly higher neural spine to help support the longer neck. (Maybe this is why Cam inspires such visceral revulsion: it reads as a failed brachiosaur.)
• This emphasizes the outlier status of Apatosaurus in the cervical rib department. It bears repeating: the cervical ribs of Camarasaurus are certainly wide, but they’re not nearly as massive or ventrally expanded as in apatosaurines.

So far, pretty interesting. I’d like to add Barosaurus and Haplocanthosaurus to round out the “big six” Morrison sauropods. I known Haplo has big, tall, almost apatosaurine neural spines (as shown above, with arrows highlighting the epipophyses), but for Baro I’d have to actually do the comparison to see where it falls out.

The idea of bringing in Barosaurus also forces the question, previously glossed over, of how legit it is to compare C10s of all these animals when their cervical counts differed. C. supremus is thought to have had 12 vertebrae in its neck, Brachiosaurus 13 (based on Giraffatitan), A. louisae and D. carnegii 15, and Barosaurus probably 16. It would be more informative to graph neural spine height divided by cotyle diameter along the column for all of these critters, plus Kaatedocus and Galeamopus. But that’s a lot of actual work, and as much fun as it sounds (really, I’d rather be doing that), I have summer teaching to prep for and field gear to wrangle. So I’ll have to revisit this stuff another time.

References

• Gilmore Charles W. 1936. Osteology of Apatosaurus, with special reference to specimens in the Carnegie Museum. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 11:175–300 and plates XXI–XXXIV.
• Hatcher, John Bell. 1901. Diplodocus (Marsh): its osteology, taxonomy, and probable habits, with a restoration of the skeleton. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 1:1-63.
• Osborn, Henry Fairfield, and Charles C. Mook. 1921. Camarasaurus, Amphicoelias and other sauropods of Cope. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, n.s. 3:247-387, and plates LX-LXXXV.
• Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2013. Why sauropods had long necks; and why giraffes have short necks. PeerJ 1:e36. 41 pages, 11 figures, 3 tables. doi:10.7717/peerj.36
• Wedel, M.J., and Sanders, R.K. 2002. Osteological correlates of cervical musculature in Aves and Sauropoda (Dinosauria: Saurischia), with comments on the cervical ribs of Apatosaurus. PaleoBios 22(3):1-6.
• Wedel, M.J., Cifelli, R.L., and Sanders, R.K. 2000b.  Osteology, paleobiology, and relationships of the sauropod dinosaurSauroposeidon.  Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 45(4): 343-388.