Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

If you were curious about the Wedel et al. presentation on the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus at the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress but didn’t attend the event, it is now preserved for posterity and freely available to the world as a PeerJ Preprint (as promised). Here’s the link.

I’ll have much more to say about this going forward, but for now here are slides 20 and 21 on the intervertebral joint spaces. This is obviously just the same vert cloned three times and articulated with itself. With the digital rearticulation of the reconstructed and retrodeformed caudal series still in progress, we cloned caudal 3, the only vertebra that preserves both sets of zygapophyses, to get a rough estimate of the sizes and shapes of the soft tissues that filled the intervertebral spaces and neural canal.

The reconstructed intervertebral discs (in blue) are very crude and diagrammatic. The reason I’m putting these particular slides up is to get the cited references out in the open on the blog, to start correcting the misapprehension that all non-mammalian amniotes have exclusively synovial intervertebral joints (see the discussion in the comments on this post). In the list below I’m including Banerji (1957), which is not cited in the presentation but which I did cite in that comment thread; it’s an important source and at least for now it is a free download. These refs are just the tip of a very big iceberg. One of my goals for 2019 is to do a series of posts reviewing the extensive literature on amphiarthrodial (fibrocartilaginous) intervertebral joints in living lepidosaurs and birds. Stay tuned!

And please go have a look at the presentation if you are at all interested or curious. As we said in the next to last slide, “this research is ongoing, and we welcome your input. If there are facts or hypotheses we haven’t considered but should, please let us know!”

References

• Baumel, J.J. (ed.) 1993. Handbook of Avian Anatomy: Nomina Anatomica Avium. Nuttal Ornithological Club, Publication No. 23, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
• Banerji, K.K. 1957. The comparitive anatomy of the intervertebral joints. Doctoral dissertation, University of St Andrews, 132 + viii pp.
• Wedel, M.J., Atterholt, J., Macalino, J., Nalley, T., Wisser, G., and Yasmer, J. 2018. Reconstructing an unusual specimen of Haplocanthosaurus using a blend of physical and digital techniques. Abstract book, 1st Palaeontological Virtual Congress, http://palaeovc.uv.es/, p. 158 /  PeerJ Preprints 6:e27431v1
• Winchester, L.A. 1978. Development and morphology of vertebrae and intervertebral joints in lizards and snakes. PhD thesis, Imperial College London, 326 pp.
• Winchester, L.A., and Bellairs, A.D.A. 1977. Aspects of vertebral development in lizards and snakes. J. Zoology 181(4): 495-525.