Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

Last year about this time I vowed to return SV-POW! to its nominal roots: a new post at least once a week for all of 2018. It had been a while since the blog had lived up to the letter of its name, and I thought it would be a fun challenge to see if blogging to a schedule again would be inspiring or oppressive.

Then I went and had probably the busiest year of my professional career: 12 invited talks in 5 different states, 12 visits to museum collections or research labs, plus another 3 visits to museum public galleries for fun, 4 trips for fieldwork, 3 conference presentations, and more CT scanning than I have done since the last millennium. Happily, I am not the sole proprietor here and Mike and I can take turns driving when the other is occupied.

So how’d we do?

In January I blogged about weird neural canals, part of an obsession that would occupy most of my mental bandwidth this year, and also about the impact of Don Glut’s New Dinosaur Dictionary when I was a kid. A post on sauropod gigantism sparked a very active discussion that ran to 47 comments, which is a rarity these days.

Gonzalez Riga et al. (2018: figure 6). Mendozasaurus neguyelap cervical vertebra (IANIGLA-PV 076/1) in (A) anterior, (B) left lateral, (C) posterior, (D) right lateral, (E) ventral and (F) dorsal views. Scale bar = 150 mm. Sorry it’s monochrome, but that’s how it appears in the paper.

February was mostly run-of-the-mill posts on vertebral morphology and open access. The standouts were Mike’s post on weird cervical vertebrae and my unexpectedly popular off-topic post on the durability of tungsten. I see that my teaser post on a trip to see elephant seals has not yet been followed up. There’s a lot of that around here–we’re often too busy with the next thing to finish up the last thing. I’ve given up feeling bad about that, and accepted that it’s just how we roll.

Mike ruled March with a flurry of posts, including a couple worth revisiting on how grant funding is awarded and on the state of play vis-a-vis Big Publishing. Also (and uncharacteristically) Mike posted on appendicular bones of birds, both skinny and fat. It was left to me to represent for sauropods, with posts on the cervical vertebrae of Alamosaurus and Suuwassea and some noodling about sauropod skin.

I flew solo in April, with some posts derived from my spring travels. A very long post on the suitability of dinosaur femora as clubs was good, goofy fun, but an arresting video of a rhino going ass-over-teakettle and getting up unhurt, and the humility that should inspire in us, is the clear standout for the month.

In May I started CT scanning sauropod vertebrae again and went to Utah for the first of several stints of fieldwork this year. Mike started work on the Archbishop (allegedly), and blogged about Argentinosaurus poop. My series on bird neural canals, represented by these posts (two links) is still incomplete, and has now been superseded by the Haplocanthosaurus presentation at the 1st Palaeontological Virtual Congress.

June was comparative anatomy month here at SV-POW!, with Mike posting on the dead things in his woodshed, and me writing about exploded turtles and the amazing collection of anatomical preparations in Peter Dodson’s office. I also managed two posts about field adventures in the Oklahoma panhandle.

Figure 4. Centra and neural arches of posterior dorsal vertebrae from two rebbachisaurid sauropods (not to scale), highlighting the distinctive “M” shape formed by laminae on the lateral face of the neural arch. A. NHMUK PV R2095, the holotype and only vertebra of Xenoposeidon proneneukos. B. MNHN MRS 1958, a posterior dorsal vertebra from the holotype specimen of Rebbachisaurus garasbae.

In July Mike and I returned to our regular dance partners. For Mike, that meant serious and whimsical posts about Xenoposeidon, which for a few months held the title of the oldest known rebbachisaur. I had Haplocanthosaurus caudals on the brain, both old and new. Posts on fieldwork in Oklahoma and Utah bookended the month.

My fascination with Haplocanthosaurus extended into August, and I CT scanned a Diplodocus caudal and attended a pterosaur conference. Mike kicked off a discussion about vertebral orientation with a pair of posts that would eventually lead to our presentation on the topic at the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress. And I see that I still owe the world a “down in flames” perspective on my own career.

In September the vertebral orientation discussion expanded to take in the Brachiosaurus holotype and Komodo dragons, and Mike blogged about imposter syndrome. The most personally satisfying event in September was that Jessie Atterholt and I started to get the word out about some of the collaborative research we’ve been doing in the past year, with her very well-received talk at SVPCA and the archiving of our abstract and slideshow on PeerJ Preprints.

October saw the return of #MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt, and the 2018 TetZooCon, and #MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt at TetZooCon. I also had a return to form, with a series of posts about pneumaticity, and a batch of new paleo-memes. The biggest actual news was the enigmatic Amphicoelias fragillimus dethroning Xenoposeidon as the new world’s oldest rebbachisaur.

November was entirely representative of SV-POW!, with an eclectic grab-bag of posts on a museum mount, neck flexibility, a historical illustration, bird vertebrae, academic publishing, and what is probably our real favorite dinosaur (no matter what we might say when asked in interviews or in person): the insanely overbuilt Apatosaurus.

This month we’re closing out the year with posts on dissecting a pig head, our presentations at the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress, the open birth of the vertebral orientation paper, a long overdue post on cleaning bird vertebrae, and this, our first yearly retrospective.

The Salutary Effects of Blogging

This blog started as a joke, and we thought we’d see if we could keep up the gag for a whole year. But it very rapidly evolved into something much more serious, in a way that none of us expected. SV-POW! doesn’t just give us a forum to interact with you, our colleagues. It also forces us to talk to each other, regularly, about subjects that we care about. I love reading Mike’s posts, because after all this time, I still often have no idea what he’s going to say. After 18 years of friendship, 14 joint conference presentations, 11 years of blogging together, and 7 coauthored papers, we still regularly surprise each other with unexpected observations and provocative questions. Not only do we not always agree, we very often disagree, but we disagree constructively. Neither of us is willing to let a subject drop until we’ve gotten to the root of the disagreement, and that process sharpens us both.

Bottom line, we both need SV-POW! Not only as a forum for discussion, although that’s rewarding, or as a soapbox, although that’s sometimes useful, or a generator of occasionally publishable ideas, although that’s an unexpected bonus. We need to blog here because it forces us to keep learning what we think and what we know, both individually and as a team. If you enjoy the output or find it interesting or infuriating or worth thinking about, we’re happy — honored, in fact. But at this point I think we would keep blogging if there was no audience at all. It is a whetstone for our minds.

Let’s see what 2019 will bring. Happy New Year, everyone! We’ll see you in the future.