Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

To my shock, I find that we seem never to have posted Bob Nicholls’ beautiful sketch Hello, ladies! on SV-POW!. His recent tweet reminded me about this piece, so here it is!

Like so many classic sauropod sketches, this was executed during a mammal-tooth talk at SVPCA: this one back in 2013, the year of our first Barosarus talk. (Our second was in 2016.)

Bob’s sketch shows speculative sexual display behaviour. We have no direct evidence for (or against) such behaviour; but while we don’t believe sexual selection was the main reason for sauropods evolving long necks, it seems inevitable that long necks evolved for other purposes would be exapted for sexual display.

I always love Bob’s sketches — in fact, for most palaeoartists, I tend to like their sketches more than their finished pieces. Among the many things about this one that make me jealous is all the females in the background admiring the male: the economy of line where Bob can not only summon up a perfectly cromulent diplodocid head in a few strokes, but imbue it with a sense of being inquisitive about the display. It’s magical.

Whatever happened to that 2013 Barosaurus project?, you may ask.

Well, the first thing that happened is that after we submitted the abstract, entitled Barosaurus revisited: the concept of Barosaurus (Dinosauria: Sauropoda) is based on erroneously referred specimens, we realised that there was a tiny, tiny mistake in our work. So by the time I gave the talk at the actual conference, the title slide was this:

Then you will recall we did an efficient job of converting the conference presentation into a manuscript, which we submitted as a preprint less than a month after the conference. The preprint quickly garnered amazingly helpful comments, which we used to extensively revise the manuscript.

For reasons we don’t understand, there was a three-year delay before we got it submitted for peer-review in 2016; but when we did finally submit, we did it in the confident hope that it would sail through peer-review, having already been extensively reviewed and revised.

But it was not to be. When we got the reviews back, they asked for a ton of changes, and that process was just too dispiriting to face having already made a ton of changes based on the first set of comments just prior to the submission. So the tedious process got back-burnered, and the suddenly three more years passed.

The upshot is that I still need to handle the reviews on the 2nd version of the paper, and shove the blasted thing through the peer-review process. I will, to be frank, be glad to get it out of my POOP chute, so I can think about other things — not least, the 2016 Barosaurus project.