Our vertebral orientation paper is up as a preprint
September 30, 2019
Regular readers will remember that we followed up our 1VPC talk about what it means for a vertebra to be horizontal by writing it up as a paper, and doing it in the open. That manuscripts is now complete, and published as a preprint (Taylor and Wedel 2019).
Taylor and Wedel (2018: Figure 5). Haplocanthosaurus sp. MWC 8028, caudal vertebra ?3, in cross section, showing medial aspect of left side, cranial to the right, in three orientations. A. In “articular surfaces vertical” orientation (method 2 of this paper). The green line joins the dorsal and ventral margins of the caudal articular surface, and is oriented vertically; the red line joins the dorsal and ventral margins of the cranial articular surface, and is nearly but not exactly vertical, instead inclining slightly forwards. B. In “neural canal horizontal” orientation (method 3 of this paper). The green line joins the cranial and caudal margins of the floor of the neural canal, and is oriented horizontally; the red line joins the cranial and caudal margins of the roof of the neural canal, and is close to horizontal but inclined upwards. C. In “similarity in articulation” orientation (method 4 of this paper). Two copies of the same vertebra, held in the same orientation, are articulated optimally, then the group is rotated until the two are level. The green line connects the uppermost point of the prezygapophyseal rami of the two copies, and is horizontal; but a horizontal line could join the two copies of any point. It happens that for this vertebra methods 3 and 4 (parts B and C of this illustration) give very similar results, but this is accidental.
The preprint has all the illustrations and their captions at the back of the PDF. If you prefer to have them inline in the text, where they’re referenced — and who wouldn’t? — you can download a better version of the manuscript from the GitHub archive.
By the way, you may have noticed that what started our written in Markdown has mutated into an MS-Word document. Why? Well, because journals won’t accept submissions in Markdown. It eas a tedious and error-prone job to convert the Markdown into MS-Word, and not one I am keen to repeat. For this reason, I think I am unlikely to use Markdown again for papers.
References
- Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2019. What do we mean by the directions “cranial” and “caudal” on a vertebra? PeerJ PrePrints 7:e27437v2. doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.27437v2
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Checking out Isle of Wight rebbachisaurid vertebrae at SVPCA 2019
September 27, 2019
This awesome photo was taken in the SVPCA 2019 exhibit area by Dean Lomax (L). On the right, Jessie Atterholt, me, and Mike are checking out some Isle of Wight rebbachisaurid vertebrae prepped by Mick Green, who is juuuust visible behind Dean. Jessie’s holding a biggish (as rebbachisaurids go) dorsal or caudal centrum and partial arch, me a lovely little cervical, and Mike an astonishingly delicate and beautiful dorsal. You can see behind us more tables full of awesome fossils, and there were more still across the way, behind Dean and Mick. I was going to throw this photo into the last post to illustrate the exhibit area, but by the time the caption had hit three lines long, I realized it needed a post of its own.
Photo courtesy of Dean, and used with permission. Mark your calendars: on Sunday, Oct. 13, Dean will be speaking at TEDx Doncaster, with a talk titled, “My unorthodox path to success: how my passion for the past shaped my future”. You can follow the rest of Dean’s gradual conquest of the paleosphere through his website, http://www.deanrlomax.co.uk/.
Things I loved about SVPCA 2019
September 26, 2019
As usual I came back from SVPCA to a mountain of un-dealt-with day-job work, which is why it’s taken me so long to get this post done and up. I wanted to get it posted as quickly as I could decently arrange, because I had a fantastic time at this year’s meeting and I wanted to document a few reasons why, both to thank this year’s hosts and to perhaps inspire the organizers of future meetings.
A shot from the back of the banquet-hall-turned-lecture-theater during Mike’s talk.
1. Space
This year’s presentation space was unlike any I can remember from previous SVPCAs. Instead of being in a lecture hall, talks were held in a big ballroom, and attendees sat in chairs at big circular banquet tables. This had a LOT of positive effects: no edging along long rows of seats to get in or out between talks, easy discussion around and between the tables at the breaks, the opportunity for a group of people to sit together as a group (vs a line or same-facing block), plenty of space to set notebooks, laptops, papers, pens, drinks, etc. I realize that meeting space is probably one of the things that conference organizers have the least control over, but at least from what I saw this year I’d say the ballroom model works even better than the lecture hall model, so that’s a possible consideration for the future.
2. Time
Owing to the smaller-than-normal number of abstract submissions — possibly a function of the meeting being on an island rather than the, uh, somewhat larger island of Great Britain — everyone who asked for a talk got one, and the talk slots were long enough for full 15-minute talks and 5 minutes for questions. So the meeting seemed decompressed. No-one really rushed through their talks (although Mike did speak very quickly), and there was usually plenty of time for questions, and the all-important coffee top-up or between-breaks bio-refresh. I know that a fuller conference is in some ways a healthier conference, and I still maintain that if talks have to be trimmed at future meetings, established players like myself should take the hit so students and early-career-researchers can have some runway, but I still appreciated the more relaxed pace of this meeting.
3. Food and drink
Food and drink service was probably the best that I have experienced at a paleo conference, full stop. I wish I had taken a photo of the ranked rows of coffee cups on saucers, because they never ran out. I don’t think we ever ran out of coffee, either. A lunch of sandwiches, crisps, veggies, and hummus (edit: and cheese, lots of beautiful cheese!) was provided on Thursday and Friday all three days of the conference, and from what I saw, the lunches ran down to a bare handful of sandwiches at the very end but didn’t quite run out — and this was after everyone had ample opportunity to go back for more. Simply an outstanding job.
If I had one quibble, it was that the bar at Cowes Yacht Haven opened about five minutes before the start of Don Henderson’s Fox Lecture on Wednesday evening, without warning and after a lot of people (Mike and me included) had brought in drinks from outside, which we were then told we couldn’t drink on the premises. I realize that the opening and closing of the yacht club bar was probably outside the control of the organizers, but it was an annoyance for those of us who wanted to have a drink with the evening lecture.
4. Exhibitors
I admit to being disappointed when I realized that the meeting would be at Cowes rather than near the Dinosaur Isle museum in Sandown. We did get to visit the museum for the Tuesday evening icebreaker, but other than that we were in a different town entirely. The organizers’ clever solution was to bring the fossils to the paleontologists: several local collectors brought fossils for us to pore over on breaks and during poster time. This was particularly great for Mike, Jessie, and me, since so many of the fossils on display were from sauropods. Jessie and I were able to recognize neural canal ridges in the vertebrae of a rebbachisaurid for the first time, and we were able to use a brachiosaur caudal to demonstrate the ridges to Femke Holwerda, who then told us she’d seen them in a cetiosaur caudal. So our research made meaningful advancements because of the specimens on display, and we made useful contacts.
Speaking of Femke, her big Patagosaurus redescription has been accepted for publication at an OA outlet, so look for that most-welcome work in the not-too-distant future.
There were also paleoartists among the exhibitors, including John Sibbick, Mark Witton, and Luis Rey, among others, including some local artists. I picked up a nice print of a hand-drawn sauropod caudal by Trudie Wilson (this Trudie Wilson, not that Trudie Wilson, although I’m sure she’s a wonderful person too), which I need to do a whole post about, and will soon. I can’t remember now who proposed it, but someone remarked in one of the open sessions about how nice it was to have so much paleoart on display, and that maybe that was something that future meetings could lean into, including having paleoartists give talks about their art. That’s not unprecedented — John Conway and Bob Nicholls have both given presentations on paleoart at previous meetings, either in regular sessions or at evening social functions — but it is a great idea, and one I heartily endorse.
5. Proximity to everything else
Mike did sterling work finding an AirBnB house for a bunch of us (Mike, Darren, Mark Evans, Femke Holwerda, Jeff Liston, Mark Witton, Georgia Witton-Maclean, and Vicki and London and me) that was 300 feet from the entrance to Cowes Yacht Haven and about 700 feet from the banquet hall where the talks were held. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a short walk between my lodgings and the talk venue, even when I’ve stayed in the hotel where the conference was being held. There was also a Sainsbury’s grocery store, a bank of ATMs, and a bunch of restaurants within, seriously, a two-minute walk of the venue. I realize that this was also a lucky circumstance, not readily repeatable for other meetings that take place in museums or university lecture halls at some remove from commercial districts, but it sure was nice. If you had ten minutes, you could legit pop out to Sainsbury’s for some crisps or a beer, and be back at your seat with time to spare.
6. Loot
This one is purely personal, and mostly outside the organizers’ control. (Although they did carelessly put those exhibitors right in the path of my wallet, which fortunately was only running at about Category 3 this trip.) I’m only listing it here to guilt me into finishing the post (or posts) about the items I acquired on the trip, but folks, I did all right. More on that later.
So, a huge thank-you to the organizers of this year’s SVPCA for pulling off such a comfortable and enjoyable meeting. It was a gem. For more on what it was like, please see this post by Emma Nicholls, Deputy Keeper of Natural History at London’s Horniman Museum. If you know of other post-SVPCA conference reviews or retrospectives, please post them in the comments.
The Atterholt & Wedel and plain-old-Wedel talks from SVPCA 2019 are now PeerJ Preprints
September 25, 2019
I’ll have more to say about both of these in the near future, but for now suffice it to say that this (link):
and this (link):
are available for your perusal. Not just the abstracts, but the slide decks as well, just as Mike did for his talk on Jensen’s Big Three sauropods (link).
Jessie is also posting her talk a few slides at a time on her Instagram, with some helpful unpacking, so that’s worth a look even if you have the slides already. That stream of posts starts here.
Print your manuscripts before submitting them
September 24, 2019
Years ago, I wrote a tutorial on how to get a “nearly finished” paper over the finishing line in which I said “Do you really need a printed copy for this? YES YOU DO! Can’t you just do it on the screen? NO YOU CAN’T!”
I was so right.
Here is a page from the manuscript for the vertebral orientation project. I thought a couple of days ago that this was complete and ready to submit. But, just for form’s sake, I printed a copy and went through it with a pen, as I recommended in the tutorial.
Well, I found many, many places where I had to mark up the printed manuscript. Some of them were trivial typos that I’d somehow missed in all times I’d read the manuscript on a screen. Others were infelicitous word choices that I could improve. A few were places where I realised I’d not spelled out something that ought really to be made explicit. There are probably more than a hundred in all.
I just finished this process (shortly after midnight). The next thing I will do, when I have a chance, will be to go theough the manuscript fixing all these little errors and omissions. Most of them I will do right away; other will take longer, so I will just leave a comment for myself marked with the “XXX” rule. Later I will come back and search for “XXX”, and fix the complicated ones.
Only then will I submit — once we have made this submission the best we can make it.
Matt bought an Iguanodon pelvis … OR DID HE???!
September 16, 2019
We’re just back from an excellent SVPCA on the Isle of Wight. We’ll write more about it, but this time I just want to draw attention to a neat find. During a bit of down time, Matt and Vicki were wandering around West Cowes (the town where the scientific sessions were held), when they stumbled across a place called That Shop. Intrigued by all the Lego figures in the window, they went in, and Matt found a small section of fossils. Including … an Iguanodon pelvis, supposedly certified as such by the Dinosaur Isle museum.
Here it is: I imagine that whoever classified it read this elongate concave surface as part of the acetabulum. Matt’s hypothesis is that they mistook it for a sacral vertebra and that became “pelvis” via over-simplification.
It’s about 18 cm in a straight line across the widest part, or 20 cm around the curve.
Here is an actual documentary record of Matt’s moment of discovery:
Yep, you got it! It’s a sauropod vertebra! (Matt would never have spent good money on a stinkin’ appendicular element of a stinkin’ ornithopod.)
Specifically, it’s the bottom half of the front part of the centrum of a dorsal vertebra:
“Eucamerotus” dorsal vertebra NHMUK PV R88 in right lateral and anterior views. Non-faded portions show the location of the Wedel Specimen. Modified from Hulke (1880: plate IV).
In these photos, we’re looking down into it more or less directly dorsal view, with anterior to the left. Click through the photos, and — once you know what you’re looking at — you can clearly see the pneumatic spaces: nice patches of finished bone lining the camellae, with trabecular bone in between.
Clearly there’s nowhere near enough of this to say what it is with any certainty. But our best guess is that it seems compatible with a titanosauriform identity, quite possibly in same space as the various Wealden sauropod dorsals that have been assigned to Ornithopsis or Eucamerotus.
References
- Hulke, J. W. 1880. Supplementary Note on the Vertebræ of Ornithopsis, Seeley, = Eucamerotous, Hulke. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society 36:31–35. doi:10.1144/GSL.JGS.1880.036.01-04.06
Cut and polished ichthyosaur vertebrae from the Isle of Wight
September 5, 2019
The polished face of the block, 1.5″ tungsten cube for scale. The bowtie shapes are the two biconcave vertebral centra.
It is pretty darned satisfying to be heading to the Isle of Wight for SVPCA next week. My only other visit was in the spring of 2004, when Vicki and I were in England on a spring break vacation/research trip. We spent a night at a bed and breakfast in Sandown and visited the Dinosaur Isle museum, where I got to see “Angloposeidon” and the Barnes High brachiosaur in person.
My most tangible memento of that trip is this cut and polished block with two vertebral centra from what I’m guessing is an ichthyosaur. It has a little story.
While we were at Dinosaur Isle I got to see another cut-and-polished specimen, the partial titanosauriform centrum shown above (and memorialized on the blog way back in 2008, when SV-POW! was about 6 months old). I’ve seen others since (like this one), but that was the first such specimen I’d seen in person, and it captured my imagination.
Vicki and I took a bus to get back to the ferry from Sandown, and somewhere in the island interior there was a bus stop at a small collection of buildings, maybe just two or three? One was a rock shop, and I really wanted to pop in and see what they had. The bus driver warned me, sternly, that the bus would be stopped for precisely two minutes, and that if I was not back on board in 120 seconds I’d be left behind.
So I sprinted inside the shop, found this block behind the counter, paid, and dashed back to the bus, arriving with a few seconds to spare. For four years it sat on my desk or on our mantle, then it got boxed up with a bunch of other natural history stuff and was buried in a closet for a decade. I didn’t get around to unboxing it until January, 2018 — you can spot it in the second photo down in this post. Since then it’s lived on my desk at work, or on a bookshelf adjacent to my desk.
One of the things I love best about it is that even in these somewhat weathered, almost certainly non-diagnostic shards of adequacy, the internal structure is beautifully preserved.
This chunk of rock embodies a lot of time — developmental time for the ichthyosaur, to grow such beautiful bones; deep time for these vertebrae, voyaging to us across millions of years; and personal time. In the fifteen-and-a-half years since my last visit to the Isle of Wight, I’ve gone from being a grad student to a professor at a med school (which I did not see coming back in 2004), and Mike and I have gone from being pen pals to frequent coauthors and co-travelers (and we’re still pen pals).
I think it’s only right that I pressure Mike into stopping at that rock shop, if it’s still there, so I can find a companion piece. Stay tuned.
…including the Atterholt and Wedel (2018) talk on paramedullary diverticula in birds
September 4, 2019
As Mike noted in the last post, many (all?) of the talks from SVPCA 2018 are up on YouTube. Apparently this has been the case for a long time, maybe most of the past year, and I just didn’t know. But I’m glad I do now, because I can encourage you to take 14 minutes and watch Jessie Atterholt’s talk on air spaces inside the neural canal in birds and other archosaurs:
This will not only be interesting in itself — assuming you are interested in pneumaticity, animals, or just how weird the natural world can be at times — but it will be good homework for the Atterholt and Wedel talk at this year’s SVPCA. That talk, also to be delivered by Jessie, will be on a different weird thing about archosaur neural canals, and one that neither of us have yapped about yet on social media.
Here’s the full rundown of talks by SV-POW!sketeers and affiliates at this year’s SVPCA:
Thursday, September 12
- 11:00-11:20 – Vicki Wedel, “Validating the use of Dental Cementum Increment Analysis to determine season-at-death in humans and other mammals”
- 11:20-11:40 – Matt Wedel, “How to make new discoveries in (human) anatomy”
Friday, September 13
- 10:10-10:30 – Mike Taylor and Matt Wedel, “The past, present and future of Jensen’s Big Three sauropods”
- 15:00-15:20 – Jessie Atterholt and Matt Wedel, “Neural canal ridges: a novel osteological correlate of post-cranial neurology in dinosaurs”
Presumably most or all of these will become PeerJ Preprints in time, just like Mike’s and my presentations from SVPCA 2017 (link, link) and Jessie’s presentation last year (link). I haven’t heard anything yet about livestreaming or recording of the talks this year — fingers firmly crossed.
Anyway, we look forward to seeing at least some of you at SVPCA or at other points on our trip to England, and to having more stuff to talk about here in the near future. Stay tuned!
The whole of the SVPCA 2018 conference is on YouTube
September 3, 2019
Sorry to you all for the recent radio-silence here on SV-POW!. Matt and I are hard at work preparing our presentations for SVPCA 2019, which will take place on the Isle of Wight next week. Delightfully, not only will Matt be joining us this year, but so will his wife, forensic anthropologist celebre Vicki; and their son London.
Exterior of the Dinosaur Isle museum, Sandown, Isle of Wight, last known resting place of the vertebra known as “Angloposeidon” and the venue for the SVPCA 2019 drinks reception.
Anyway, since we have effectively prorogued SV-POW! until after the conference, I’d like to leave you with the delightful fact that the whole of last year’s conference is freely available to watch on YouTube.
We’ll hope to see some of you next week on the Isle of Wight — do come up and say hi, we always like to meet our readers. I hope that this year’s talks will also be streamed and recorded, but I don’t know what plans exist.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
