Investigating sauropod vertebral pneumaticity the old-fashioned way
August 17, 2020
Long before Matt and others were CT-scanning sauropod vertebrae to understand their internal structure, Werner Janensch was doing it the old-fashioned way. I’ve been going through old photos that I took at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin back in 2005, and I stumbled across this dorsal centrum:
Dorsal vertebra centum of ?Giraffatitan in ventral view, with anterior to top.
You can see a transverse crack running across it, and sure enough the front and back are actually broken apart. Here there are:
The same dorsal vertebral centrum of ?Giraffatitan, bisected transversely in two halves. Left: anterior half in posterior view; right: posterior half in anterior view. I had to balance the anterior half on my shoe to keep it oriented corrrectly for the photo.
This does a beautiful job of showing the large lateral foramina penetrating into the body of the centrum and ramifying further into the bone, leaving only a thin midline septum.
But students of the classics will recognise this bone immediately as the one that Janensch (1947:abb. 2) illustrated the posterior half of in his big pneumaticity paper:
It’s a very strange feeling, when browsing in a collection, to come across a vertebra that you know from the literature. As I’ve remarked to Matt, it’s a bit like running into, say, Cameron Diaz in the corner shop.
Reference
- Janensch, W. 1947. Pneumatizitat bei Wirbeln von Sauropoden
und anderen Saurischien. Palaeontographica, supplement
7:1-25.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
August 18, 2020 at 3:15 pm
Was the vertebra partially separated before Janensch split it? The edges seem rather jagged.
August 18, 2020 at 3:17 pm
I don’t know this history, but to me this looks like a good, honest break — maybe done during excavation, maybe an accident in collections — that they took advantage of by prepping the matrix out of the insides.
August 18, 2020 at 9:00 pm
Janensch also broke apart Tendaguru skulls. When I wanted to photograph one that was in several pieces, I had to tie the pieces together through various cranial nerve openings with dental floss…
August 19, 2020 at 8:35 am
This particular centrum is getting to be a minor celebrity here at SV-POW!, having also been the subject of this post and this one. It’s the SII C8 of dorsal centra.
August 19, 2020 at 8:38 am
Wow, my memory is not doing a good job of keeping past SV-POW! posts catalogued. (Still, there are 1,407 of them, so I am not without excuse.)
August 19, 2020 at 8:57 am
Hey, you showed _two_ views that I hadn’t (ventral, and the other half of the cross-section), so there’s plenty of added value here. No foul.