Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

Last Thursday I gave a public lecture for the No Man’s Land Historical Society in the Oklahoma Panhandle, titled “Oklahoma’s Jurassic Giants: the Dinosaurs of Black Mesa”. It’s now on YouTube, on the No Man’s Land Museum’s channel.

There’s a point I want to make here, that I also made in the talk: we can’t predict the value of natural history collections. The first sauropod vertebrae that Rich Cifelli and Kent Sanders and I CT scanned back in the spring of 1998 belonged to what would become Sauroposeidon, but most of the ones we scanned after that were Morrison specimens collected by J. Willis Stovall’s crews from the Oklahoma Panhandle between 1934 and 1941. Those scans formed the core of the pneumaticity research that fleshed out the Sauroposeidon papers (Wedel et al. 2000a, b), and was more fully developed in my Master’s thesis and the papers that came out of that (Wedel 2003a, b).

OMNH 1094, a mid-cervical vertebra of Brontosaurus in right lateral view. If you’ve seen one of my talks or my first few papers, you’ve seen this vert. I just realized that I have almost all the photos I need to do a proper multi-view; stand by for a future post on that.

So the foundation of my career was built in large part from collections that had been made 60 years earlier, decades before CT was invented. I’ll also note here that Xenoposeidon — Mike’s fourth paper (Taylor and Naish 2007), but the one which really launched his career as a morphologist — is based on a specimen collected in the 1890s. Natural history collections are not only resources for making comparisons, but also the engines of future discovery, and building and maintaining them is one of the most significant contributions to science that we can make.

I thank a bunch of folks at the end of the talk, but I especially want to thank Brian Engh for the use of his art, and Anne Weil for inviting me to collaborate on the sauropod material from the Homestead Quarry. Looking forward to more adventures!

References

• Taylor, Michael P., and Darren Naish. 2007. An unusual new neosauropod dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Hastings Beds Group of East Sussex, England. Palaeontology 50(6):1547-1564.
• Wedel, M.J. 2003a. Vertebral pneumaticity, air sacs, and the physiology of sauropod dinosaurs. Paleobiology 29:243-255.
• Wedel, M.J. 2003b. The evolution of vertebral pneumaticity in sauropod dinosaurs. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 23:344-357.
• Wedel, M.J., Cifelli, R.L., and Sanders, R.K. 2000a. Sauroposeidon proteles, a new sauropod from the Early Cretaceous of Oklahoma. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 20:109-114.
• Wedel, M.J., Cifelli, R.L., and Sanders, R.K. 2000b. Osteology, paleobiology, and relationships of the sauropod dinosaur Sauroposeidon. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 45:343-388.