My Brachiosaurus talk for Dinosaur Journey is now on YouTube
October 20, 2021
My Oct. 13 National Fossil Day public lecture, “Lost Giants of the Jurassic”, for the Museums of Western Colorado – Dinosaur Journey is now up on their YouTube channel. First 48 minutes are talk, last 36 minutes are Q&A with audience, moderated by Dr. Julia McHugh. New stuff from the 2021 field season — about which I’ll have more to say in the future — starts at about the 37-minute mark. Hit the 44-minute mark (and this and this) to find out what to do with all of the unwanted bird necks that will be floating around at the upcoming holidays.
Finally, big thanks to Brian Engh for finding our brachiosaur and for letting me use so much of his art, to John Foster, Kaelen Kay, Tom Howells, Jessie Atterholt, Thierra Nalley, and Colton Snyder for such a fun field season this year, and to Julia McHugh for giving me the opportunity to yap about one of my favorite dinosaurs!
Imaging bone cells in 420-million-year-old jawless fish
March 31, 2021
The early armored fish Bothriolepis, which Yara Haridy affectionately refers to as a “beetle mermaid”. Art by Brian Engh, dontmesswithdinosaurs.com.
If I had to sum up my main research program over the past 20+ years, it would be, “Why pneumatic bone?” Or as I typically put it in my talks, most bone has marrow inside, so if you find bone with air inside, someone has some explaining to do (f’rinstance).
One of the reasons I like hanging out with Yara Haridy is that she is interested in an even more fundamental question: “Why bone?” And also “How bone?” And she has a paper out today that gives us new insights into the form and function of bone cells — osteocytes — in some of the earliest vertebrates that had them (Haridy et al. 2021; if you’re in TL;DR mode, here’s the link).
Bones have multiple functions in vertebrate bodies: they’re a mechanical framework for our muscles, and a mineral reservoir, and form armor in many taxa, and are involved in hormone regulation, and doubtless other things that we are still discovering, even now. To fulfill those functions, bone tissue has to be formed in the first place, it has to be maintained, and it has to be able to be reshaped as an individual grows. Derived extant vertebrates, including humans, have an impressive array of cellular machinery to make all those things happen. Central to most of those operations are osteocytes, the cells inside living bone, which maintain intimate connections to extracellular bone tissue and to other osteocytes via fine, tentacle-like processes.
Individual osteocytes look something like the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The central portion of the FSM, with the meatballs, is the osteocyte body, and the noodly appendages are the processes.
Now imagine that you cloned the FSM many, many times, and the resulting array of FSMs stayed in physical contact with each other via their noodly appendates, forming a network.
Then imagine that you entombed all of the cloned FSMs in concrete. This is more or less what cellular bone — the kind you find in humans, dinosaurs, and even some jawless fish — looks like on the microscopic scale: osteocytes (the FSMs) and their processes (the noodly appendages) embedded in space-filling stuff (the bone matrix). Some critters, including teleost fish, have acellular bone, but I don’t have time for those unbelievers today.
When an animal dies and decomposes, the osteocytes and their processes decay away, leaving behind the spaces that they used to occupy. The big spaces that hold osteocytes are called lacunae, and the little tunnels that hold the osteocyte processes (noodly appendages, in this metaphor) are canaliculi. Collectively, the lacunae and canaliculi form the lacunocanalicular network or LCN.
Those spaces can then be filled by matrix — not extracellular bone matrix, but future rock matrix, like mud and clay. In point of fact, not all of the spaces are filled with matrix. Even in their 420-million-year-old fish, Yara and colleagues found some osteocyte lacunae that had not been filled with matrix, and were filled by air instead. Whether the lacunocanalicular network is filled with matrix or air, its preservation in fossil bone has turned out to be a boon for paleontologists, because we can ‘see’ the sizes and shapes of osteocytes, and their level of connectivity, by studying the lacunae and canaliculi they left behind.
Histological thin section of bone in the osteostracan Tremataspis mammillata (MB.f.TS.463), imaged with transmitting light microscopy showing osteocyte lacunae (osl) and canaliculi (ca); scale bar, 100 microns. Haridy et al. (2021: fig 2A).
Traditionally osteocyte lacunae and canaliculi in fossil bone have been imaged by taking thin sections of the specimens and looking at them under microscopes.
Synchrotron tomography of bone of Bothriolepis trautscholdi (MB.f.9188a) with the vasculature and osteocytes segmented; scale bar, 0.4 mm. (D) Close-up of tomography in (C) showing the resolution of the osteocyte lacunae volumes; scale bar, 10 microns. bs, bone sample; vs, vasculature channels. Modified from Haridy et al. (2021: fig. 2C-D).
If you’re fancy, you can also do synchrotron tomography, which is fine enough to show osteocyte lacunae — the colored blobs in the image on the right, above.
Those methods have their limitations. Light microscopy will reveal both lacunae and canaliculi in 2D, but it’s hard to get a 3D understanding of the lacunocanalicular network that way (at least in fossils; in modern samples it can be done with confocal miscoscopy). Synchrotron tomography can resolve lacunae in 3D, but not canaliculi, sort of like a map that shows only cities but not the highways that connect them.
Enter FIB-SEM: focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy. An ion gun blasts the specimen with a beam of gallium ions, which vaporizes a slice of the specimen that is less than 1 micron thick, and an SEM images the freshly exposed face. If you do this over and over again, you can build up a 3D model of the stuff that once occupied the volume that got zapped.
FIB-SEM tomography imaging and processing of the fossil jawless vertebrate Tremataspis mammillata (MB.f.9025). (A and B) FIB-SEM setup showing the FIB in relation to the SEM both aimed at the region of interest. (C) Bone surface with an excavate area made by the FIB. (D) Internal wall of the excavated area lined with small black dots that are the fossil osteocyte lacunae. (E) Single osteocyte lacuna from the surface that is scanned; the single SEM image shows the lacunae and canaliculi in black and the mineralized bone in gray; scale bar, 5 microns. (F and G) An image stack is obtained, and 3D made of fossil LCN can be made. Haridy et al. (2021: fig 3).
FIB-SEM is fine enough to resolve both osteocyte lacunae and canaliculi — the lacunocanalicular network or LCN — in three dimensions, in fossil specimens where confocal light microscopy doesn’t always work very well. And the resolution is pretty insane. The rough edges on the 3D models of the LCN aren’t sampling artifacts, they’re accurately reflecting the real morphology of the walls of the lacunae and canaliculi as they were preserved in the fossil bone.
But wait — that’s not all! Not only can FIB-SEM show us osteocyte lacunae and canaliculi in incredible detail in three dimensions, it can also help us figure out at least some of what osteocytes were doing. Together, osteocytes and their processes can sense mechanical strain in bone, trigger bone remodeling, and resorb and lay down bone from the walls of the lacunae and canaliculi. That last process starts with osteocytic osteolysis — the resorption of bone matrix (= osteolysis) from the lacunae and canaliculi by the osteocytes themselves (as opposed to the more familiar destruction of bone at a larger spatial scale by osteoclasts), which is typically followed by the replacement of new matrix where the old bone used to be. Lots of extant vertebrates do osteocytic osteolysis, especially those that have a high demand for calcium and phosphorus in physiologically challenging times. Examples including migrating salmon, lactating mice, and lactating humans. But when did that capacity evolve — did the earliest osteocytes already have the ability to resorb and replace bone? As Yara said to me when she was telling me about her new paper, “We think we know how things work by looking at extant animals, but we’re looking at this highly pruned tree, and we can’t just assume that things worked the same way earlier in our evolutionary history.”
Yara wanted to investigate when osteolytic osteolysis first evolved when she started her dissertation in 2018, but she didn’t know that FIB-SEM existed. Then she was visiting a neutron tomography facility in Berlin and she saw a poster on the wall about people using FIB-SEM to image corrosion in batteries on ultra-fine scales. She thought, “Wow, the corrosion pits in the batteries look like osteocytes!” The rest you probably figured out faster than it’s taking me to write this sentence: together with her collaborators, she got some samples of bone from the jawless fish Tremataspis and Bothriolepis and zapped them with the FIB-SEM.
Osteocytic osteolysis as a mechanism for early mineral metabolism. (A to C) Illustrations depicting the process of osteocytic osteolysis; the phases are stasis phase, dissolution phase, and redeposition phase, respectively. (D) Single SEM image from the FIB-SEM acquisition showing the air-filled osteocyte lacunae and canaliculi of T. mammillata. (E) Same SEM image as in (D) with contrast shifted to show the demineralized zone surrounding the lacunae. (F and G) 3D render of the stack of images from (D and E) T. mammillata (MB.f.9025). The 3D model shows several osteocytes and their canaliculi, with the red areas showing where the “areas of low density” were found. ald, area of low density; os, osteocyte. Scale bar, 5 microns.
And, wonder of wonders, some of the osteocyte lacunae in Tremataspis were surrounded by a halo of less-dense bone, which is evidence for osteocytic osteolysis. Now, Yara and colleagues can’t be sure whether the bone is less dense because it was being resorbed when the animal died — the actual lytic or bone-destructive phase — or because new bone was being laid down after the old bone had been resorbed; naturally the new bone is less dense as it being formed than it will be when it is complete. They also can’t be sure why the process was occurring in that one individual Tremataspis. Mice only do osteocytic osteolysis when they’re lactating, and salmon only do it when they’re migrating, so the presence of osteocytic osteolysis might indicate that the Tremataspis in question was doing something stressful related to its ecology or life history — both topics we know almost nothing about.
Yara and colleagues didn’t find any evidence of osteocytic osteolysis in their Bothriolepis sample, but this is one of those ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’ things — you wouldn’t find evidence of osteocytic osteolysis in my skeleton either, despite a long ancestral history, because I’m skeletally healthy, not fasting or migrating, and not lactating. Possibly other Bothriolepis individuals that were going through a rough patch, metabolically speaking, would show osteocytic osteolysis. So far, as a species, we’ve only looked at the one sample, from the one individual.
I asked Yara what she wanted people to take away from her new paper. Her response:
- We have technology can image fossil bone cells at the same resolution that we can see modern bone cells.
- Bone metabolism was going on 420 million years ago, in the earliest osteocytes, the same way it happens in modern mammals, including humans.
I expect that we will see a lot more FIB-SEM papers on fossils in years to come. That research program started today, with the publication of Haridy et al. (2021). I often sign off posts with “stay tuned”, and this time I really mean it.
Reference
The new monster redescription of Dilophosaurus by Adam Marsh and Tim Rowe came out in the Journal of Paleontology last week. I’m blogging about it now because the OA link just went live yesterday. So you can get this huge, important paper for free, at this link.
There’s a lot of stuff to love here: beautiful, clear photos of every element from every specimen from multiple angles, interesting anatomical and phylogenetic findings, and of particular interest on this blog, some very cool documentation of serial variation in pneumatic features. Here in Figure 62 we see serial changes in the posterior centrodiapophyseal laminae, which in some of the vertebrae are split around an intermediate fossa, or have accessory laminae.
One thing that I’ve thought a lot about, but written not so much about (yet), is pneumatic features on the ventral surfaces of vertebrae and how they change along the column. So I was excited to see Figure 64, which shows how fossae change serially on both the lateral and the ventral surfaces of the presacral centra. As far as I know, no-one has ever done something like this for a sauropod (please correct me in the comments if I’ve forgotten any examples), but it could be done and the results would be interesting, particularly for taxa like Haplocanthosaurus or Dicraeosaurus that have both lateral and ventral fossae and keels in at least some of the vertebrae.
Here’s Figure 66, a beautiful new skull reconstruction and life restoration, both by Brian Engh. There’s a lot of Engh/Dilophosaurus stuff going on right now, including a new video for the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site museum (short version here, longer version available at the museum, and I think on Brian’s Patreon page), and, uh, another thing that will be revealed in the not-too-distant future.
I hope everyone is well and safe. When I first realized we were going into quarantine back in March, I had big plans for doing various series of posts here, but almost immediately the demand of getting med school anatomy online ate up all my time and creative energy. Just barely getting back on my feet now. I know Mike has been busier than normal, too. So please be patient with us, and we’ll try to remember to feed the blog now and then.
Reference
FHPR 17108, a right humerus of Brachiosaurus, with Wes Bartlett and his Clydesdale Molly for scale. Original paleoart by Brian Engh.
Last May I was out in the Salt Wash member of the Morrison Formation with Brian Engh and Thuat Tran, for just a couple of days of prospecting. We’d had crappy weather, with rain and lots of gnats. But temperatures were cooler than usual, and we were able to push farther south in our field area than ever before. We found a small canyon that had bone coming out all over, and as I was logging another specimen in my field book, I heard Brian shout from a few meters away: “Hey Matt, I think you better get over here! If this is what I think it is…”
What Brian had found–and what I couldn’t yet show you when I put up this teaser post last month–was this:
That’s the proximal end of a Brachiosaurus humerus in the foreground, pretty much as it was when Brian found it. Thuat Tran is carefully uncovering the distal end, some distance in the background.
Here’s another view, just a few minutes later:
After uncovering both ends and confirming that the proximal end was thin, therefore a humerus (because of its shape), and therefore a brachiosaur (because of its shape and size together), we were elated, but also concerned. This humerus–one of the largest ever found–was lying in what looked like loose dirt, actually sitting in a little fan of sediment cascading down into the gulch. We knew we needed to get it out before the winter rains came and destroyed it. And for that, we’d need John Foster’s experience with getting big jackets out of inconvenient places. We were also working out there under the auspices of John’s permit, so for many reasons we needed him to see this thing.
We managed to all rendezvous at the site in June: Brian, John, ReBecca Hunt-Foster, their kids Ruby and Harrison, and Thuat. We uncovered the whole bone from stem to stern and put on a coat of glue to conserve it. Any doubts we might have had about the ID were dispelled: it was a right humerus of Brachiosaurus.
While we were waiting for the glue to dry, Brian and Ruby started brushing of a hand-sized bit of bone showing just a few feet away. After about an hour, they had extracted the chunk of bone shown above. This proved to be something particularly exciting: the proximal end of the matching left humerus. We hiked that chunk out, along with more chunks of bone that were tumbled down the wash, which may be pieces of the shaft of the second humerus.
But we still had the intact humerus to deal with. We covered it with a tarp, dirt, and rocks, and started scheming in earnest on when, and more importantly how, to get it out. It weighed hundreds of pounds, and it was halfway down the steep slope of the canyon, a long way over broken ground from even the unmaintained jeep trail that was the closest road. Oh, and there are endangered plants in the area, so we coulnd’t just bulldoze a path to the canyon. We’d have to be more creative.
I told a few close friends about our find over the summer, and my standard line was that it was a very good problem to have, but it was actually still a problem, and one which we needed to solve before the winter rains came.
As it happened, we didn’t get back out to the site until mid-October, which was pushing it a bit. The days were short, and it was cold, but we had sunny weather, and we managed to get the intact humerus uncovered and top-jacketed. Here John Foster and ReBecca Hunt-Foster are working on a tunnel under the bone, to pass strips of plastered canvas through and strengthen the jacket. Tom Howells, a volunteer from the Utah Field House in Vernal, stands over the jacket and assists. Yara Haridy was also heavily involved with the excavation and jacketing, and Brian mixed most of the plaster himself.
John Foster, Brian Engh, Wes and Thayne Bartlett, and Matt Wedel (kneeling). Casey Cordes (blue cap) is in the foreground, working the winch. Photo courtesy of Brian Engh.
Here we go for the flip. The cable and winch were rigged by Brian’s friend, Casey Cordes, who had joined us from California with his girlfriend, teacher and photographer Mallerie Niemann.
Photo courtesy of Brian Engh.
Jacket-flipping is always a fraught process, but this one went smooth as silk. As we started working down the matrix to slim the jacket, we uncovered a few patches of bone, and they were all in great shape.
So how’d we get this monster out of the field?
From left to right: Wes Bartlett and one of his horses, Matt Wedel, Tom Howells, and Thayne Bartlett. Photo by Brian Engh.
Clydesdales! John had hired the Bartlett family of Naples, Utah–Wes, Resha, and their kids Thayne, Jayleigh, Kaler, and Cobin–who joined us with their horses Molly and Darla. Brian had purchased a wagon with pneumatic tires from Gorilla Carts. Casey took the point on winching the jacket down to the bottom of the wash, where we wrestled it onto the wagon. From there, one of the Clydesdales took it farther down the canyon, to a point where the canyon wall was shallow enough that we could get the wagon up the slope and out. The canyon slope was slickrock, not safe for the horses to pull a load over, so we had to do that stretch with winches and human power, mostly Brian, Tom, and Thayne pushing, me steering, and Casey on the winch.
Easily the most epic and inspiring photo of my butt ever taken. Wes handles horses, Casey coils rope, Thayne pushes the cart, and Kaler looks on. Photo by Brian Engh.
Up top, Wes hooked up the other horse to pull the wagon to the jeep trail, and then both horses to haul the jacket out to the road on a sled. I missed that part–I had gone back to the quarry to grab tools before it got dark–but Brian got the whole thing on video, and it will be coming soon as part of his Jurassic Reimagined documentary series.
There’s one more bit I have to tell, but I have no photos of it: getting the jacket off the sled and onto the trailer that John had brought from the Field House. We tried winching, prybar, you name it. The thing. Just. Did. Not. Want. To. Move. Then Yara, who is originally from Egypt, said, “You know, when my people were building the pyramids, we used round sticks under the big blocks.” As luck would have it, I’d brought about a meter-long chunk of thick dowel from my scrap wood bin. Brian used a big knife to cut down some square posts into roughly-round shapes, and with those rollers, the winch, and the prybar, we finally got the jacket onto the trailer.
The real heroes of the story are Molly and Darla. In general, anything that the horses could help with went waaay faster and more smoothly than we expected, and anything we couldn’t use the horses for was difficult, complex, and terrifying. I’d been around horses before, but I’d never been up close and personal with Clydesdales, and it was awesome. As someone who spends most of his time thinking about big critters, it was deeply satisfying to use two very large animals to pull out a piece of a truly titanic animal.
Back in the prep lab at the Field House in Vernal: Matt Wedel, Brian Engh, Yara Haridy, ReBecca Hunt-Foster, and John Foster.
We’re telling the story now because the humerus is being unveiled for the public today at the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum in Vernal. The event will be at 11:00 AM Mountain Time, and it is open to the public. The humerus, now cataloged as FHPR 17108, will be visible to museum visitors for the rest of its time in the prep lab, before it eventually goes on display at the Field House. We’re also hoping to use the intact right humerus as a Rosetta Stone to interpet and piece back together the shattered chunks of the matching left humerus. There will be a paper along in due time, but obviously some parts of the description will have to wait until the right humerus is fully prepped, and we’ve made whatever progress we can reconstructing the left one.
Why is this find exciting? For a few reasons. Despite its iconic status, in dinosaur books and movies like Jurassic Park, Brachiosaurus is actually a pretty rare sauropod, and as this short video by Brian Engh shows, much of the skeleton is unknown (for an earlier, static image that shows this, see Mike’s 2009 paper on Brachiosaurus and Giraffatitan, here). Camarasaurus is known from over 200 individuals, Apatosaurus and Diplodocus from over 100 individuals apiece, but Brachiosaurus is only known from about 10. So any new specimens are important.
A member of the Riggs field crew in 1900, lying next to the humerus of the holotype specimen of Brachiosaurus. I’m proud to say that I know what this feels like now!
If Brachiosaurus is rare, Brachiosaurus humeri are exceptionally rare. Only two have ever been described. The first one, above, is part of the holotype skeleton of Brachiosaurus, FMNH P25107, which came out of the ground near Fruita, Colorado, in 1900, and was described by Elmer S. Riggs in his 1903 and 1904 papers. The second, in the photo below, is the Potter Creek humerus, which was excavated from western Colorado in 1955 but not described until 1987, by Jim Jensen. That humerus, USNM 21903, resides at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
The Brachiosaurus humerus from Potter Creek, Colorado, on display at the Smithsonian.
For the sake of completeness, I have to mention that there is a humerus on display at the LA County Museum of Natural History that is labeled Brachiosaurus, but it’s not been written up yet, and after showing photos of it to colleagues, I’m not 100% certain that it’s Brachiosaurus (I’m not certain that it isn’t, either, but further study is needed). And there’s at least one humerus with a skeleton that was excavated by the University of Kansas and sold by the quarry owner to a museum in Korea (I had originally misunderstood this; some but not all of the material from that quarry went to KU), that is allegedly Brachiosaurus, but that one seems to have fallen into a scientific black hole. I can’t say anything about its identification because I haven’t seen the material.
Happy and relieved folks the morning after the Brachstraction: Yara Haridy, Matt Wedel, John and Ruby Foster, and the Bartletts: Kaler, Wes, Cobin, Resha, Jayleigh, and Thayne. Jacketed Brachiosaurus humerus for scale. Photo by Brian Engh.
So our pair of humeri from the Salt Wash of Utah are only the 3rd and 4th that I can confidently say are from Brachiosaurus. And they’re big. Both are at least 62cm wide across the proximal end, and the complete one is 201cm long. To put that into context, here’s a list of the longest sauropod humeri ever found:
- Brachiosaurus, Potter Creek, Colorado: 213cm
- Giraffatitan, MB.R.2181/SII specimen, Tanzania: 213cm
- Brachiosaurus, holotype, Colorado: ~213cm (preserved length is 203cm, but the distal end is eroded, and it was probably 213cm when complete)
- Giraffatitan, XV3 specimen, Tanzania: 210cm
- *** NEW Brachiosaurus, FHPR 17108, Utah: 201cm
- Ruyangosaurus (titanosaur from China): ~190cm (estimated from 135cm partial)
- Turiasaurus (primitive sauropod from Spain): 179cm
- Notocolossus (titanosaur from Argentina): 176cm
- Paralititan (titanosaur from Egypt): 169cm
- Patagotitan (titanosaur from Argentina): 167.5cm
- Dreadnoughtus (titanosaur from Argentina): 160cm
- Futalognkosaurus (titanosaur from Argentina): 156cm
As far as we know, our intact humerus is the 5th largest ever found on Earth. It’s also pretty complete. The holotype humerus has an eroded distal end, and was almost certainly a few centimeters longer in life. The Potter Creek humerus was missing the cortical bone from most of the front of the shaft when it was found, and has been heavily restored for display, as you can see in one of the photos above. Ours seems to have both the shaft and the distal end intact. The proximal end has been through some freeze-thaw cycles and was flaking apart when we found it, but the outline is pretty good. Obviously a full accounting will have to wait until the bone is fully prepared, but we might just have the best-preserved Brachiosaurus humerus yet found.
Me with a cast of the Potter Creek humerus in the collections at Dinosaur Journey in Fruita, Colorado. The mold for this was made from the original specimen before it was restored, so it’s missing most of the bone from the front of the shaft. Our new humerus is just a few cm shorter. Photo by Yara Haridy.
Oh, our Brachiosaurus is by far the westernmost occurrence of the genus so far, and the stratigraphically lowest, so it extends our knowledge of Brachiosaurus in both time and space. It’s part of a diverse dinosaur fauna that we’re documenting in the Salt Wash, that minimally also includes Haplocanthosaurus, Camarasaurus, and either Apatosaurus or Brontosaurus, just among sauropods. There are also some exciting non-sauropods in the fauna, which we’ll be revealing very soon.
A chunk of matrix from the brachiosaur quarry. The black bits are fossilized plants.
And that’s not all. Unlike most of the other dinosaur fossils we’ve found in the Salt Wash, including the camarasaur, apatosaur, and haplocanthosaur vertebrae I’ve shown in recent posts, the humeri were not in concrete-like sandstone. Instead, they came out of a sandy clay layer, and the matrix is packed with plant fossils. It was actually kind of a pain during the excavation, because I kept getting distracted by all the plants. We did manage to collect a couple of buckets of the better-looking stuff as we were getting the humerus out, and we’ll be going back for more.
As you can seen in Part 1 of Brian’s Jurassic Reimagined documentary series, we’re not out there headhunting dinosaurs, we’re trying to understand the whole environment: the dinosaurs, the plants, the depositional system, the boom-and-bust cycles of rain and drought–in short, the whole shebang. So the plant fossils are almost as exciting for us as the brachiosaur, because they’ll tell us more about the world of the early Morrison.
The Barletts: Thayne, Jayleigh, Resha, Cobin, Wes, and Kaler.
Among the folks I have to thank, top honors go to the Bartlett family. They came to work, they worked hard, and they were cheerful and enthusiastic through the whole process. Even the kids worked–Thayne was one of the driving forces keeping the wagon moving down the gulch, and the younger Bartletts helped Ruby uncover and jacket a couple of small bits of bone that were in the way of the humerus flip. So Wes, Resha, Thayne, Jayleigh, Kaler, and Cobin: thank you, sincerely. We couldn’t have done it without you all, and Molly and Darla!
EDIT: I also need to thank Casey Cordes–without his rope and winch skills, the jacket would still be out in the desert. And actually everyone on the team was clutch. We had no extraneous human beings and no unused gear. It was a true team effort.
The full version of the art shown at the top of this post: a new life restoration of Brachiosaurus by Brian Engh.
From start to end, this has been a Brian Engh joint. He found the humerus in the first place, and he was there for every step along the way, including creating the original paleoart that I’ve used to bookend this post. When Brian wasn’t prospecting or digging or plastering (or cooking, he’s a ferociously talented cook) he was filming. He has footage of me walking up to the humerus for the first time last May and being blown away, and he has some truly epic footage of the horses pulling the humerus out for us. All of the good stuff will go into the upcoming installments of Jurassic Reimagined. He bought the wagon and the boat winch with Patreon funds, so if you like this sort of thing–us going into the middle of nowhere, bringing back giant dinosaurs, and making blog posts and videos to explain what we’ve found and why we’re excited–please support Brian’s work (link). Also check out his blog, dontmesswithdinosaurs.com–his announcement about the find is here–and subscribe to his YouTube channel, Brian Engh Paleoart (link), for the rest of Jurassic Reimagined and many more documentaries to come.
(SV-POW! also has a Patreon page [link], and if you support us, Mike and I will put those funds to use researching and blogging about sauropods. Thanks for your consideration!)
The happiest I have ever been in the field. Photo by Yara Haridy.
And for me? It’s been the adventure of a lifetime, by turns terrifying and exhilarating. I missed out on the digs where Sauroposeidon, Brontomerus, and Aquilops came out of the ground, so this is by far the coolest thing I’ve been involved with finding and excavating. I got to work with old friends, and I made new friends along the way. And there’s more waiting for us, in “Brachiosaur Gulch” and in the Salt Wash more generally. After five years of fieldwork, we’ve just scratched the surface. Watch this space!
Media Coverage
Just as I was about to hit ‘publish’ I learned that this story has been beautifully covered by Anna Salleh of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I will add more links as they become available.
- “Brachiosaurus bone 2 metres long excavated in Utah with help of horses” – Australian Broadcasting Corporation
- “Fossil hunters use horses to pull 150 million-year-old six-foot Brachiosaurus arm bone from Utah gully in race against time before it was washed away” – Daily Mail
- “Paleontologists recover Brachiosaurus remains in southern Utah” – Southern Utah Independent
- “Bone of rare long-necked dinosaur found in Southern Utah desert” – St. George News
- “Top 5 weekend stories on St. George News” – St. George News
- Brian Engh and Matt Wedel talk about the find on the I Know Dino podcast
- “This 6-Foot Brachiosaurus Fossil Hitched a Ride With Two Clydesdale Horses” – Atlas Obscura
- “A pair of horses helped excavate a hulking Brachiosaurus fossil in Utah” — Smithsonian Magazine
References
- Jensen, James A. 1987. New brachiosaur material from the Late Jurassic of Utah and Colorado. Great Basin Naturalist 47(4):592–608.
- Riggs, Elmer S. 1903. Brachiosaurus altithorax, the largest known dinosaur. American Journal of Science 15(4):299-306.
- Riggs, E.S. 1904. Structure and relationships of opisthocoelian dinosaurs. Part II, the Brachiosauridae. Field Columbian Museum, Geological Series 2, 6, 229-247.
- Taylor, Michael P. 2009. A re-evaluation of Brachiosaurus altithorax Riggs 1903 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) and its generic separation from Giraffatitan brancai (Janensch 1914). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29(3):787-806.
A Haplocanthosaurus in the Salt Wash
January 29, 2020
If you’re thinking that it’s about time to look at some sauropod vertebrae from the Salt Wash member of the Morrison Formation, well, you’re gol-durned right, pardner. Let’s ride.
Here’s a vertebra sticking out of the rock. For once it’s not in cross-section. We’re simply looking at the posterior surface of a dorsal vertebra and bits of its associated ribs. Let’s stand it up correctly:
And, well, heck, Alex, I’d like to go ahead and solve the puzzle:
Figure on the right from Wedel and Taylor (2013a), and composed in turn from plates in Hatcher (1901, Diplodocus), Hatcher (1903, Haplocanthosaurus), and Gilmore (1936, Apatosaurus).
UPDATE: I had the discovery sequence wrong–this is one of the bones that was first found by photographer Guy Tal, who then put ReBecca Hunt-Foster onto the area. ReBecca has since gone on to become Monument Paleontologist at Dinosaur National Monument, but at the time she was working as a BLM paleontologist out of the Moab office. ReBecca then brought out some more of us out to take a look, and that was the genesis of my work with her and John in the Salt Wash.
John Foster and Cary Woodruff were both there when I saw this vertebra for the first time. I think we set a new record for a consensus among paleontologists in concluding that this vertebra belongs to Haplocanthosaurus. The super-tall, cathedral-esque laminae arching over the neural canal and the up-tilted transverse processes are absolutely diagnostic, and not present in any other Morrison sauropods. Haplocanthosaurus is one of the rarer sauropods in the Morrison, so it’s nice to have one in our Salt Wash fauna. Not least because of all the other awesome sauropods out there, it’s this weird little duck that my destiny seems to have become intertwingled with (exhibits A, B, C, D, E, and counting).
Speaking of: did you remember that the Western Science Center exhibit on the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus is still up for a couple more months? Have you seen it? Go see it!
Life restoration of Haplocanthosaurus by Brian Engh, for the Western Science Center exhibit.
So, hey, rock and roll, we have Haplocanthosaurus, and that is legitimately exciting. Between that and Camarasaurus (covered here) we have the primitive-and-unspecialized end of the Morrison sauropods sewn up. Anything bigger or more exotic? Why, yes, in fact. Stay tuned.
This is another “Road to Jurassic Reimagined, Part 2″ post. You know the drill: Part 1 is here, Part 2 will be going up here in the near future, Part 3 will be along sometime after that.
References
- Gilmore Charles W. 1936. Osteology of Apatosaurus, with special reference to specimens in the Carnegie Museum. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 11:175–300 and plates XXI–XXXIV.
- Hatcher, John Bell. 1901. Diplodocus (Marsh): its osteology, taxonomy, and probable habits, with a restoration of the skeleton. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 1:1-63.
- Hatcher, J.B. 1903. Osteology of Haplocanthosaurus with description of a new species, and remarks on the probable habits of the Sauropoda and the age and origin of the Atlantosaurus beds; additional remarks on Diplodocus. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 2:1-75.
- Wedel, Mathew J., and Michael P. Taylor. 2013. Neural spine bifurcation in sauropod dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation: ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications. Palarch’s Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology 10(1):1-34. ISSN 1567-2158.
Welcome…to Jurassic Reimagined
January 25, 2020
Over the past few years I’ve dropped hints here and there about the work I’ve been doing in the Morrison Formation of Utah with Brian Engh, John Foster, ReBecca Hunt-Foster, Jessie Atterholt, and Thuat Tran. I’ve been quiet about that (with one notable exception), but we’re finally ready to show you all what we’ve been up to. Brian has put together a short series of documentaries to take you into the Morrison and show you what we’ve found and why we’re excited about it. Your journey begins here:
We’ll have a lot more to say about this, building up to a big reveal this coming Thursday, so stay tuned!
The Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus project is now a museum exhibit
November 16, 2019
A life-size silhouette of the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus, with Thierra Nalley, me, and Jessie Atterholt for scale. Photo by Jeremiah Scott.
Tiny Titan, a temporary exhibit about the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus project, opened at the Western Science Center in Hemet, California, last night. How? Why? Read on.
Things have been quieter this year on the Haplo front than they were in 2018, for many reasons. My attention was pulled away by a lot of teaching and other day-job work–we’re launching a new curriculum at the med school, and that’s eaten an immense amount of time–and by some very exciting news from the field that I can’t tell you about quite yet (but watch this space). Things are still moving, and there will be a paper redescribing MWC 8028 and all the weird and cool things we’ve learned about it, but there are a few more timely things ahead of it in the queue.
One of the things going on behind the scenes this year is that Jessie Atterholt, Thierra Nalley, and I have been working with Alton Dooley, the director of the Western Science Center, on this exhibit. Alton has had a gleam in his eye for a long time of using the WSC’s temporary exhibit space to promote the work of local scientists, and we had the honor of being his first example. He also was not fazed by the fact that the project isn’t done–he wants to show the public the process of science in all of its serendipitous and non-linear glory, and not just the polished results that get communicated at the end.
Everything’s better cut in half. Photo by Jessie Atterholt.
Which is not to say that the exhibit isn’t polished. On the contrary, it looks phenomenal. Thanks to a loan from Julia McHugh at Dinosaur Journey in Colorado, most of the real fossils are on display. We’re only missing the ribs and most of the sacrum, which is too fragmentary and fragile to come out of its jacket. As you can see from the photo up top, there is a life-size vinyl silhouette of the Snowmass Haplo, with 3D prints of the vertebrae in approximate life position. Other 3D prints show the vertebrae before and after the process of sculpting, rescanning, and retrodeformation, as described in our presentation for the 1st Palaeontological Virtual Congress last year (that slideshow is a PeerJ Preprint, here). The exhibit also includes panels on “What is Haplocanthosaurus” and its relationships, on pneumaticity in sauropods, on the process of CT scanning and 3D modeling, and on the unusual anatomical features of the Snowmass specimen. The awesome display shown above, with the possibly-bumpy spinal cord and giant intervertebral discs reconstructed, was all Alton–he did the modeling, printing, and assembly himself.
Haplo vs Bronto. Thierra usually works on the evolution and development of the vertebral column in primates, so I had to show her how awesome vertebrae can be when they’re done right. Photo by Brittney Stoneburg.
My favorite thing in the exhibit is this striking comparison of one the Snowmass Haplo caudals with a proximal caudal from the big Oklahoma apatosaurine. This was Alton’s idea. He asked me if I had any photos of caudal vertebrae from really big sauropods that we could print at life size to compare to MWC 8028, and my mind went immediately to OMNH 1331, which is probably the second-largest-diameter vertebra of anything from all of North America (see the list here). It was also Alton’s idea to fill in the missing bits using one of Marsh’s plates of Brontosaurus excelsus from Como Bluff in Wyoming. It’s a pretty amazing display, and it turns out to have been a vehicle for discovery, too–I didn’t realize until I saw the verts side-by-side that the neural canal of the Snowmass Haplo caudal is almost as big as the neural canal from the giant apatosaurine caudal. It’s not a perfect comparison, because the OMNH fossil doesn’t preserve the neural canal, and the Como specimen isn’t that big, but proportionally, the Snowmass Haplo seems to have big honkin’ neural canals, not just at the midpoint (which we already knew), but all the way through. Looks like I have some measuring and comparing to do.
(Oh, about the title: we don’t know if the Snowmass Haplo was fully grown or not, but not all haplocanthosaurs were small. The mounted H. delfsi in Cleveland is huge, getting into Apatosaurus and Diplodocus territory. Everything we can assess in the Snowmass Haplo is fused, for what that’s worth. We have some rib chunks and Jessie will be doing histo on them to see if we can get ontogenetic information. I’ll keep you posted.)
Brian’s new Haplocanthosaurus restoration, along with some stinkin’ mammals. Photo by Jessie Atterholt.
Brian Engh contributed a fantastic life restoration of Haplocanthosaurus pro bono, thanks to this conversation, which took place in John Foster’s and ReBecca Hunt-Foster’s dining room about a month ago:
Brian: What are you drawing?
Me: Haplocanthosaurus.
Brian: Is that for the exhibit?
Me: Yup.
Brian (intense): Dude, I will draw you a Haplocanthosaurus.
Me: I know, but you’re a pro, and pros get paid, and we didn’t include a budget for paleoart.
Brian (fired up): I’m offended that you didn’t just ask me to draw you a Haplocanthosaurus.
Then he went to the Fosters’ couch, sat down with his sketchbook, and drew a Haplocanthosaurus. Not only is it a stunning piece on display in the exhibit, there are black-and-white printouts for kids to take and color (or for adults to take to their favorite tattoo artists, just sayin’). [Obligatory: this is not how things are supposed to work. We should all support original paleoart by supporting the artists who create it. But Brian just makes so damn many monsters that occasionally he has to kick one out for the heck of it. Also, I support him on Patreon, and you can, too, so at a stretch you could consider this the mother of all backer rewards.]
One special perk from the opening last night: Jessica Bramson was able to attend. Who’s that, you ask? Jessica’s son, Mike Gordon, found the first piece of bone from the Snowmass Haplo on their property in Colorado over a decade ago. Jessica and her family spent two years uncovering the fossils and trying to get paleontologists interested. In time she got in touch with John Foster, and the rest is history. Jessica lives in California now, and thanks to John’s efforts we were able to invite her to the exhibit opening to see her dinosaur meet the world. Stupidly, I did not get any photos with her, but I did thank her profusely.
A restored, retrodeformed caudal of the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus, 3D-printed at life size for the exhibit. Photo swiped from the WSC Facebook page.
I owe a huge thanks to Alton Dooley for taking an interest in our work, and to the whole WSC crew for their hard work creating and promoting the exhibit. You all rock.
The exhibit will run through the end of March, 2020, at least. I deliberately did not show most of it, partly because I was too busy having fun last night to be diligent about taking photos, but mostly because I want you to go see it for yourself (I will do a retrospective post with more info after the exhibit comes down, for people who weren’t able to see it in person). If you make it out to Hemet, I hope you have half as much fun going through the exhibit as we did making it.
Parasaurolophus sculpture by Brian Engh
October 7, 2019
This past summer I did a post on my birthday card from Brian Engh, but I haven’t posted about my birthday present from him: this handmade fired-clay sculpture of Parasaurolophus.
I don’t have a ton to say about it, other than that — as you can tell from the photos — it looks pretty darned convincing. I adore the fern leaf impressions in the base.
This sits on the mantle in our living room. My eye wanders to it in stray moments. I’ve often run down ornithopods as boring, but they’re all right. They’re the clade of dinosaurs most remote from my research, so they’re about the only ones left that just signify “dinosaur” to me, without any research-related intellectual baggage. So when I’m woolgathering and my eyes land on this sculpture, it doesn’t make me think about me or now. It makes me think about them, and then. It’s a talismanic time machine. And a pretty darned great birthday present. Thanks, Brian!
My sauroponderous birthday card from Brian Engh
June 3, 2019
Okay, so here on the Best Coast it’s not technically my birthday for another 3 hours, but SV-POW! runs on England time, and at the SV-POW! global headquarters bunker it’s already June 3. Oh, and tomorrow Brian and I are driving to New Mexico to look for Cretaceous monsters with Andrew McDonald and crew, and I won’t be advantageously situated for blogging. So here’s my Favorite. Card. EVAR:
Bone cancer in a Triassic stem turtle
February 7, 2019
Cool new paper out today by Yara Haridy and colleagues, describing the oldest known osteosarcoma in the vertebrate fossil record. The growth in question is on the proximal femur of the Triassic stem turtle Pappochelys.
Brian Engh did his usual amazing job illustrating this pervert turtle with no shell and a weird growth on its butt.
I don’t have a ton more to say about the paper, it’s short and sweet. I got to meet Yara in person at SVP last fall and learn about her research, and there is going to a LOT more weird stuff coming down the pike. She is after some really fundamental questions about where bone comes from, how it develops in the first place, and how it remodels and heals. Get ready to see some crazy jacked-up bones from other basal amniotes in the next few years, including some vertebrae that are so horked that Yara and I spent some time discussing which end was which.
On a probably inevitable and purely selfish personal note, I don’t blog nearly enough about turtles. I like turtles. Which, if you’re going to say, you gotta say like this kid:
In fact, I love turtles, and if there were no sauropods, I’d probably be working on turtles. Other people show you pictures of their cats, I’m going to show you pictures of my turtle, Easty. She’s a female three-toed box turtle, Terrapene carolina triunguis.
Here she is closing in on an unlucky roly-poly (or pill bug, if you prefer).
Having a close encounter with our cat Berkeley last summer. I think Easty kinda blew Berkeley’s mind. She’s been around our other cat, Moe, for years, so she’s completely unfazed by cats. But Berkeley is a SoCal kitty who showed up on our doorstep starving and yowling when he was about eight weeks old, so this was his first encounter with a turtle.
Berkeley batted at Easty’s shell a couple of times and then spent about half an hour having a visible existential crisis. Here was a small creature that he couldn’t frighten and couldn’t move, which was not the least bit afraid of him and either ignored him or treated him like an obstacle. Watching them interact — or rather, watching Easty act and Berkeley react — was solid entertainment for most of the afternoon.
Why have I hijacked this post to yap about my turtle? Primarily because up until now I’ve had a hard time visualizing a stem turtle. Turtles are so much their own thing, and I’ve been so interested in them for virtually my entire life, that imagining an animal that was only partly a turtle was very difficult for me. The thing I like most about Brian’s art of the tumorous Pappochelys is that it reads convincingly turtle-ish to me, especially the neck and head:
So congratulations to Yara and her coauthors for a nice writeup of a very cool find, and to Brian for another vibrant piece of paleoart. Triassic turtles sometimes had cancer on their butts. Tell the world!
Since I’ve already blown the weekly schedule here in the new year, maybe my SV-POW! resolution for 2019 will be to blog more about turtles. I’m gonna do it anyway, might as well make it a resolution so I can feel like I’m keeping up with something. Watch this space.
Reference
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 