More on Qiaowanlong already

September 6, 2009

I know it’s a bit soon to follow up my own post, but I’ve been in correspondence with You Hai-Lu, lead author of the Proc. B paper describing the new putative brachiosaurid Qiaowanlong.  He’s been very gracious in response to my questioning the new taxon, and I wanted to pass on the fruits of that exchange.

Most importantly, I’d questioned whether the three bones that make up the right pelvis of the type and only specimen might actually be from different individuals, as the pubis seems insanely huge.  (As Tor Bertin pointed out in a comment, “the proximal end of the pubis is proportionally almost identical in [Qiaowanlong] as it is [in “B“. brancai]–then it leads to the Distal End That Ate New York”.)  You wrote that “One thing I’m sure is that the pelvic is articulated, and also associated with the cervicals. See the attached photo I used in my original submission.” — and here, with permission, is that figure:

Qiaowanlong fossil block, partly prepared, showing articulated right pelvis in anteromedial view

Qiaowanlong fossil block, partly prepared, showing articulated right pelvis in anteromedial view

This certainly clears up any question about the association of the pelvic bones (so Randy was right).   You notes that since this figure was prepared, the serial identification of the cervicals has changed.  I assume that “un” in the interpretive drawing on the right indicates unidentified bones, and it’s nice to think that further preparation might yield more secrets.

Regarding the likelihood of a full monographic description, You wrote that “Certainly, more work will follow on Qiaowanlong, but hard to see when this can be done.”  I can sympathise, given the astonishing rate that new taxa are leaping out of the ground in China, but I do hope time can be found to get this done.

Other issues that came up in the comments which ought to be addressed:

  • Mickey Mortimer asked “How many other brachiosaur-grade macronarians were included in the analysis?”  Sorry I wasn’t clear in the original post — there is no cladistic analysis in the published paper; and You, in email, wrote “Let’s wait for a cladistic analysis to see what’s the future of Qiaowanlong will be”.
  • Mickey also noted that “with how many basal titanosauriform taxa are known, and how much analyses can change with the addition or subtraction of one OTU, I don’t think we can say anything is a brachiosaurid or not besides Brachiosaurus itself.”  Yes, that region of the tree is pretty unresolved right now, but Help Is On The Way!  I know of at least two projects under way to do good cladistic jobs on the base of Titanosauriformes (neither of them by me in case anyone wondered!)  So it should soon be possible to meaningfully shove taxa like Qiaowanlong into existing analyses.
  • Randy made an important point that I’d glossed over in my anti-tabloid rant: “Publishing short-form articles in high-impact journals is absolutely necessary to get a job and get tenure at a research I university and/or major museums”.  It’s true, I do tend to forget what an unusual position I’m in and that most other publishing palaeontologists have to wrestle with all sorts of dumbitude that I am, thankfully, insulated from.  As things stand, we have a system in which appointment boards and funding committees what to see THE EXACT OPPOSITE of what actually serves science; and, yes, I do understand that people sometimes have to play that game, however dumb.
  • Nathan asked “Actually, I don’t understand why Nature itself doesn’t have an online annex for long-enough versions of the articles”.  I feel very strongly that Online Supplementary Information is NOT the answer.  It doesn’t count as “published”, no-one cites it or trusts it, and journals are notoriously cavalier about losing OSIs.  Try to download the supplement for the Rapetosaurus description if you don’t believe me.
  • Yes, of course, publishing a brief description in Science, Nature or Proc. B and following up with a comprehensive description elsewhere (as suggested by Tor) is just fine.  The problem is, not many people do it.  Mickey Mortimer recently analysed this on the Dinosaur Mailing List — and found that only a quarter of the 33 theropods described in Nature in the last twenty-five years have been properly described elsewhere since then.

I’ll close with a sequence of field photographs of the Qiaowanlong excavation, again kindly provided by You and posted here with permission.

Qiaowanlong-1-480px

Qiaowanlong-2-480px

Qiaowanlong-6-480px

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in brachiosaurids, Qiaowanlong
16 Comments »

Bifid Brachiosaurs, Batman!

September 6, 2009

These are the days of miracle and wonder, especially for all you right-minded people out there who are lovers of fine brachiosaurs.  I heard yesterday evening about a new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: You and Li’s (2009, duh) description of a new brachiosaur, the first one known from the Cretaceous of Asia: Qiaowanlong kangxii. Best of all, it’s based primarily on vertebral material:

You and Li (2009:fig. 2) Cervical vertebrae of Qiaowanlong kangxii holotype FRDC GJ 07-14.

You and Li (2009:fig. 2) Cervical vertebrae of Qiaowanlong kangxii holotype FRDC GJ 07-14. (a) Photograph and (b) interpretative line drawing of C4-C7 in left lateral view; (c) a distal portion of a cervical rib; C9 in (d) cranial, (e) left lateral, (f) caudal, (g) right lateral, (h) dorsal and (i) ventral views. di, diapophysis; f1-f5, fossa 1-fossa 5; pa, parapophysis; poz, postzygapophysis; prz, prezygapophysis; sp, neural spine. Scale bars, 10 cm.

Brachiosaur aficionados will be gazing slack-jawed at parts d, f and h of this figure (the anterior, posterior and dorsal views of C9), which clearly show that the neural spines of the new taxon are bifid (i.e. have two peaks side by side and a trough between them) — just like the cervical neural spines of flagellicaudatans (diplodocids and dicraeosaurs) and camarasaurs.  And mamenchisaurs.  And some titanosaurs.  And Erketu.  Finding this feature yet again — apparently independently evolved in brachiosaurs — makes it about the most plastic character in the matrix.  Very exciting.

That is, it’s exciting if this really is a brachiosaurid.  Now as it happens, Matt was one of the reviewers for this paper (and by the way did an amazingly professional job of not telling me about it until it came out, the git).  He’s told me in email that he’s satisfied that Qiaowanlong really is a brachiosaur, and I hesitate to question that identification given that (A) unlike the authors I’ve never seen the material, and (B) unlike Matt, I’ve spent most of my brachiosaur-presacral quality time with dorsals rather than cervicals.  But, with that caveat, I’m not sure that a compelling case has yet been made for a brachiosaurian identity.

The authors cite three characters in support of a brachiosaurid identity:

  • The most persuasive is the deeply excavated cervical neural spines.
  • Next is a transition in neural spine height: this is quite abrupt in “Brachiosaurus” brancai between cervicals 6 and 7, and also in Sauroposeidon — presumably also between C6 and C7, but that can’t be known for sure, since it’s only the assumption that this is the case that led to the identification of the four preserved Sauroposeidon cervicals as C5-C8 in the first place.  In Qiaowanlong, this transition is “much less pronounced”, with spines increasing in height by only 25% rather then 100% in the other taxa — and occurs between C8 and C9.  All in all, not really very similar to the condition in “B.” brancai.
  • The final character supporting the brachiosaurid identity of Qiaowanlong is the absence of an anterior centrodiapophyseal lamina.  As the authors point out, though, this lamina does exist in “B.” brancai and is absent only in Sauroposeidon; so if this is evidence of anything, it’s a synapomorphy of a clade uniting Qiaowanlong and Sauroposeidon to the absence of other brachiosaurs — something that seems very unlikely given the proportions of the vertebrae.

Putting it all together, there seems to be only one convincing brachiosaur character cited; and that stands against several non-brachiosaur characters, most obviously the bifurcation of the neural spine and the low Elongation Index (centrum length divided by cotyle height) but also by a few other characters that are not discussed in the paper.  For example, Matt has previously noted that in brachiosaur cervicals, the diapophyses are more anteriorly positioned than the parapophyses whereas in diplodocids the opposite is the case: as shown in fig 2(b) above, C6 at least of Qiaowanlong resembles diplodocids in this respect.

To try to get more of a handle on this, I put together a comparative figure of the 8th and 9th cervicals of various sauropods:

8th/9th cervicals vertebrae of various sauropods, scaled to the same centrum length. "Brachiosaurus" brancai, Sauroposeidon; Qiaowanlong, Diplodocus; Haplocanthosaurus, Camarasaurus

8th/9th cervicals vertebrae of various sauropods, scaled to the same centrum length. From top to bottom and left to right: "Brachiosaurus" brancai, Sauroposeidon; Qiaowanlong, Diplodocus; Haplocanthosaurus, Camarasaurus. Six sauropod vertebrae for the price of one!

Based on overall proportions, I don’t find it intuitively obvious that the Qiaowanlong (middle row, left) more closely resembles the brachiosaurs (top row) than it does the other three.

What does all this mean?  Probably nothing: most likely there are further reasons for the brachiosaurid identification of the new taxon, and lack of space prevented their explanation and illustration.  We can hope that the authors, having placed an initial brief description in Proc. B, will follow it up with a more comprehensive description and analysis in a journal that does not impose such tight length restrictions.  But for now at least, my feeling is that the case for a bifid brachiosaur has yet to be made.

Moving on … Qiaowanlong is also represented by some nice appendicular material: the entire right side of the pelvis (ilium, ischium and pubis).  The ilium certainly looks brachiosaury, so that is another bit of support for the systematic hypothesis, but the proportions of the pelvic bones are very odd:

Right pelvis of "Brachiosaurus" brancai (left), based on composite of Janensch's (1961) figures, and Qiaowanlong (from You and Li 2009: fig. 3a). Scaled to same ilium length.

Right pelvis of "Brachiosaurus" brancai (left), based on composite of Janensch's (1961) figures, and Qiaowanlong (from You and Li 2009: fig. 3a). Scaled to same ilium length.

You and Li (2009) describe their pelvis as having a “much reduced ischium”, but as is apparent by comparison with the pelvis of “Brachiosaurus” brancai, the ischium is in reasonable proportion to the ilium, and the oddity is more that the pubis is enormous.  So much so that it makes me feel a little ill looking at it, and it makes me wonder how certain it is that all three of these bones are from the same individual — sadly, the paper doesn’t discuss the association of the material.

[Not to flog a dead horse, but this kind of omission shows once more the perils of publishing new taxa in general-interest journals such as Proc. B that impose draconian length limits.  This paper just creeps onto page 7, and I simply don’t believe that it’s possible to do anything like justice to the description of a new taxon in that little space, especially when there is also geography, geology, phylogeny and discussion to be got through.  I don’t want to go all This Is How To Do It, but I can’t help remembering that Darren and I took 18 pages, nearly three times as long, to describe the single partial vertebra that is Xenoposeidon (Taylor and Naish 2007), and it’s not as though that paper wastes a lot of words.  To give You and Li credit, they did squeeze in photos of a representative vertebra from all six cardinal directions, which is great; but only at the cost of the photos being too tiny to be much use.  Please, folks: send your new taxon descriptions to a proper descriptive journal, not to a tabloid!  </hobbyhorse>]

Back on the Dinosaur Mailing List, B tH asked how big Qiaowanlong was.  According to the BBC, the authors say that “the dinosaur would have been a relatively small sauropod about 12m long, 3m high, and weighing perhaps 10 tonnes”.  Can we confirm that?  Well, the excellently comprehensive table of measurements in the paper gives centrum lengths, not counting the condyle, totalling 267 cm for the seven vertebrae C5-C11.  Janensch (1950a:44) gave measurements for the corresponding vertebrae of “Brachiosaurus” brancai HMN SII totalling 577 cm, which is more than twice as long.  If Qiaowanlong was 267/577 = 0.46 times as long as HMN SII, which Janensch (1950b:102) gave as 22.46 m, then it would have been 10.4 m long; it’s not obvious how the authors got the larger figure of 12 m unless they had reason to think the neck was proportionally shorter than in HMN SII.  If Qiaowanlong was isometrically similar to HMN SII, then it was 0.46^3 = 0.99 0.099 times as heavy.  Using my own in-press mass of 23337 kg for HMN SII, this would make Qiaowanlong only 2312 kg in mass — pretty pathetic for a sauropod.

That’s it for now.  I’d be the first to admit that there’s an awful lot of speculation in this post based on relatively little published information.  Hopefully You Hai-Lu will drop by and comment — I’ll be letting him know that I’ve posted this.

References

  • Janensch, Werner.  1950.  Die Wirbelsaule von Brachiosaurus brancai. Palaeontographica (Suppl. 7) 3: 27-93.
    Janensch, Werner.  1950.  Die Skelettrekonstruktion von Brachiosaurus brancai.  Palaeontographica (Suppl. 7) 3: 97-103.
    Janensch, Werner.  1961.  Die Gliedmaszen und Gliedmaszengurtel der Sauropoden der Tendaguru-Schichten.  Palaeontographica, suppl. 7 (1), teil 3, lief. 4: 177-235.
    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.  doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4983.2007.00728.x
    You, Hai-Lu, and Li, Da-Qing.  2009.  The first well-preserved Early Cretaceous brachiosaurid dinosaur in Asia.  Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.  doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1278.
  • Janensch, Werner.  1950.  Die Wirbelsaule von Brachiosaurus brancai. Palaeontographica (Suppl. 7) 3: 27-93.
  • Janensch, Werner.  1950.  Die Skelettrekonstruktion von Brachiosaurus brancai.  Palaeontographica (Suppl. 7) 3: 97-103.
  • Janensch, Werner.  1961.  Die Gliedmaszen und Gliedmaszengurtel der Sauropoden der Tendaguru-Schichten.  Palaeontographica, suppl. 7 (1), teil 3, lief. 4: 177-235.
  • 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.  doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4983.2007.00728.x
  • You, Hai-Lu, and Li, Da-Qing.  2009.  The first well-preserved Early Cretaceous brachiosaurid dinosaur in Asia.  Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.  doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1278.

And finally … two announcements!

Traumador the Tyrannosaur has asked us to point out that over on ART Evolved (the palaeo-art blog), the next big art gallery is to be sauropod themed.  Details are on the site, so get over there and submit your sauropod art!

And Matt and I will shortly be teaming up with Andy Farke, the open-source paleontologist, on a new project where we plan to actually do some of this Shiny Digital Future that we keep on talking about.  Andy will be announcing the details on Tuesday 8th September.  Mark the date well!  For now, I shall say no more …

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in brachiosaurids, Brachiosaurus, camarasaurs, cervical, diplodocids, Diplodocus, Haplocanthosaurus, mass estimates, math, Qiaowanlong, Sauroposeidon, Shiny digital future, size, teaser
19 Comments »