Over on Mastodon (sign up, it’s great!), Jim Kirkland posted a baby Utahraptor caudal vertebrae for #FossilFriday. Here it is:
And after a bit of virtual prep work:
My first reaction was just “That’s pretty!“. My second, which I admit should have been my first, was “Wait a sec — how the heck do those things articulate?”
The issue is that both the prezygs and the postzygs overhang the centrum by so much. If we imagine three of these babies consecutively, there are basically two options.
First, the centra articulate closely, with what we might feel intuitively is a reasonable cartilage gap; and the zygs cross over:
Does something like this ever happen? Not in sauropods, for sure, but it could be correct — if the zyg facets are some way short of the tips of their processes, so that the most distal parts of each process are pre-epipophyses and epipophyses rather than prezygs and postzygs per se.
The other interpretation is this, with the zygs overlapping near the end as in sensible dinosaurs, and much more spaced out centra:
If this is right, then (in this respect) baby Utahraptor tails resembled camel necks in having big intervertebral spaces, which in life were filled with big cartilage plugs.
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SPOILER SPACE
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Have a think about this before reading on.
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SPOILER SPACE
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OK, here is the horrible truth.
Dromaeosaur tails do overlap their zyg processes as in the first mock-up above: but they do much, much worse than this!
Here is the truly perverted figure 37 of Ostrom’s classic 1969 monograph on Deinonychus — the publication that catalysed the whole Dinosaur Renaissance:
As you can see, the zygapophyseal processes are grotesquely elongated, and overlap in long stiffening bundles with those of successive vertebrae (part C of the figure). The actual zyg facets are small, and close to the origins of these processes (see parts A and B of the figure). And the chevrons are also hideously protracted beyond their natural length to form stiffening bundles beneath the tail that complement those above the tail.
To add insult to injury, the chevrons even face in the wrong darned direction, extending anteriorly along the tail rather than posteriorly as in all decent animals. Yes: in Ostrom’s illustrations, we’re seeing the vertebrae in right lateral view, i.e. anterior is to the right.
All of this confirms that I was so, so right two decades ago to focus so completely on proper dinosaurs instead of these nasty mutant ones. Ugh.
What’s up with your insanely thick intervertebral discs, Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus?
February 28, 2022
Among the numerous weird features of MWC 8028, the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus, is the extreme biconcave profile of the caudal vertebrae, in which each centrum is basically reduced to a vertical plate of bone separating two cup-shaped articular surfaces. All four available caudals — found in different parts of the quarry, in different orientations — have essentially the same cross-section. For the diagram above, I just copied caudal 3, because it’s the most complete, so I could figure out the thickness and cross-sectional shape of a single intervertebral disc.
I drew a more realistic version, with the first three caudals at approximately the right scale, for our neural canal paper last year:
The first three caudal vertebrae of Haplocanthosaurus specimen MWC 8028 in midsagittal section, emphasizing the volumes of the neural canal (yellow) and intervertebral joint spaces (blue). Anterior is to the right. Wedel et al. (2021: fig. 2B).
It’s a drawing, sure, but it’s based on a true story, because we have CT scans of all the vertebrae (and we’re going to publish them, soon, along with the reconstructed verts).
(NB: I’m using “intervertebral disc” as a convenient shorthand for “whatever soft tissues filled the joint space”. But I do think it was a big, fat, fibrocartilaginous disc, not wildly different from the ones in the human vertebral column. It’s not totally impossible that there was some combination of crazy thick articular cartilage and a synovial cavity — there is some precedent in extant salamanders and lizards — but that seems way less likely, for reasons I’ll go into in detail elsewhere. Incidentally, the notion is floating around that reptiles have only synovial intervertebral joints, but this is simply false: intervertebral discs are present in some squamates [Winchester and Bellairs 1977] and in the tails of birds [Baumel 1988].)
I should point out that the other specimens of Haplocanthosaurus also have biconcave caudal vertebrae, but the concavities are much shallower. So what we’re seeing in MWC 8028 is an extreme version of something we see in other individuals of the same genus.
Now, because the caudal centra and joint spaces are roughly radially symmetrical, their relative cross-sectional areas, in these mid-sagittal sections, should be good proxies for their relative volumes. You can imagine the generating the volume of a centrum by rotating its cross-section through 180 degrees, ditto for the joint space (ignoring tilt since both the centrum and joint space are tilted). We’ll have this math worked out in more detail in the next paper, along with volumes from the 3D models, but the upshot is this:
The volume of the intervertebral discs is about twice that of the vertebral centra. If we ignore the neural arch and spine and the transverse processes, and focus only on the weight-bearing column formed by the proximal caudal centra and intervertebral discs, that column is 2/3 cartilage and only 1/3 bone.
Why, tho?
I spent some time brainstorming with Alton Dooley and we came up with a whole slate of hypotheses. We don’t necessarily like any of them very much, we’re just trying to cast the widest possible net, to make sure we haven’t overlooked any possibilities, no matter how remote they might seem. Here’s what we have so far:
Non-biological:
1. taphonomic distortion
Abnormal biology:
2. congenital malformation
3. pathology
Ontogenetic:
4. incomplete ossification (animal died without laying down the ‘missing’ bone)
5. senescence (the ‘missing’ bone was removed by some process related to aging)
Functional:
6. increased or decreased movement between vertebrae
7. weight reduction
8. shock absorption
What else?
To reiterate, we’re in the hypothesis-generating stage, not the hypothesis-evaluating stage. So we’re not interested in whether any of these hypotheses are likely. (In point of fact, I think the ones we have so far all suck.) We just want all of the ideas that aren’t impossible.
The comment field is open!
References
- Baumel, J.J. 1988. Functional morphology of the tail apparatus of the pigeon (Columba livia). Advances in Anatomy, Embryology, and Cell Biology 110: 1-115.
- Wedel, Mathew; Atterholt, Jessie; Dooley, Jr., Alton C.; Farooq, Saad; Macalino, Jeff; Nalley, Thierra K.; Wisser, Gary; and Yasmer, John. 2021. Expanded neural canals in the caudal vertebrae of a specimen of Haplocanthosaurus. Academia Letters, Article 911, 10pp.
- Winchester, L. and Bellairs, A.D.A. 1977. Aspects of vertebral development in lizards and snakes. Journal of Zoology 181(4): 495-525.
What can sauropod sacra tell us about neck posture?
April 22, 2020
Daniel Vidal et al.’s new paper in Scientific Reports (Vidal et al. 2020) has been out for a couple of days now. Dealing as it does with sauropod neck posture, it’s obviously of interest to me, and to Matt. (See our earlier relevant papers Taylor et al. 2009, Taylor and Wedel 2013 and Taylor 2014.)
Overview
To brutally over-summarise Vidal et al.’s paper, it comes down to this: they digitized the beautifully preserved and nearly complete skeleton of Spinophorosaurus, and digitally articulated the scans of the bones to make a virtual skeletal mount. In doing this, they were careful to consider the neutral pose of consecutive vertebrae in isolation, looking at only one pair at a time, so as to avoid any unconscious biases as to how the articulated column “should” look.
Then they took the resulting pose, objectively arrived at — shown above in their figure 1 — and looked to see what it told them. And as you can well see, it showed a dramatically different pose from that of the original reconstruction.
Original skeletal reconstruction of Spinophorosaurus nigerensis (Remes et al. 2009:figure 5, reversed for ease of comparison). Dimensions are based on GCP-CV-4229/NMB-1699-R, elements that are not represented are shaded. Scale bar = 1 m.
In particular, they found that as the sacrum is distinctly “wedged” (i.e. its anteroposterior length is greater ventrally than it is dorsally, giving it a functionally trapezoidal shape, shown in their figure 1A), so that the column of the torso is inclined 20 degrees dorsally relative to that of the tail. They also found lesser but still significant wedging in the last two dorsal vertebrae (figure 1B) and apparently some slight wedging in the first dorsal (figure 1C) and last cervical (figure 1D).
The upshot of all this is that their new reconstruction of Spinophorosaurus has a strongly inclined dorsal column, and consequently a strongly inclined cervical column in neutral pose.
Vidal et al. also note that all eusauropods have wedged sacra to a greater or lesser extent, and conclude that to varying degrees all eusauropods had a more inclined torso and neck than we have been used to reconstructing them with.
Response
I have to be careful about this paper, because its results flatter my preconceptions. I have always been a raised-neck advocate, and there is a temptation to leap onto any paper that reaches the same conclusion and see it as corroboration of my position.
The first thing to say is that the core observation is absolutely right, — and it’s one of those things that once it’s pointed out it’s so obvious that you wonder why you never made anything of it yourself. Yes, it’s true that sauropod sacra are wedged. It’s often difficult to see in lateral view because the ilia are usually fused to the sacral ribs, but when you see them in three dimensions it’s obvious. Occasionally you find a sacrum without its ilium, and then the wedging can hardly be missed … yet somehow, we’ve all been missing its implications for a century and a half.
Sacrum of Diplodocus AMNH 516 in left lateral and (for our purposes irrelevant) ventral views. (Osborn 1904 figure 3)
Of course this means that, other thing being equal, the tail and torso will not be parallel with each other, but will project in such a way that the angle between them, measured dorsally, is less than 180 degrees. And to be fair, Greg Paul has long been illustrating diplodocids with an upward kink to the tail, and some other palaeoartists have picked up on this — notably Scott Hartman with his very uncomfortable-looking Mamenchisaurus.
But I do have three important caveats that mean I can’t just take the conclusions of the Vidal et al. paper at face value.
1. Intervertebral cartilage
I know that we have rather banged on about this (Taylor and Wedel 2013, Taylor 2014) but it remains true that bones alone can tell us almost nothing about how vertebrae articulated. Unless we incorporate intervertebral cartilage into our models, they can only mislead us. To their credit, Vidal et al. are aware of this — though you wouldn’t know it from the actual paper, whose single mention of cartilage is in respect of a hypothesised cartilaginous suprascapula. But buried away the supplementary information is this rather despairing paragraph:
Cartilaginous Neutral Pose (CNP): the term was coined by Taylor for “the pose found when intervertebral cartilage [that separates the centra of adjacent vertebrae] is included”. Since the amount of inter-vertebral space cannot be certainly known for most fossil vertebrate taxa, true CNP will likely remain unknown for most taxa or always based on estimates.
Now this is true, so far as it goes: it’s usually impossible to know how much cartilage there was, and what shape it took, as only very unusual preservational conditions give us this information. But I don’t think that lets us out from the duty of recognising how crucial that cartilage is. It’s not enough just to say “It’s too hard to measure” and assume it didn’t exist. We need to be saying “Here are the results if we assume zero-thickness cartilage, here’s what we get if we assume cartilage thickness equal to 5% centrum length, and here’s what we get if we assume 10%”.
I really don’t think it’s good enough in 2020 to say “We know there was some intervertebral cartilage, but since we don’t know exactly how much we’re going to assume there was none at all”.
The thing about incorporating cartilage into articulating models is that we would, quite possibly, get crazy results. I refer you to the disturbing figure 4 in my 2014 paper:
Figure 4. Effect of adding cartilage to the neutral pose of the neck of Diplodocus carnegii CM 84. Images of vertebra from Hatcher (1901:plate III). At the bottom, the vertebrae are composed in a horizontal posture. Superimposed, the same vertebrae are shown inclined by the additional extension angles indicated in Table 2.
I imagine that taking cartilage into account for the Spinophorosaurus reconstruction might have given rise to equally crazy “neutral” postures. I can see why Vidal et al. might have been reluctant to open that can of worms; but the thing is, it’s a can that really needs opening.
2. Sacrum orientation
As Vidal et al.’s figure 1A clearly shows, the sacrum of Spinophorosaurus is indeed wedge-shaped, with the anterior articular surface of the first sacral forming an angle of 20 degrees relative to the posterior articular surface of the last:
But I don’t see why it follows that “the coalesced sacrum is situated so that the posterior face of the last sacral centrum is sub-vertical. This makes the presacral series slope dorsally and allows the tail to be subhorizontal (Figs. 1 and 4S)”. Vidal et al. justify this by saying:
Since a subhorizontal tail has been known to be present in the majority of known sauropods[27, 28, 29], the [osteologically induced curvature] of the tail of Spinophorosaurus is therefore compatible with this condition.
But those three numbered references are to Gilmore 1932, Coombs 1975 and Bakker 1968 — three venerable papers, all over fifty years old, dating from a period long before the current understanding of sauropod posture. What’s more, each of those three was about disproving the previously widespread assumption of tail-dragging in sauropods, but the wedged sacrum of Spinophorosaurus if anything suggests the opposite posture.
So my question is, given that the dorsal and caudal portions of the vertebral column are at some specific angle to each other, how do we decide which (if either) is horizontal, and which is inclined?
Three interpretations of the wedged sacrum of Spinophorosaurus, in right lateral view. In all three, the green line represents the trajectory of the dorsal column in the torso, and the red line that of the caudal column. At the top, the tail is horizontal (as favoured by Vidal et al. 2020) resulting in an inclined torso; at the bottom, the torso is horizontal, resulting in a dorsally inclined tail; in the middle, an intermediate posture shows both the torso and the tail slightly inclined.
I am not convinced that the evidence presented by Vidal et al. persuasively favours any of these possibilities over the others. (They restore the forequarters of Spinophorosaurus with a very vertical and ventrally positioned scapula in order to enable the forefeet to reach the ground; this may be correct or it may not, but it’s by no means certain — especially as the humeri are cross-scaled from a referred specimen and the radius, ulna and manus completely unknown.)
3. Distortion
Finally, we should mention the problem of distortion. This is not really a criticism of the paper, just a warning that sacra as preserved should not be taken as gospel. I have no statistics or even systematic observations to back up this assertion, but the impression I have, from having looked closely at quite a lot of sauropod vertebra, is the sacra are perhaps more prone to distortion than most vertebrae. So, for example, the very extreme almost 30-degree wedging that Vidal et al. observed in the sacrum of the Brachiosaurus altithorax holotype FMNH PR 25107 should perhaps not be taken at face value.
Now what?
Vidal el al. are obviously onto something. Sauropod sacra are screwy, and I’m glad they have drawn attention in a systematic way to something that had only been alluded to in passing previously, and often in a way that made it seems as though the wedging they describe was unique to a few special specimens. So it’s good that this paper is out there.
But we really do need to see it as only a beginning. Some of the things I want to see:
- Taking cartilage into account. If this results in silly postures, we need to understand why that is the case, not just pretend the problem doesn’t exist.
- Comparison of sauropod sacra with those of other animals — most important, extant animals whose actual posture we can observe. This might be able to tell us whether wedging really has the implications for posture that we’re assuming.
- Better justification of the claim that the torso rather than the tail was inclined.
- An emerging consensus on sauropod shoulder articulation, since this also bears on torso orientation. (I don’t really have a position on this, but I think Matt does.)
- The digital Spinophorosaurus model used in this study. (The paper says “The digital fossils used to build the virtual skeleton are deposited and accessioned at the Museo Paleontológico de Elche” but there is no link, I can’t easily find them on the website and they really should be published alongside the paper.)
Anyway, this is a good beginning. Onward and upward!
References
- Bakker, Robert T. 1968. The Superiority of Dinosaurs. Discovery 3:11–22.
- Coombs, Walter P. 1975. Sauropod habits and habitats. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 17:1-33.
- Gilmore, Charles W. 1932. On a newly mounted skeleton of Diplodocus in the United States National Museum. Proceedings of the United States National Museum 81:1-21.
- 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.
- Osborn, Henry F. 1904. Manus, sacrum and caudals of Sauropoda. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 20:181-190.
- Taylor, Michael P. 2014. Quantifying the effect of intervertebral cartilage on neutral posture in the necks of sauropod dinosaurs. PeerJ 2:e712. doi:10.7717/peerj.712
- Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2013c. The effect of intervertebral cartilage on neutral posture and range of motion in the necks of sauropod dinosaurs. PLOS ONE 8(10):e78214. 17 pages. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0078214
- Taylor, Michael P., Mathew J. Wedel and Darren Naish. 2009. Head and neck posture in sauropod dinosaurs inferred from extant animals. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 54(2):213-230.
- Vidal, Daniel, P Mocho, A. Aberasturi, J. L. Sanz and F. Ortega. 2020. High browsing skeletal adaptations in Spinophorosaurus reveal an evolutionary innovation in sauropod dinosaurs. Scientific Reports 10(6638). Indispensible supplementary information at https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-020-63439-0/MediaObjects/41598_2020_63439_MOESM1_ESM.pdf
doi:10.1038/s41598-020-63439-0
The Haplocanthosaurus presentation from the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress is now a PeerJ Preprint
December 17, 2018
If you were curious about the Wedel et al. presentation on the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus at the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress but didn’t attend the event, it is now preserved for posterity and freely available to the world as a PeerJ Preprint (as promised). Here’s the link.
I’ll have much more to say about this going forward, but for now here are slides 20 and 21 on the intervertebral joint spaces. This is obviously just the same vert cloned three times and articulated with itself. With the digital rearticulation of the reconstructed and retrodeformed caudal series still in progress, we cloned caudal 3, the only vertebra that preserves both sets of zygapophyses, to get a rough estimate of the sizes and shapes of the soft tissues that filled the intervertebral spaces and neural canal.
The reconstructed intervertebral discs (in blue) are very crude and diagrammatic. The reason I’m putting these particular slides up is to get the cited references out in the open on the blog, to start correcting the misapprehension that all non-mammalian amniotes have exclusively synovial intervertebral joints (see the discussion in the comments on this post). In the list below I’m including Banerji (1957), which is not cited in the presentation but which I did cite in that comment thread; it’s an important source and at least for now it is a free download. These refs are just the tip of a very big iceberg. One of my goals for 2019 is to do a series of posts reviewing the extensive literature on amphiarthrodial (fibrocartilaginous) intervertebral joints in living lepidosaurs and birds. Stay tuned!
And please go have a look at the presentation if you are at all interested or curious. As we said in the next to last slide, “this research is ongoing, and we welcome your input. If there are facts or hypotheses we haven’t considered but should, please let us know!”
References
- Baumel, J.J. (ed.) 1993. Handbook of Avian Anatomy: Nomina Anatomica Avium. Nuttal Ornithological Club, Publication No. 23, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
- Banerji, K.K. 1957. The comparitive anatomy of the intervertebral joints. Doctoral dissertation, University of St Andrews, 132 + viii pp.
- Wedel, M.J., Atterholt, J., Macalino, J., Nalley, T., Wisser, G., and Yasmer, J. 2018. Reconstructing an unusual specimen of Haplocanthosaurus using a blend of physical and digital techniques. Abstract book, 1st Palaeontological Virtual Congress, http://palaeovc.uv.es/, p. 158 / PeerJ Preprints 6:e27431v1
- Winchester, L.A. 1978. Development and morphology of vertebrae and intervertebral joints in lizards and snakes. PhD thesis, Imperial College London, 326 pp.
- Winchester, L.A., and Bellairs, A.D.A. 1977. Aspects of vertebral development in lizards and snakes. J. Zoology 181(4): 495-525.
We may never know how flexible sauropod necks were
November 8, 2018
The more I look at the problem of how flexible sauropod necks were, the more I think we’re going to struggle to ever know their range of motion It’s just too dependent on soft tissue that doesn’t fossilise. Consider for example the difference between horse necks (above) and camel necks (below).
The skeletons of both consist of vertebrae that are pronouncedly opisthocoelous (convex in front and concave behind), so you might think their necks would be similarly flexible.
But the balls of horse cevicals are deeply embedded in their corresponding sockets, while those of camels have so much cartilage around and between them that the tip of the ball doesn’t even reach the rim of the socket. As a result of this (and maybe other factors), camel necks are far more flexible than those of horses.
Which do sauropod necks resemble? We don’t currently know, and we may never know. It will help if someone gets a good handle on osteological correlates of intervertebral cartilage.
[This post is recycled and expanded from a comment that I left on a Tetrapod Zoology post, but since Tet Zoo ate that comment it’s just as well I kept a copy.]
Sauropods’ neutral neck postures were really weird
November 5, 2014
Last night, I submitted a paper for publication — for the first time since April 2013. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like. But, because we’re living in the Shiny Digital Future, you don’t have to wait till it’s been through review and formal publication to read it. I submitted to PeerJ, and at the same time, made it available as a preprint (Taylor 2014).
It’s called “Quantifying the effect of intervertebral cartilage on neutral posture in the necks of sauropod dinosaurs”, and frankly the results are weird. Here’s a taste:
Taylor (2014:figure 3). Effect of adding cartilage to the neutral pose of the neck of Apatosaurus louisae CM 3018. Images of vertebra from Gilmore (1936:plate XXIV). At the bottom, the vertebrae are composed in a horizontal posture. Superimposed, the same vertebrae are shown inclined by the additional extension angles indicated in Table 1. If the slightly sub-horizontal osteological neutral pose of Stevens and Parrish (1999) is correct, then the cartilaginous neutral pose would be correspondingly slightly lower than depicted here, but still much closer to the elevated posture than to horizontal. (Note that the posture shown here would not have been the habitual posture in life: see discussion.)
A year back, as I was composing a blog-post about our neck-cartilage paper in PLOS ONE (Taylor and Wedel 2013c), I found myself writing down the rather trivial formula for the additional angle of extension at an intervertebral joint once the cartilage is taken into account. In that post, I finished with the promise “I guess that will have to go in a followup now”. Amazingly it’s taken me a year to get that one-pager written and submitted. (Although in the usual way of things, the manuscript ended up being 13 pages long.)
To summarise the main point of the paper: when you insert cartilage of thickness t between two vertebrae whose zygapophyses articulate at height h above the centra, the more anterior vertebra is forced upwards by t/h radians. Our best guess for how much cartilage is between the adjacent vertebrae in an Apatosaurus neck is about 10% of centrum length: the image above shows the effect of inserting that much cartilage at each joint.
And yes, it’s weird. But it’s where the data leads me, so I think it would be dishonest not to publish it.
I’ll be interested to see what the reviewers make of this. You are all of course welcome to leave comments on the preprint itself; but because this is going through conventional peer-review straight away (unlike our Barosaurus preprint), there’s no need to offer the kind of detailed and comprehensive comment that several people did with the previous one. Of course feel free if you wish, but I’m not depending on it.
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.
Stevens, Kent A., and J. Michael Parrish. 1999. Neck posture and feeding habits of two Jurassic sauropod dinosaurs. Science 284(5415):798–800. doi:10.1126/science.284.5415.798
Does anyone want a project? How can we understand sauropod neck cartilage better?
September 27, 2014
A couple of times now, I’ve pitched in an abstract for a Masters project looking at neck cartilage, hoping someone at Bristol will work on it with me co-supervising, but so far no-one’s bitten. Here’s how I’ve been describing it:
Understanding posture and motion in the necks of sauropods: the crucial role of cartilage in intervertebral joints
The sauropod dinosaurs were an order of magnitude bigger than any other terrestrial animal. Much sauropod research has concentrated on their long necks, which were crucial to their success (e.g. Sander et al. 2010). One approach to understanding neck function tries to determine neutral posture and range of motion by modelling the cervical vertebrae as a mechanical system (e.g. Stevens and Parrish 1999).
The raw material of such studies is fossilised vertebrae, but these are problematic for several reasons. The invariable incompleteness and distortion of sauropod neck fossils causes fundamental difficulties; but even given perfect fossils, the lack of preserved cartilage means that the bones are not shaped or sized as they were in life.
Ignoring cartilage has dramatic consequences for neutral posture, range of motion and even length of necks: pilot studies (Cobley 2011, Taylor 2011) found that intact bird necks are 8–12% longer than articulated sequences of their dry bones, and that figure is as high as 24% for a juvenile giraffe neck. A turkey neck postzygapophysis was 26% longer when cartilage was included than after being stripped down to naked bone.
We do not yet know how much articular cartilage sauropods had in their necks, nor even what kind of intervertebral joints they had: crocodilians have fibrocartilaginous discs like those of mammals, while birds have synovial joints, so the extant phylogenetic bracket is uninformative.
The project will involve dissection and measurement of bird and crocodilian necks, documenting the extent and shape of articular cartilage, identifying osteological correlates of fibrocartilaginous and synovial joints, and applying this data to sauropods to determine the nature of their neck joints and length of their necks, to reconstruct the lost cartilage, and to determine its effect on neutral pose and range of motion.
Following completion, we anticipate publication of the project.
References
Cobley, Matthew J. 2011. The flexibility and musculature of the ostrich neck: implications for the feeding ecology and reconstruction of the Sauropoda (Dinosauria: Saurischia). MSc Thesis, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol. vi+64 pages.
Sander, P. Martin, Andreas Christian, Marcus Clauss, Regina Fechner, Carole T. Gee, Eva-Maria Griebeler, Hanns-Christian Gunga, Jürgen Hummel, Heinrich Mallison, Steven F. Perry, Holger Preuschoft, Oliver W. M. Rauhut, Kristian Remes, Thomas Tütken, Oliver Wings and Ulrich Witzel. 2010. Biology of the sauropod dinosaurs: the evolution of gigantism. Biological Reviews 86:117–155. doi:10.1111/j.1469-185X.2010.00137.x
Stevens, Kent A., and J. Michael Parrish. 1999. Neck Posture and Feeding Habits of Two Jurassic Sauropod Dinosaurs. Science 284:798–800. doi:10.1126/science.284.5415.798
Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2011. Sauropod necks: how much do we really know?. p. 20 in Richard Forrest (ed.), Abstracts of Presentations, 59th Annual Symposium of Vertebrae Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy, Lyme Regis, Dorset, UK, September 12th–17th 2011. 37 pp. http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/dino/pubs/svpca2011/TaylorWedel2011-what-do-we-really-know.ppt
(Obviously some part of this have since been covered by my and Matt’s first cartilage paper, but plenty has not.)
I now think there are two reasons no-one’s taken up this project: first, because I wrote it as very focussed only on the question of what type of joint was present, whereas there are plenty of related issues to be investigated along the way; and second, because I wrote it as a quest to discover a specific treasure (an osteological correlate), with the implication that if there’s no treasure to be found then the project will have been a failure.
But I do think there is still plenty of important work to be done in this area, and that there’s lots of important information to be got out of comparative dissection of extant critters.
If anyone out there fancies working in this area, I’d be delighted. I’d also be happy to offer whatever advice and help I could.
Update (18 October 2014)
Somehow I’d forgotten, when I wrote this post, that I’d previously written a more detailed post about the discs-in-sauropod-necks problem. If you’re interested in the problem, you should read that.
How long was the torso of Dreadnoughtus?
September 15, 2014
In a comment on the last post, on the mass of Dreadnoughtus, Asier Larramendi wrote:
The body mass should be considerably lower because the reconstructed column don’t match with published vertebrae centra lengths. 3D reconstruction also leaves too much space between vertebrae. The reconstruction body trunk is probably 15-20% longer than it really was. Check the supplementary material: http://www.nature.com/srep/2014/140904/srep06196/extref/srep06196-s1.pdf
So I did. The table of measurements in the supplementary material is admirably complete. For all of the available dorsal vertebrae except D9, which I suppose must have been too poorly preserved to measure the difference, Lacovara et al. list both the total centrum length and the centrum length minus the anterior condyle. Centrum length minus the condyle is what in my disseration I referred to as “functional length”, since it’s the length that the vertebra actually contributes to the articulated series, assuming that the condyle of one vertebra sticks out about as far as the cotyle is recessed on the next vertebra. Here are total lengths/functional lengths/differences for the seven preserved dorsals, in mm:
- D4 – 400/305/95
- D5 – 470/320/150
- D6 – 200/180/20
- D7 – 300/260/40
- D8 – 350/270/80
- D9 – 410/ – / –
- D10 – 330/225/105
The average difference between functional length and total length is 82 mm. If we apply that to D9 to estimate it’s functional length, we get 330mm. The summed functional lengths of the seven preserved vertebrae are then 1890 mm. What about the missing D1-D3? Since the charge is that Lacovara et al. (2014) restored Dreadnoughtus with a too-long torso, we should be as generous as possible in estimating the lengths of the missing dorsals. In Malawisaurus the centrum lengths of D1-D3 are all less than or equal to that of D4, which is the longest vertebra in the series (Gomani 2005: table 3), so it seems simplest here to assign D1-D3 functional lengths of 320 mm. That brings the total functional length of the dorsal vertebral column to 2850 mm, or 2.85 m.
At this point on my first pass, I was thinking that Lacovara et al. (2014) were in trouble. In the skeletal reconstruction that I used for the GDI work in the last post, I measured the length of the dorsal vertebral column as 149 pixels. Divided by 36 px/m gives a summed dorsal length of 4.1 m. That’s more than 40% longer than the summed functional lengths of the vertebrae calculated above (4.1/2.85 = 1.44). Had Lacovara et al. really blown it that badly?
Before we can rule on that, we have to estimate how much cartilage separated the dorsal vertebrae. This is a subject of more than passing interest here at SV-POW! Towers–the only applicable data I know of are the measurements of intervertebral spacing in two juvenile apatosaurs that Mike and I reported in our cartilage paper last year (Taylor and Wedel 2013: table 3, and see this post). We found that the invertebral cartilage thickness equaled 15-24% of the length of the centra.* For the estimated 2.85-meter dorsal column of Dreadnoughtus, that means 43-68 cm of cartilage (4.3-6.8 cm of cartilage per joint), for an in vivo dorsal column length of 3.28-3.53 meters. That’s still about 15-20% shorter than the 4.1 meters I measured from the skeletal recon–and, I must note, exactly what Asier stated in his comment. All my noodling has accomplished is to verify that his presumably off-the-cuff estimate was spot on. But is that a big deal?
Visually, a 20% shorter torso makes a small but noticeable difference. Check out the original reconstruction (top) with the 20%-shorter-torso version (bottom):
FWIW, the bottom version looks a lot more plausible to my eye–I hadn’t realized quite how weiner-dog-y the original recon is until I saw it next to the shortened version.
In terms of body mass, the difference is major. You’ll recall that I estimated the torso volume of Dreadnoughtus at 32 cubic meters. Lopping off 20% means losing 6.4 cubic meters–about the same volume as a big bull elephant, or all four of Dreadnoughtus‘s limbs put together. Even assuming a low whole-body density of 0.7 g/cm^3, that’s 4.5 metric tons off the estimated mass. So a ~30-ton Dreadnoughtus is looking more plausible by the minute.
For more on how torso length can affect the visual appearance and estimated mass of an animal, see this post and Taylor (2009).
* I asked Mike to do a review pass on this post before I published, and regarding the intervertebral spacing derived from the juvenile apatosaurs, he wrote:
That 15-24% is for juveniles. For the cervicals of adult Sauroposeidon we got about 5%. Why the differences? Three reasons might be relevant: 1, taxonomic difference between Sauroposeidon and Apatosaurus; 2, serial difference between neck and torso; 3, ontogenetic difference between juvenile and adult. By applying the juvenile Apatosaurus dorsal measurement directly to the adult Dreadnoughtus dorsals, you’re implicitly assuming that the adult/juvenile axis is irrelevant (which seems unlikely to me), that the taxonomic axis is (I guess) unknowable, and that the cervical/dorsal distinction is the only one that matter.
That’s a solid point, and it deserves a post of its own, which I’m already working on. For now, it seems intuitively obvious to me that we got a low percentage on Sauroposeidon simply because the vertebrae are so long. If the length-to-diameter ratio was 2.5 instead of 5, we’d have gotten 10%, unless cartilage thickness scales with centrum length, which seems unlikely. For a dorsal with EI of 1.5, cartilage thickness would then be 20%, which is about what I figured above.
Now, admittedly that is arm-waving, not science (and really just a wordy restatement of his point #2). The obvious thing to do is take all of our data and see if intervertebral spacing is more closely correlated with centrum length or centrum diameter. Now that it’s occurred to me, it seems very silly not to have done that in the actual paper. And I will do that very thing in an upcoming post. For now I’ll just note three things:
- As you can see from figure 15 in our cartilage paper, in the opisthocoelous anterior dorsals of CM 3390, the condyle of the posterior vertebra is firmly engaged in the cotyle of the anterior one, and if anything the two vertebrae look jammed together, not drifted apart. But the intervertebral spacing as a fraction of centrum length is still huge (20+4%) because the centra are so short.
- Transferring these numbers to Dreadnoughtus only results in 4.3-6.8 cm of cartilage between adjacent vertebrae, which does not seem unreasonable for a 30- or 40-ton animal with dorsal centra averaging 35 cm in diameter. If you asked me off the cuff what I thought a reasonable intervertebral spacing was for such a large animal, I would have said 3 or 4 inches (7.5 to 10 cm), so the numbers I got through cross-scaling are actually lower than what I would have guessed.
- Finally, if I’ve overestimated the intervertebral spacing, then the actual torso length of Dreadnoughtus was even shorter than that illustrated above, and the volumetric mass estimate would be smaller still. So in going with relatively thick cartilage, I’m being as generous as possible to the Lacovara et al. (2014) skeletal reconstruction (and indirectly to their super-high allometry-derived mass estimate), which I think is only fair.
References
- Gomani, Elizabeth M. 2005. Sauropod dinosaurs from the Early Cretaceous of Malawi, Africa. Palaeontologia Electronica 8(1):27A (37 pp.)
- Lacovara, Kenneth J.; Ibiricu, L.M.; Lamanna, M.C.; Poole, J.C.; Schroeter, E.R.; Ullmann, P.V.; Voegele, K.K.; Boles, Z.M.; Egerton, V.M.; Harris, J.D.; Martínez, R.D.; Novas, F.E. (September 4, 2014). A Gigantic, Exceptionally Complete Titanosaurian Sauropod Dinosaur from Southern Patagonia, Argentina. Scientific Reports. doi:10.1038/srep06196.
- 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.
- Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2013c. The effect of intervertebral cartilage on neutral posture and range of motion in the necks of sauropod dinosaurs. PLOS ONE 8(10): e78214. 17 pages. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0078214
Estimating sauropod intervertebral cartilage thickness from CT scans
January 15, 2014
[This is part 4 in an ongoing series on our recent PLOS ONE paper on sauropod neck cartilage. See also part 1, part 2, and part 3.]
Weird stuff on the ground, Big Bend, 2007.
Here’s a frequently-reproduced quote from Darwin:
About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorise; and I well remember some one saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!
It’s from a letter to Henry Fawcett, dated September 18, 1861, and you can read the whole thing here.
I’ve known this quote for ages, having been introduced to it at Berkeley–a copy used to be taped to the door of the Padian Lab, and may still be. It’s come back to haunt me recently, though. An even stronger version would run something like, “If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you won’t make the observation in the first place!”
Kent Sanders looking at scans of BYU 12613, a posterior cervical of either Kaatedocus or an anomalously small Diplodocus, at the University of Utah in May, 2008.
For example: I started CT scanning sauropod vertebrae with Rich Cifelli and Kent Sanders back in January, 1998. Back then, I was interested in pneumaticity, so that’s what I looked for, and that’s what I found–work which culminated in Wedel et al. (2000) and Wedel (2003). It wasn’t until earlier this year that I wondered if it would be possible to determine the spacing of articulated vertebrae from CT scans. So everything I’m going to show you, I technically saw 15 years ago, but only in the sense of “it crossed my visual field.” None of it registered at the time, because I wasn’t looking for it.
A corollary I can’t help noting in passing: one of the under-appreciated benefits of expanding your knowledge base is that it allows you to actually make more observations. Many aspects of nature only appear noteworthy once you have a framework in which to see them.
BYI 12613 going through a CT scanner at the University of Utah medical center. We were filming for the “Megasaurus” episode of Jurassic CSI. That shoot was crazy fun.
So anyway, the very first specimen we scanned way back when was the most anterior of the three plaster jackets that contain the four cervical vertebrae that make up OMNH 53062, which was destined to become the holotype of Sauroposeidon. I’ve written about the taphonomy of that specimen here, and you can read more about how it was excavated in Wedel and Cifelli (2005). We scanned that jacket first because, although the partial vertebrae it contains are by far the most incomplete of the four, the jacket is a lot smaller and lighter than the other two (which weigh hundreds of pounds apiece). Right away we saw internal chambers in the vertebrae, and that led to all of the pneumaticity work mentioned above.
Internal structure of a cervical vertebra of Sauroposeidon, OMNH 53062. A, parts of two vertebrae from the middle of the neck. The field crew that dug up the bones cut though one of them to divide the specimen into manageable pieces. B, cross section of C6 in posterior view at the level of the break, traced from a CT image and photographs of the broken end. The left side of the specimen was facing up in the field and the bone on that side is badly weathered. Over most of the broken surface the internal structure is covered by plaster or too damaged to trace, but it is cleanly exposed on the upper right side (outlined). C, the internal structure of that part of the vertebra, traced from a photograph. The arrows indicate the thickness of the bone at several points, as measured with a pair of digital calipers. The camellae are filled with sandstone. Wedel (2007: fig. 14).
Happily for me, that first jacket contains not only the posterior two-thirds of the first vertebra (possibly C5), but also the front end of the second vertebra. Whoever decided to plow through the second vertebra to divide the specimen into manageable chunks in the field made a savvy choice. Way back in 2004 I realized that the cut edge of the second vertebra was not obscured by plaster, and therefore the internal structure could be seen and measured directly, which is a lot cleaner than relying on the artifact-heavy CT scans. (The CT scans are noisy because the hospital machines we had access to start to pant a bit when asked to punch x-rays through specimens this large and dense.) A figure derived from that work made it into a couple of papers and this post, and appears again above.
But that’s pneumaticity, which this post is allegedly not about. The cut through the second vertebra was also smart because it left the intervertebral joint intact.
![Figure 11. Fifth and partial sixth cervical vertebrae of Sauroposeidon. Photograph and x-ray scout image of C5 and the anterior portion of C6 of Sauroposeidon OMNH 53062 in right lateral view. The anterior third of C5 eroded away before the vertebra was collected. C6 was deliberately cut through in the field to break the multi-meter specimen into manageable pieces for jacketing (see [37] for details). Note that the silhouettes of the cotyle of C5 and the condyle of C6 are visible in the x-ray.](https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/fig11-sauroposeidon-c5-and-scout.jpeg)
Fifth and partial sixth cervical vertebrae of Sauroposeidon.
Photograph and x-ray scout image of C5 and the anterior portion of C6 of Sauroposeidon OMNH 53062 in right lateral view. The anterior third of C5 eroded away before the vertebra was collected. C6 was deliberately cut through in the field to break the multi-meter specimen into manageable pieces for jacketing (see Wedel and Cifelli 2005 for details). Note that the silhouettes of the cotyle of C5 and the condyle of C6 are visible in the x-ray. Taylor and Wedel (2013: figure 11).
Here are a photo of the jacket and a lateral scout x-ray. The weird rectangles toward the left and right ends of the x-ray are boards built into the bottom of the jacket to strengthen it.
CT slices from fifth cervical vertebrae of Sauroposeidon.
X-ray scout image and three posterior-view CT slices through the C5/C6 intervertebral joint in Sauroposeidon OMNH 53062. In the bottom half of figure, structures from C6 are traced in red and those from C5 are traced in blue. Note that the condyle of C6 is centered in the cotyle of C5 and that the right zygapophyses are in articulation. Taylor and Wedel (2013: figure 12).
And here’s a closeup of the C5/C6 joint, with the relevant radiographs and tracing. The exciting thing here is that the condyle is centered almost perfectly in the cotyle, and the zygapophyses are in articulation. Together with the lack of disarticulation in the cervical rib bundle (read more about that here and in Wedel et al. 2000), these things suggest to us that the vertebrae are spaced pretty much as they were in life. If so, then the spacing between the vertebrae now tells us the thickness of the soft tissue that separated the vertebrae in life.
I should point out here that we can’t prove that the spacing between the vertebrae is still the same as it was in life. But if some mysterious force moved them closer together or farther apart, it did so (1) without decentering the condyle of C6 within the cotyle of C5, (2) without moving the one surviving zygapophyseal joint out of contact, and (3) without disarticulating the cervical ribs. The cervical ribs were each over 3 meters long in life and they formed vertically-stacked bundles on either side below the vertebrae; that’s a lot of stuff to move just through any hypothetical contraction or expansion of the intervertebral soft tissues after death. In fact, I would not be surprised if the intervertebral soft tissues did contract or expand after death–but I don’t think they moved the vertebrae, which are comparatively immense. The cartilage probably pulled away from the bone as it rotted, allowing sediment in. Certainly every nook and cranny of the specimen is packed with fine-grained sandstone now.
Anyway, barring actual preserved cartilage, this is a best-case scenario for trying to infer intervertebral spacing in a fossil. If articulation of the centra, zygs, and cervical ribs doesn’t indicate legitimate geometry, nothing ever will. So if we’re going to use the fossils to help settle this at all, we’re never going to have a better place to start.
Geometry of opisthocoelous intervertebral joints.
Hypothetical models of the geometry of an opisthocoelous intervertebral joint compared with the actual morphology of the C5/C6 joint in Sauroposeidon OMNH 53062. A. Model in which the condyle and cotyle are concentric and the radial thickness of the intervertebral cartilage is constant. B. Model in which the condyle and cotyle have the same geometry, but the condyle is displaced posteriorly so the anteroposterior thickness of the intervertebral cartilage is constant. C. the C5/C6 joint in Sauroposeidon in right lateral view, traced from the x-ray scout image (see Figure 12); dorsal is to the left. Except for one area in the ventral half of the cotyle, the anteroposterior separation between the C5 cotyle and C6 condyle is remarkably uniform. All of the arrows in part C are 52 mm long. Taylor and Wedel (2013: figure 14).
So, by now, you know I’m a doofus. I have been thinking about this problem literally for years and the data I needed to address it was sitting on my hard drive the entire time. One of the things I pondered during those lost years is what the best shape for a concave-to-convex intervertebral joint might be. Would the best spacing be radially constant (A in the figure above), or antero-posteriorly constant (B), or some other, more complicated arrangement? The answer in this case surprised me–although the condyle is a lot smaller in diameter than the cotyle, the anteroposterior separation between them in almost constant, as you can see in part C of the above figure.
Joint between sixth and seventh cervicals vertebrae of Sauroposeidon.
X-ray scout image of the C6/C7 intervertebral joint in Sauroposeidon OMNH 53062, in right lateral view. The silhouette of the condyle is traced in blue and the cotyle in red. The scale on the right is marked off in centimeters, although the numbers next to each mark are in millimeters. Taylor and Wedel (2013: figure 13).
Don’t get too worked up about that, though, because the next joint is very different! Here’s the C6/C7 joint, again in a lateral scout x-ray, with the ends of the bones highlighted. Here the condyle is almost as big in diameter as the cotyle, but it is weirdly flat. This isn’t a result of overzealous prep–most of the condyle is still covered in matrix, and I only found its actual extent by looking at the x-ray. This is flatter than most anterior dorsal vertebrae of Apatosaurus–I’ve never seen a sauropod cervical with such a flat condyle. Has anyone else?
The condyle of C6 is a bit flatter than expected, too–certainly a lot flatter than the cervical condyles in Giraffatitan and the BYU Brachiosaurus vertebrae. As we said in the paper,
It is tempting to speculate that the flattened condyles and nearly constant thickness of the intervertebral cartilage are adaptations to bearing weight, which must have been an important consideration in a cervical series more than 11 meters long, no matter how lightly built.
Anyway, obviously here the anteroposterior distance between condyle and cotyle could not have been uniform because they are such different shapes. Wacky. The zygs are missing, so they’re no help, and clearly the condyle is not centered in the cotyle. Whether this posture was attainable in life is debatable; I’ve seen some pretty weird stuff. In any case, we didn’t use this joint for estimating cartilage thickness because we had no reason to trust the results.
First and second dorsal vertebrae of Apatosaurus CM 3390.
Articulated first and second dorsal vertebrae of Apatosaurus CM 3390. A. Digital model showing the two vertebrae in articulation, in left lateral (top) and ventral (bottom) views. B-G. Representative slices illustrating the cross-sectional anatomy of the specimen, all in posterior view. B. Slice 25. C. Slice 31. D. Slice 33. E. Slice 37. F. Slice 46. G. Slice 61. Orthogonal gaps are highlighted where the margins of the condyle and cotyle are parallel to each other and at right angles to the plane of the CT slice. ‘Zygs’ is short for ‘zygapophyses’, and NCS denotes the neurocentral synchondroses. Taylor and Wedel (2013: figure 15).
Kent Sanders and I had also scanned several of the smaller sauropod vertebrae from the Carnegie collection (basically, the ones that would fit in the trunk of my car for the drive back to Oklahoma). Crucially, we’d scanned a couple of sets of articulated vertebrae, CM 3390 and CM 11339, both from juvenile individuals of Apatosaurus. In both cases, the condyles and cotyles are concentric (that’s what the ‘orthogonal gaps’ are all about in the above figure) and the zygs are in articulation, just as in Sauroposeidon. These are dorsals, so we don’t have any cervical ribs here to provide a third line of evidence that the articulation is legit, but all of the evidence that we do have is at least consistent with that interpretation.
So, here’s an interesting thing: in CM 3390, above, the first dorsal is cranked up pretty sharply compared to the next one, but the condyle is still centered in the cotyle and the zygs are in articulation. Now, the vertebrae have obviously been sheared by taphonomic deformation, but that seems to have affected both vertebrae to the same extent, and it’s hard to imagine some kind of taphonomic pressure moving one vertebra around relative to the next. So I think it’s at least plausible that this range of motion was achievable in life. Using various views and landmarks, we estimate the degree of extension here somewhere between 31 and 36 degrees. That’s a lot more than the ~6 degrees estimated by Stevens and Parrish (1999, 2005). And, as we mentioned in the paper, it nicely reinforces the point made by Upchurch (2000), that flexibility in the anterior dorsals should be taken into account in estimating neck posture and ROM.
Dorsal vertebrae of Apatosaurus CM 11339.
Articulated middle or posterior dorsal vertebrae of Apatosaurus CM 11339. A. X-ray scout image showing the two vertebrae in articulation, in left lateral view. B–D. Slices 39, 43 and and 70 in posterior view, showing the most anterior appearance of the condyles and cotyles. Taylor and Wedel (2013: figure 16).
Here’s our last specimen, CM 11339. No big surprises here, although if you ever had a hard time visualizing how hyposphenes and hypantra fit together, you can see them in articulation in parts C and D (near the top of the specimen). Once again, by paging through slices we were able to estimate the separation between the vertebrae. Incidentally, the condyle IS centered in the cotyle here, it just doesn’t look that way because the CT slice is at an angle to the joint–see the lateral scout in part A of the figure to see what I mean.
So, what did we find? In Sauroposeidon the spacing between C5 and C6 is 52mm. That’s pretty darn thick in absolute terms–a shade over two inches–but really thin in relative terms–only a little over 4% of the length of each vertebra. In both of the juvenile Apatosaurus specimens, the spacing between the vertebrae was about 14mm (give or take a few because of the inherent thickness of the slices; see the paper for details on these uncertainties).
Now, here’s an interesting thing: we can try to estimate the intervertebral spacing in an adult Apatosaurus in two ways–by scaling up from the juvenile apatosaurus, or by scaling sideways from Sauroposeidon (since a big Apatosaurus was in the same ballpark, size-wise)–and we get similar answers either way.
Scaling sideways from Sauroposeidon (I’m too lazy to write anymore so I’m just copying and pasting from the paper):
Centrum shape is conventionally quantified by Elongation Index (EI), which is defined as the total centrum length divided by the dorsoventral height of the posterior articular surface. Sauroposeidon has proportionally very long vertebrae: the EI of C6 is 6.1. If instead it were 3, as in the mid-cervicals of Apatosaurus, the centrum length would be 600 mm. That 600 mm minus 67 mm for the cotyle would give a functional length of 533 mm, not 1153, and 52 mm of cartilage would account for 9.8% of the length of that segment.
Scaling up from the juveniles: juvenile sauropods have proportionally short cervicals (Wedel et al. 2000). The scanned vertebrae are anterior dorsals with an EI of about 1.5. Mid-cervical vertebrae of this specimen would have EIs about 2, so the same thickness of cartilage would give 12mm of cartilage and 80mm of bone per segment, or 15% cartilage per segment. Over ontogeny the mid-cervicals telescoped to achieve EIs of 2.3–3.3. Assuming the cartilage did not also telescope in length (i.e., didn’t get any thicker than it got taller or wider), the ratio of cartilage to bone would be 12:120 (120 from 80*1.5), so the cartilage would account for 10% of the length of the segment–almost exactly what we got from the based-on-Sauroposeidon estimate. So either we got lucky here with our tiny sample size and truckloads of assumptions, or–just maybe–we discovered a Thing. At least we can say that the intervertebral spacing in the Apatosaurus and Sauroposeidon vertebrae is about the same, once the effects of scaling and EI are removed.
Finally, we’re aware that our sample size here is tiny and heavily skewed toward juveniles. That’s because we were just collecting targets of opportunity. Finding sauropod vertebrae that will fit through a medical-grade CT scanner is not easy, and it’s just pure dumb luck that Kent Sanders and I had gotten scans of even this many articulated vertebrae way back when, since at the time we were on the hunt for pneumaticity, not intervertebral joints or their soft tissues. As Mike has said before, we don’t think of this paper as the last word on anything. It is, explicitly, exploratory. Hopefully in a few years we’ll be buried in new data on in-vivo intervertebral spacing in both extant and extinct animals. If and when that avalanche comes, we’ll just be happy to have tossed a snowball.
References
- Stevens, K.A. and Parrish, J.M. 1999. Neck posture and feeding habits of two Jurassic sauropod dinosaurs. Science 284: 798-800. [Free subscription required]
- Stevens, Kent A., and J. Michael Parrish. 2005. Neck posture, dentition, and feeding strategies in Jurassic sauropod dinosaurs. pp. 212-232 in: Virginia Tidwell and Ken Carpenter (eds.), Thunder Lizards: the Sauropodomorph Dinosaurs. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana. 495 pp.
- Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2013c. The effect of intervertebral cartilage on neutral posture and range of motion in the necks of sauropod dinosaurs. PLOS ONE 8(10): e78214. 17 pages. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0078214 [PDF]
- Upchurch, P. 2000. Neck posture of sauropod dinosaurs. Science 287: 547b.
- Wedel, M.J. 2003b. The evolution of vertebral pneumaticity in sauropod dinosaurs. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 23:344-357.
- Wedel, M.J. 2007. Aligerando a los gigantes (Lightening the giants). ¡Fundamental! 12:1-84. [in Spanish, with English translation]
- Wedel, M.J., and Cifelli, R.L. 2005. Sauroposeidon: Oklahoma’s native giant. Oklahoma Geology Notes 65 (2):40-57.
- Wedel, M.J., R.L. Cifelli and R.K. Sanders. 2000. Osteology, paleobiology, and relationships of the sauropod dinosaur Sauroposeidon. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 45(4): 343-388.
Did sauropod necks have intervertebral discs?
November 8, 2013
One aspect of sauropod neck cartilage that’s been overlooked — and this applies to all non-avian dinosaurs, not just sauropods — is the configuration of the cartilage in their necks. It’s not widely appreciated that birds’ necks differ from those of all other animals in this respect, and we don’t yet know whether sauropods resembled birds or mammals.
Here’s a classic sagittal view of a mammal neck — in this case a human — from The Basics of MRI (Joseph P. Hornak, 1996-2013):
You can see two distinct kinds of structure alternating along the neck: the big, square ones are vertebral centra (slightly hollow at each end), and the narrower lens-shaped ones are the intervertebral discs.
In mammals, and most animals, we find this distinct fibrocartilaginous element, the disc, between the centra of consecutive vertebrae. These discs have a complex structure of their own, consisting of an annulus fibrosus (fibrous ring), made of several layers of fibrocartilage, surrounding a nucleus pulposus (pulpy centre) with the consistency of jelly.
But in birds, uniquely among extant animals, there is no separate cartilaginous element. Instead, the articular surfaces of the bones are covered with layers of hyaline cartilage which articulate directly with one another, and are free to slide across each other. The adjacent articular surfaces are enclosed in synovial capsules similar to those that enclose the zygapophyseal joints. You can see this in the hemisected Rhea neck from last time:
Taylor and Wedel (2013c: Figure 18). Cartilage in the neck of a rhea. Joint between cervicals 11 (left) and 10 (right) of a rhea, sagittally bisected. Left half of neck in medial view. The thin layers of cartilage lining the C11 condyle and C10 cotyle are clearly visible.
The difference between these two constructions is very apparent in dissection: in birds, adjacent vertebrae come apart easily once the surrounding soft tissue is removed; but in mammals, it is very difficult to separate consecutive vertebrae, as they are firmly attached to the intervening intervertebral disc.
![Figure 19. Alligator head and neck. Sagittally bisected head and neck of American alligator, with the nine cervical vertebrae indicated. Inset: schematic drawing of these nine vertebrae, from ([62]: figure 1), reversed.](https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/fig19-hemisected-gator.jpeg)
Taylor and Wedel (2013c: Figure 19). Alligator head and neck. Sagittally bisected head and neck of American alligator, with the nine cervical vertebrae indicated. Inset: schematic drawing of these nine vertebrae, from ([62]: figure 1), reversed.
Taylor and Wedel (2013: Figure 4). Intervertebral articular discs of an ostrich (not to scale). Left: first sacral vertebra in anterior view, showing articular disc of joint with the last thoracic vertebra. Right: posterior view view of a cervical vertebra, with probe inserted behind posterior articular disc. The cervical vertebra is most relevant to the present study, but the the sacral vertebra is also included as it shows the morphology more clearly. These fibrocartilaginous articular discs divide the synovial cavity, like the articular discs in the human temporomandibular and sternoclavicular joints, and should not be confused with the true intervertebral discs of mammals and other animals, which consist of a nucleus pulposus and an annulus fibrosus.
Crucially, the extant phylogenetic bracket (EPB) does not help us to establish the nature of the intervertebral articulations in sauropods, as the two extant groups most closely related to them have different articulations. As noted, birds have synovial joints; but crocodilians, like mammals, have fibrocartilaginous intervertebral discs. So their most recent common ancestor, the ur-archosaur, could equally have had either condition, and so could its various descendants.
This seems like a mystery well worth solving. For one thing, in the wholly inadequate database that we assembled for the paper, the birds had much thinner cartilage than the other animals. Since they are also the only animals with synovial neck joints, thin cartilage correlates with this kind of joint — at least across that tiny database. Is that correlation reliable? Does it hold out across a bigger sample? Is there a causation? If so, then finding out what kind of intervertebral joints sauropods had would help us to determine how thick their cartilage was, and so what their actual neutral posture was.
But we can’t tell this directly unless we find sensationally well preserved specimens that let us see the structure of the cartilage. We might speculate that since birds have unique saddle-shaped joints and sauropods have ball-and-socket joints like those of mammals and crocs, they’d be more likely to resemble the latter in this respect, too, but that’s rather hand-wavey.
Can we do better?
If we can, it will be through osteological correlates: that is, features of the bones (which are preserved in fossils) that are consistently correlated with features of the soft tissues (which are not). We’d want to find out from analysis of extant animals what correlates might exist, then go looking for them in the bones of extinct animals.
A couple of times now, I’ve pitched this as an abstract for a Masters project, hoping someone at Bristol will work on it with me as co-supervisor, but so far no-one’s bitten. Maybe next year. It would be a very specimen-based project, which I’d think would be a plus in most people’s eyes.
Taylor and Wedel (2013: Figure 8). Cervical vertebra 7 from a turkey. Anterior view on the left; dorsal, left lateral and ventral views in the middle row; and posterior on the right.
Anyway, the awful truth is that at the moment we know spectacularly little about the cartilage in the necks of sauropods. We don’t know whether they had true intervertebral discs. If not, we don’t know whether they had articular discs like those of ostriches. We don’t know how thick these elements, if present, were. We don’t know how thick the hyaline cartilage on the bones’ articular surfaces was, or how evenly it covered its those surfaces.
And until we know those things, we don’t really know anything about neck posture or range of movement.
There’s lots of work to be done here!
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 