The Atterholt & Wedel and plain-old-Wedel talks from SVPCA 2019 are now PeerJ Preprints
September 25, 2019
I’ll have more to say about both of these in the near future, but for now suffice it to say that this (link):
and this (link):
are available for your perusal. Not just the abstracts, but the slide decks as well, just as Mike did for his talk on Jensen’s Big Three sauropods (link).
Jessie is also posting her talk a few slides at a time on her Instagram, with some helpful unpacking, so that’s worth a look even if you have the slides already. That stream of posts starts here.
Matt bought an Iguanodon pelvis … OR DID HE???!
September 16, 2019
We’re just back from an excellent SVPCA on the Isle of Wight. We’ll write more about it, but this time I just want to draw attention to a neat find. During a bit of down time, Matt and Vicki were wandering around West Cowes (the town where the scientific sessions were held), when they stumbled across a place called That Shop. Intrigued by all the Lego figures in the window, they went in, and Matt found a small section of fossils. Including … an Iguanodon pelvis, supposedly certified as such by the Dinosaur Isle museum.
Here it is: I imagine that whoever classified it read this elongate concave surface as part of the acetabulum. Matt’s hypothesis is that they mistook it for a sacral vertebra and that became “pelvis” via over-simplification.
It’s about 18 cm in a straight line across the widest part, or 20 cm around the curve.
Here is an actual documentary record of Matt’s moment of discovery:
Yep, you got it! It’s a sauropod vertebra! (Matt would never have spent good money on a stinkin’ appendicular element of a stinkin’ ornithopod.)
Specifically, it’s the bottom half of the front part of the centrum of a dorsal vertebra:
“Eucamerotus” dorsal vertebra NHMUK PV R88 in right lateral and anterior views. Non-faded portions show the location of the Wedel Specimen. Modified from Hulke (1880: plate IV).
In these photos, we’re looking down into it more or less directly dorsal view, with anterior to the left. Click through the photos, and — once you know what you’re looking at — you can clearly see the pneumatic spaces: nice patches of finished bone lining the camellae, with trabecular bone in between.
Clearly there’s nowhere near enough of this to say what it is with any certainty. But our best guess is that it seems compatible with a titanosauriform identity, quite possibly in same space as the various Wealden sauropod dorsals that have been assigned to Ornithopsis or Eucamerotus.
References
- Hulke, J. W. 1880. Supplementary Note on the Vertebræ of Ornithopsis, Seeley, = Eucamerotous, Hulke. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society 36:31–35. doi:10.1144/GSL.JGS.1880.036.01-04.06
…including the Atterholt and Wedel (2018) talk on paramedullary diverticula in birds
September 4, 2019
As Mike noted in the last post, many (all?) of the talks from SVPCA 2018 are up on YouTube. Apparently this has been the case for a long time, maybe most of the past year, and I just didn’t know. But I’m glad I do now, because I can encourage you to take 14 minutes and watch Jessie Atterholt’s talk on air spaces inside the neural canal in birds and other archosaurs:
This will not only be interesting in itself — assuming you are interested in pneumaticity, animals, or just how weird the natural world can be at times — but it will be good homework for the Atterholt and Wedel talk at this year’s SVPCA. That talk, also to be delivered by Jessie, will be on a different weird thing about archosaur neural canals, and one that neither of us have yapped about yet on social media.
Here’s the full rundown of talks by SV-POW!sketeers and affiliates at this year’s SVPCA:
Thursday, September 12
- 11:00-11:20 – Vicki Wedel, “Validating the use of Dental Cementum Increment Analysis to determine season-at-death in humans and other mammals”
- 11:20-11:40 – Matt Wedel, “How to make new discoveries in (human) anatomy”
Friday, September 13
- 10:10-10:30 – Mike Taylor and Matt Wedel, “The past, present and future of Jensen’s Big Three sauropods”
- 15:00-15:20 – Jessie Atterholt and Matt Wedel, “Neural canal ridges: a novel osteological correlate of post-cranial neurology in dinosaurs”
Presumably most or all of these will become PeerJ Preprints in time, just like Mike’s and my presentations from SVPCA 2017 (link, link) and Jessie’s presentation last year (link). I haven’t heard anything yet about livestreaming or recording of the talks this year — fingers firmly crossed.
Anyway, we look forward to seeing at least some of you at SVPCA or at other points on our trip to England, and to having more stuff to talk about here in the near future. Stay tuned!
The whole of the SVPCA 2018 conference is on YouTube
September 3, 2019
Sorry to you all for the recent radio-silence here on SV-POW!. Matt and I are hard at work preparing our presentations for SVPCA 2019, which will take place on the Isle of Wight next week. Delightfully, not only will Matt be joining us this year, but so will his wife, forensic anthropologist celebre Vicki; and their son London.
Exterior of the Dinosaur Isle museum, Sandown, Isle of Wight, last known resting place of the vertebra known as “Angloposeidon” and the venue for the SVPCA 2019 drinks reception.
Anyway, since we have effectively prorogued SV-POW! until after the conference, I’d like to leave you with the delightful fact that the whole of last year’s conference is freely available to watch on YouTube.
We’ll hope to see some of you next week on the Isle of Wight — do come up and say hi, we always like to meet our readers. I hope that this year’s talks will also be streamed and recorded, but I don’t know what plans exist.
Hello, ladies!
March 28, 2019
To my shock, I find that we seem never to have posted Bob Nicholls’ beautiful sketch Hello, ladies! on SV-POW!. His recent tweet reminded me about this piece, so here it is!
Like so many classic sauropod sketches, this was executed during a mammal-tooth talk at SVPCA: this one back in 2013, the year of our first Barosarus talk. (Our second was in 2016.)
Bob’s sketch shows speculative sexual display behaviour. We have no direct evidence for (or against) such behaviour; but while we don’t believe sexual selection was the main reason for sauropods evolving long necks, it seems inevitable that long necks evolved for other purposes would be exapted for sexual display.
I always love Bob’s sketches — in fact, for most palaeoartists, I tend to like their sketches more than their finished pieces. Among the many things about this one that make me jealous is all the females in the background admiring the male: the economy of line where Bob can not only summon up a perfectly cromulent diplodocid head in a few strokes, but imbue it with a sense of being inquisitive about the display. It’s magical.
Whatever happened to that 2013 Barosaurus project?, you may ask.
Well, the first thing that happened is that after we submitted the abstract, entitled Barosaurus revisited: the concept of Barosaurus (Dinosauria: Sauropoda) is based on erroneously referred specimens, we realised that there was a tiny, tiny mistake in our work. So by the time I gave the talk at the actual conference, the title slide was this:
Then you will recall we did an efficient job of converting the conference presentation into a manuscript, which we submitted as a preprint less than a month after the conference. The preprint quickly garnered amazingly helpful comments, which we used to extensively revise the manuscript.
For reasons we don’t understand, there was a three-year delay before we got it submitted for peer-review in 2016; but when we did finally submit, we did it in the confident hope that it would sail through peer-review, having already been extensively reviewed and revised.
But it was not to be. When we got the reviews back, they asked for a ton of changes, and that process was just too dispiriting to face having already made a ton of changes based on the first set of comments just prior to the submission. So the tedious process got back-burnered, and the suddenly three more years passed.
The upshot is that I still need to handle the reviews on the 2nd version of the paper, and shove the blasted thing through the peer-review process. I will, to be frank, be glad to get it out of my POOP chute, so I can think about other things — not least, the 2016 Barosaurus project.
The vertebral orientation presentation from the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress is now a PeerJ Preprint
December 19, 2018
In a move that will surprise no-one who’s been paying attention, my and Matt’s presentation of vertebral orientation at the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress is now up as a PeerJ preprint. Sadly, with the end of the conference period on 15th December, the page for my talk has been deleted, along with some interesting comments. But here at SV-POW!, we have no truck with ephemerality, hence this more permanent manifestation of our work.
Matt’s preprint consists of the abstract, and has the slide deck as a supplementary data file. That’s what he submitted to the conference, with attendees invited to page through it. By contrast, I recorded a video of my talk. I am trying to get that attached to my preprint, but as things stand it’s not there because it’s too big (at 65 Mb).
Meanwhile — and indeed in perpetuity — you can just watch it on YouTube, where I also uploaded it. In the end, that may be a more practical way of making video available anyway, but I do want the preservational benefit of lodging it with a preprint.
Remember, we’re working on the paper in the open. We’d love to get input from you all, and especially from anyone who’s run into this problem before with other taxa. Please, if you have fifteen minutes spare, watch the talk and leave any comments you have: here, on the preprint, on the YouTube page, or as issues in the GitHub tracker!
Reference
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.
Our presentations are up at the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress
December 5, 2018
The 1st Palaeontological Virtual Congress is underway now, and will run through December 15. Mike and I have two presentations up:
“What do we mean by the directions ‘cranial’ and ‘caudal’ on a vertebra?” by Mike and me, which consists of a video Mike made presenting a slide show that he put together. The presentation sums up our thinking following the series of vertebral orientation posts here earlier this summer and fall, which are all available here.
“Reconstructing an unusual specimen of Haplocanthosaurus using a blend of physical and digital techniques” by me and a gang of WesternU-based collaborators, including Jessie Atterholt and Thierra Nalley, both of whom you saw in our recent pig-hemisecting adventures. Almost everything I’ve written on this blog about Haplocanthosaurus in 2018 was part of the run-up to this presentation (except, somewhat ironically, the post about pneumaticity), which also includes quite a bit that I haven’t put on the blog yet. So even if you follow SV-POW!, the 1PVC slideshow should have plenty of stuff you haven’t seen yet.
IF you can see it–you have to be a registered 1PVC ‘attendee’ to log in to the site and see the presentations. So probably you are either already registered and this post is old news, or not registered and this post seems useless. Why would I bother telling you about stuff you can’t see?
The answer is that neither Mike or I intend for our work to disappear when 1PVC comes to an end on December 15. Both of us are planning to put our abstracts and slide decks up as PeerJ Preprints, which is our default move for conference presentations these days (e.g., this, this, and this). I believe Mike is also going to post his video to YouTube. So the work will not only live on after the congress is over, it will jump to a much broader audience. We’re looking forward to letting everyone see what we’ve been up to, and I’m sure we’ll have some more things to say here when that happens.
So, er, go see our stuff if you’re a 1PVC attendee, and if you’re not, hang in there, we’ll have that stuff out to you in a few days. UPDATE: The Haplo presentation is up now (link).
#MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt at TetZooCon 2018
October 11, 2018
The afternoon of Day 1 at TetZooCon 2018 was split into two parallel streams: downstairs, some talks that I would have loved to see; and upstairs, a palaeoart workshop that I was even keener not to miss out on.
There were talks by Luis Rey (on how palaeoart has had to be dragged kicking and screaming into accepting feathers and bright colours) and by Mark Witton (on the future of palaeoart — sadly, bereft of slides). Both fascinating.
But better still was the wide-ranging informal discussion between Luis, Mark, John Conway, Bob Nicholls and others on what palaeoart is actually all about. For Luis, it’s basically fun; for Mark, it’s primarily science communication; for John, it’s art first, and palaeontology only because that’s what he happens to be depicting; and for Bob, as well as all those things, it’s crucially important as a job of work, satisfying the requirements of those who commission that work. Obviously that’s a huge over-simplification: all of them have all these aspects going on in varying proportions. But that’s how I read it.
At the same time that all this was going on, we — maybe 60 or 70 of us? — were encouraged to create our own art, either attempting styles that are different to what we usually do, are using materials we’re not so familiar with. For the many excellent artists in the group, this challenge must have been interestingly novel. For non-artists like myself, it was just a chance to play.
I took the opportunity to try my hand with charcoal, in the hope of getting some suggestive or even impressionistic textures. Here’s my first work — an indeterminate brachiosaur with an inexplicably big head.
Aside from the head — I can’t do heads! — I’m reasonably happy with that. I got a decent sense of bulk in the torso, anyway.
Encouraged, I made a start on a second piece: a BRONTOSMASH!ing apatosaur that didn’t come out so well.
I’m happy with the forelimbs here, but something is dreadfully wrong with the torso and I can’t put a finger on what it is. If I’d had more time, I’d have put in the second hindlimb, which might have helped me figure out what was going wrong. The other thing I fluffed here was that I should have made the neck even fatter and more robust. Oh, and of course the head. I might return to this and see if I can sort out, if I can find some charcoal.
Anyway, it was a fascinating experience. And it’s left me with a new favourite art medium.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
