New paper out today: Aureliano et al. (2022) on vertebral internal structure in the earliest saurischians

December 9, 2022

Micro-computed tomography of the vertebrae of the basalmost sauropodomorph Buriolestes (CAPPA/UFSM 0035). (A) silhouette shows the position of the axial elements. Artist: Felipe Elias. (B), three-dimensional reconstruction of the articulated cervical vertebral series and the correspondent high-contrast density slices in (D–I). Diagenetic processes partially compromised the internal structures in these cervicals. (C), 3D reconstruction of the articulated anterior dorsal vertebrae and the correspondent high-contrast density slices in (J–M). Small circumferential chambers occur both ventrally in the dorsal centrum (J) and laterally in the neural arch pedicles (D). All images indicate apneumatic chaotic trabeculae architecture. Some of the latter develop into larger chambers in the centrum (E,J,K). Nutritional foramina are broader at the bottom of the neural canal in the posterior cervicals (F,G). All slices were taken from the approximate midshaft. Anterior views in (D–H,J,K). Lateral view in (L). Ventral view in (H,I,M). Anterior/posterior orientation was defined based on the axial position, not the anatomical plane. cc circumferential chamber, ccv chamber in the centrum, ctr chaotic trabecula, d diapophysis, ltr layered trabeculae, nc neural canal, nf nutritional foramen, s neural spine. Scale bar in (A) = 500 mm; in (B–M) = 10 mm. Computed tomography data processed with 3D Slicer version 4.10. Figures were generated with Adobe Photoshop CC version 22.5.1 X64. (Aureliano et al. 2022: fig. 4)

Here’s a nice early holiday present for me: 51 weeks after our first paper together, I’m on another one with Tito Aureliano and colleagues:

Aureliano, T., Ghilardi, A.M., Müller, R.T., Kerber, L., Pretto, F.A., Fernandes, M.A.,Ricardi-Branco, F., and Wedel, M.J. 2022. The absence of an invasive air sac system in the earliest dinosaurs suggests multiple origins of vertebral pneumaticity. Scientific Reports 12:20844. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-25067-8

As before, I’m in the “just happy to be here” last author position, and quite happy to be so, too. I’ve had a productive couple of years, mostly because my colleagues keep inviting me to write a little bit, usually about pneumaticity, in exchange for a junior authorship, and that’s actually a perfect fit for my bandwidth right now. That dynamic has let me work on some cool and varied projects that have broadened my experience in satisfying ways. But enough navel-gazing!

Also as before, Tito made a really nice video that explains our findings from the paper and puts them in their broader scientific context:

For a long time now I’ve been interested in the origin of postcranial skeletal pneumaticity (PSP) in dinosaurs and pterosaurs (e.g., Wedel 2006, 2007, 2009, Yates et al. 2012, Wedel and Taylor 2013) — or is that origins, plural? Tito and crew decided to take a swing at the problem by CT scanning presacral vertebrae from the early sauropodomorphs Buriolestes and Pampadromaeus, and the herrerasaurid Gnathovorax. (Off-topic: Gnathovorax, “jaw inclined to devour”, is such a badass name that I adopted it for an ancient blue dragon in my D&D campaign.) All three taxa have shallow fossae on the lateral sides of at least some of their presacral centra, and some neural arch laminae, so they seemed like good candidates in which to hunt for internal pneumatization.

I’ll cut right to the chase: none of three have internal pneumatic chambers in their vertebrae, so if there were pneumatic diverticula present, they weren’t leaving diagnostic traces. That’s not surprising, but it’s nice to know rather than to wonder. The underlying system of respiratory air sacs could have been present in the ancestral ornithodiran, and I strongly suspect that was the case, but invasive vertebral pneumatization evolved independently in pterosaurs, sauropodomorphs, and theropods.

Detail of the vertebrae and foramina of the basalmost sauropodomorph Buriolestes (CAPPA/UFSM-0035). Cervical (A–C), anterior (D–F) and posterior (G–I) dorsal vertebrae in right lateral view. Note that nutritional foramina are present throughout the axial skeleton (dark arrows). Anterior/posterior orientation was defined based on the axial position, not the anatomical plane. Scale bar = 5 mm. Figures were generated with Adobe Photoshop CC version 22.5.1 X64. (Aureliano et al. 2022: fig. 4).

Just because we didn’t find pneumaticity, doesn’t mean we didn’t find cool stuff. Buriolestes, Pampadromaeus, and Gnathovorax all have neurovascular foramina — small holes that transmitted blood vessels and nerves — on the lateral and ventral aspects of the centra. That’s also expected, but again nice to see, especially since we think these blood vessels provided the template for invasive vertebral pneumatization in more derived taxa.

The findings I’m most excited about have to do with the internal structure of the vertebrae. Some of the vertebrae have what we’re calling a pseudo-polycamerate architecture. The polycamerate vertebrae of sauropods like Apatosaurus have large pneumatic chambers that branch into successively smaller ones. Similarly, some of the vertebrae in these Triassic saurischians have large marrow chambers that connect to smaller trabecular spaces — hence the term ‘pseudo-polycamerate’. This pseudo-polycamerate architecture is present in Pampadromaeus, but not in the slightly older Buriolestes, which has a more chaotic internal organization of trabecular spaces. So even in the apneumatic vertebrae of these early saurischians, there seems to have been an evolutionary trajectory toward more hierarchially-structured internal morphology.

Micro-computed tomography of the vertebrae of the herrerasaurid Gnathovorax (CAPPA/UFSM-0009). (A) silhouette shows the position of the axial elements. Artist: Felipe Elias. (B) 3D reconstruction of the anterior cervical vertebra and the correspondent high-contrast density slices in (D-I). Diagenetic artifacts greatly compromised the internal structures. (C) 3D reconstruction of the articulated posterior cervical vertebrae and the correspondent high-contrast density slices in (J–O). Minerals infilled between trabecular vacancies generate reddish anomalies. All images indicate irregular, chaotic, apneumatic architecture. Note the apneumatic large chambers in the centrum (ccv) and the smaller circumferential chambers at the bottom (cc). All slices were taken from the approximate midshaft. Anterior views in (D,H,I). Right lateral view in (E,L,M). Ventral view in (F,G,J,K). cc circumferential chambers, ccv chamber in the centrum, ce centrum, ctr chaotic trabeculae, d diapophysis, dia diagenetic artifact, nc neural canal, nf nutritional foramen, poz postzygapophysis, prz prezygapophysis. Scale bar in (A) = 1000 mm; in (B–O) = 10 mm. Computed tomography data processed with 3D Slicer version 4.10. Figures were generated with Adobe Photoshop CC version 22.5.1 X64.

But wait, there’s more! We also found small circumferential chambers around the margins of the centra, and what we’re calling ‘layered trabeculae’ inside the articular ends of the centra. These apneumatic trabecular structures look a heck of a lot like the circumferential pneumatic chambers and radial camellae that we described last year in a dorsal vertebra of what would later be named Ibirania (Navarro et al. 2022), and which other authors had previously described in other titanosaurs (Woodward and Lehman 2009, Bandeira et al. 2013) — see this post.

So to quickly recap, in these Triassic saurischians we find external neurovascular foramina from the nerves and vessels that probably “piloted” the pneumatic diverticula (in Mike’s lovely phrasing from Taylor and Wedel 2021) to the vertebrae in more derived taxa, and internal structures that are resemble the arrangement of pneumatic camerae and camellae in later sauropods and theropods. We already suspected that pneumatic diverticula were following blood vessels to reach the vertebrae and produce external pneumatic features like fossae and foramina (see Taylor and Wedel 2021 for a much fuller development of this idea). The results from our scans of these Triassic taxa suggests the tantalizing possibility that pneumatic diverticula in later taxa were following the vascular networks inside the vertebrae as well. 

A morphological spectrum of vertebral structure, as I thought of it 15 years ago. The Triassic saurischians described in the new paper by Aureliano et al. 2022 would sit between Arizonasaurus and Barapasaurus. (Wedel 2007: text-fig. 8)

“Hold up”, I can hear you thinking. “You can’t just draw a straight line between the internal structure of the vertebrae in Pampadromaeus, on one hand, and Apatosaurus, or a friggin’ saltasaurine, on the other. They’re at the opposite ends of the sauropodomorph radiation, separated by a vast and stormy ocean of intermediate taxa with procamerate, camerate, and semicamellate vertebrae, things like Barapasaurus, Haplocanthosaurus, Camarasaurus, and Giraffatitan.” That’s true, and the vertebral internal structure in, say, Camarasaurus doesn’t look much like either Pampadromaeus or Ibirania — at least, in an adult Camarasaurus. What about a hatchling, which hasn’t had time to pneumatize yet? Heck, what about a baby Ibirania or Rapetosaurus or Alamosaurus? Nobody knows because nobody’s done that work. There aren’t a ton of pre-pneumatization baby neosauropod verts out there, but there are some. There’s an as-yet-unwritten dissertation, or three, to be written about the vascular internal structure of the vertebrae in baby neosauropods prior to pneumatization, and in adult vertebrae that don’t get pneumatized. If caudal 20 is the last pneumatic vertebra, what does the vascular internal structure look like in caudal 21?

Cervical vertebrae of Austroposeidon show multiple internal plates of bone separated by sheets of camellae. Bandeira et al. (2016) referred to those as ‘camellate rings’, Aureliano et al. (2021) called them ‘internal plates’, and in the new paper (Aureliano et al. 2022) we call similar structures in apneumatic vertebrae ‘layered trabeculae’. (Bandeira et al. 2016: fig. 12)

To me the key questions here are, first, why does the pneumatic internal structure of the vertebrae of titanosaurs like Ibirania — or Austroposeidon, shown just above in a figure from Bandeira et al. (2016) — look like the vascular internal structure of the vertebrae of basal sauropodomorphs like Pampadromaeus? Is that (1) a kind of parallelism or convergence; (2) a deep developmental program that builds vertebrae with sheets of bone separated by circumferential and radial spaces, whether those spaces are filled with marrow or air; (3) a fairly direct ‘recycling’ of those highly structured marrow spaces into pneumatic spaces during pneumatization; or (4) some other damn thing entirely? And second, why is the vertebral internal structure of intermediate critters like Haplocanthosaurus and Camarasaurus so different from that of both Ibirania and Pampadromaeus— do the pneumatic internal structures of those taxa reflect the pre-existing vascular pattern, or are they doing something completely different? That latter question in particular is unanswerable until we know what the apneumatic internal structure is like in Haplocanthosaurus and Camarasaurus, either pre-pneumatization (ontogenetically), or beyond pneumatization (serially), or ideally both. 

A Camarasaurus caudal with major blood vessels mapped on, based on common patterns in extant tetrapods. A list of the places where blood vessels enter the bone is also a list of places where sauropod vertebrae can possibly be pneumatized. We don’t think that’s a coincidence. From Mike’s and my presentation last December at the 3rd Palaeo Virtual Congress, and this post. (Wedel and Taylor 2021)

I was on the cusp of writing that the future of pneumaticity is vascular. That’s true, but incomplete. A big part of figuring out why pneumatic structures have certain morphologies is going to be tracing their development, not just the early ontogenetic stages of pneumatization, but the apneumatic morphologies that existed prior to pneumatization. BUT we’re also nowhere near done just doing the alpha-level descriptive work of documenting what pneumaticity looks like in most sauropods. I’ll have more to say about that in an upcoming post. But the upshot is that now we’re fighting a war on two fronts — we still need to do a ton of basic descriptive work on pneumaticity in most taxa, and also need to do a ton of basic descriptive work on vertebral vascularization, and maybe a third ton on the ontogenetic development of pneumaticity, which is likely the missing link between those first two tons.

I’m proud of the new paper, not least because it raises many, many more questions than it answers. So if you’re interested in working on pneumaticity, good, because there’s a mountain of work to be done. Come join us!

References

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in cross sections, CT, pneumaticity, prosauropod
4 Comments »

New paper: pneumatic diverticula in the neural canals of birds

March 29, 2022

Morphological variation in paramedullary airways; yellow = spinal cord, green = diverticula. The spectrum of variation is discretized into four groups: i, branches of intertransverse diverticula contact spinal cord at intervertebral joints; ii, branches of intertransverse diverticula extend partially into the vertebral canal, but remain discontinuous; iii, paramedullary diverticula form sets of tubes that are continuous through vertebral canals of at least two consecutive vertebrae; iv, continuous paramedullary diverticula anastomose with supravertebral diverticula. Each variant is depicted diagrammatically (A, dorsal view; B, E, H, & K, transverse view) and shown in two CT scans; images in each column correspond to the same morphology. Morphology i: C, cormorant; D, scrub jay. Morphology ii: F, bushtit; G, common murre. Morphology iii: I, red-tailed hawk; J, black-crowned night heron. Morphology iv: L, M, pelican. (Atterholt and Wedel 2022: figure 5)

New paper out:

Atterholt, Jessie, and Wedel, Mathew J. 2022. A computed tomography-based survey of paramedullary diverticula in extant Aves. The Anatomical Record, 1– 22. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.24923

Quick aside, which will soon be of historical interest only: so far, only the accepted-but-unformatted manuscript is available, with the final, fully-formatted ‘version of record’ due along at some point in the future. We’re not sure when that will be — could be next week, could be months from now — which is why I’m following my standard procedure and yapping about the new paper now. This has paid off in the past, when papers that were only available in accepted ms form were read and cited before the final version was published. UPDATE on April 9: the formatted version of record is out now, as an open-access article with a CC-BY license, and I swapped it for the ‘accepted ms’ version in the links above and at the end of this post.

This paper has had a weirdly drawn-out gestation. Jessie and I hatched the idea of it way back in 2017, when we were teaching in the summer anatomy course together. I learned that Jessie had a big war chest of CTs of dead birds, and I’d been obsessed with supramedullary diverticula in birds and sauropods for some time already (e.g., an SVPCA talk: Wedel et al. 2014). There were detailed published descriptions of the supramedullary diverticula in a handful of species — namely chickens, turkeys, and pigeons — but no broad survey of those diverticula across living birds. Jessie had the CT scans to do that big survey, which we got rolling on right away. She presented our preliminary results at SVPCA in 2018 (Atterholt and Wedel 2018), and by rights the paper should have been along shortly thereafter. More on that in a sec.

One thing that may seem odd: we use the term ‘paramedullary diverticula’ instead of the more familiar and established ‘supramedullary diverticula’. That’s because these diverticula are not always dorsal to the spinal cord; sometimes they’re lateral, sometimes they’re ventral, and sometimes they completely surround the spinal cord, like an inflated cuff. So we decided that the term ‘paramedullary’, or ‘next to the spinal cord’, was more accurate than ‘supramedullary’, or ‘above the spinal cord’, for describing this class of diverticula.

Observed variation in the shape, arrangement, and orientation of paramedullary diverticula relative to the spinal cord; yellow = spinal cord, green = diverticula. A, paired diverticula dorsal to spinal cord in an ostrich. B, paired diverticula lateral to spinal cord in a bushtit. C, paired diverticula ventral to spinal cord in a violet turaco. D, three diverticula dorsal to spinal cord in an ostrich. E, four diverticula dorsal to spinal cord in an eclectus parrot. F, single, c-shaped diverticulum dorsal to spinal cord in an ostrich. G, diverticula completely surrounding spinal cord and pneumatizing vertebra in a violet turaco. H, no paramedullary diverticula present in a Pacific loon. I, diverticula completely surrounding spinal cord in a pelican. (Atterholt and Wedel 2022: figure 6)

I will have more to say about the science in other posts, and you can get the scientific backstory in this post and this one and the abstracts cited above and linked below. The rest of this post is mostly about me, so if you stick around, buckle up for some advanced navel-gazing.

There’s no one reason why this paper didn’t come out sooner. In short, I hit a wall. We went through a curriculum change at work, and suddenly the annual schedule that I’d relied on for a decade was completely upended. I had some unexpected challenges in my personal life. But the biggest problem was that my attitude toward research and writing had changed, for the worse.

When I was fresh out of grad school I had this kinda snotty attitude that my research was MINE, and wherever I was teaching was just, like, a paycheck, man, but they don’t own me, or my research. And as my teaching and committee responsibilities ramped up I still felt like research and writing was something I did for myself, and that my mission was to steal however many hours I could away from the “day-job work” to get done the things that I really wanted to do. Like a guerilla insurgency. In retrospect, it was a pretty good attitude for getting stuff done.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking about research as something that belonged to me, something that I did for myself, and started thinking about it as part of my job. (This also maybe is not so flattering in what it reveals about how I think, or at least thought, about my job.) Instead of using my research time as a source of energy and a wellspring of satisfaction and positivity, I starting thinking of it only as a sink. And it happened so insidiously that I didn’t even realize it. My productivity plummeted, and I didn’t understand why. I was restless and depressed, and I didn’t understand that either. At the level of my superficial thoughts I still wanted to get research done, but my subconscious was turned off to it, so I just spun my wheels.

Then the pandemic hit. I’d always been a pretty optimistic, upbeat person, but I found myself just staring off into space franticizing about all the horrible things going on in the world, or staying up too late doom-scrolling the news. I slept too little, and poorly, and by the end of 2020 I felt worn down to a nub.

Osteological evidence of paramedullary diverticula. A, pocked texturing inside the vertebral canal of a pelican (LACM 86262). B, pneumatic foramen on the roof of the vertebral canal of an albatross (Phoebastria nigripes, LACM 115139). C, pneumatic foramina in the floor of the vertebral canal of an ostrich (Struthio camelus, LACM 116205). D, deep pneumatic fossae in the roof of the vertebral canal of an Eastern moa (Emeus sp., LACM unnumbered). (Atterholt and Wedel 2022: figure 7)

Then a series of positive things happened:

  • I received a long, heartfelt email from Jessie (fittingly!), asking after me and laying out a plan for getting the paper done and out. It was the kick I needed to look inside and start picking myself apart, to figure out what the heck was going on. Much of this post is cribbed from my reply to her.
  • I got a little break from lecturing in the spring of 2021, and that gave me the space to get a couple of things finished and submitted — the pneumatic variation paper with Mike in January (Taylor and Wedel 2021), and the Haplocanthosaurus neural canal paper, which was submitted even earlier in January, although it came out much later (Wedel et al. 2021; more on that publication delay in a future post).
  • Finally, I had young, energetic coauthors who were moving projects forward that required modest levels of effort from me, but which paid off with highly visible publications that I’m proud to be an author on, including the saltasaur pneumaticity paper (Aureliano et al. 2021) and the ‘Sauro-Throat’ paper (Woodruff et al. 2022).

It’s impossible to overstate how energizing it was to get new things done and out, and how much it helped to have collaborators who were putting wins on the board even when I was otherwise occupied. One of those collaborators was Jessie, who just kept pushing this thing forward — and, sometimes, pushing me forward — until it was done. So the paper you can read today is a testament not only to her acumen as a morphologist, but also to her tenacity as a scholar, and as a friend.

The part of the paper I’m happiest about is the “Conclusions and Directions for Future Research”, which points the way toward a LOT of further studies that need to be done, both on extant birds and on fossil archosaurs, ranging from bone histology to functional morphology to macroevolution. As we wrote in the concluding sentence of the paper, “We hope that this study serves as a foundation and an enticement for further studies of this most unusual anatomical system, in both extinct and extant archosaurs.”

I can’t wait to see what comes next.

References

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in CT, just like ALL the birds, navel blogging, new papers, papers by SV-POW!sketeers, pneumaticity, stinkin' theropods, supramedullary diverticula, Uncategorized
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Herons don’t just lie, they cheat (or at least their tracheas do)

January 7, 2021

This beautiful image is bird 52659 from Florida Museum, a green heron Butorides virescens, CT scanned and published on Twitter.

(The scan is apparently from MorphoSource, but I can’t find it there.)

There is lots to love here: for example, you can see that the long bones of the arm are pneumatic, because the margins of the bones show up more strongly than the cores. But you won’t be surprised that I am interested mostly in the neck.

As you can see, while the vertebrae of the neck are pulled back into a strong curve, the trachea doesn’t bother, and just sort of hangs there from the base of the head to the top of the lungs, cheerfully crossing over (i.e. passing to the side of) the vertebral sequence. So the trachea here is not much more than half the length of the vertebral sequence.

Now this is the opposite of what we see in some birds. Here, for example, is a trumpet manucode Phonygammus keraudrenii (a bird-of-paradise) as illustrated in Katrina van Grouw’s book The Unfeathered Bird:

Yes, all those coils visible in the torso are the trachea, which is many times longer than it needs to be to connect the head to the lungs. Birds-of-paradise do this sort of thing a lot (Clench 1978).

And they are not alone: cranes and others also have elongated and contorted tracheal trajectories. So it’s odd that herons seem to do the opposite.

But the heron is even odder than that. As we have noted before, herons can stretch their necks out to the point where you would scarcely believe the unstretched and stretched animals are the same thing. But they are:

The CT-scanned heron at the top of this post is in a pose intermediate between the two shown here. But since it can adopt the long-necked pose on the right, it’s apparent that the trachea can become long enough to connect the head and lungs in that pose. Which means it must be able to stretch to nearly twice the length we see in the CT scan.

Don’t try this at home, kids!

References

  • Clench, Mary H. 1978. Tracheal elongation in birds-of-paradise. The Condor 80(4):423–430. doi:10.2307/1367193
Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in CT, Gratuitously awesome images, necks, stinkin' theropods
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Nature’s CT machine

January 28, 2020

Because I’ve worked a lot on the anatomy and evolution of air-filled bones in sauropod dinosaurs, I’ve spent most of my career looking at images like this:

CT sections through a cervical vertebra of an apatosaurine (Apatosaurus or Brontosaurus), OMNH 1094. Wedel (2003b: fig. 6). Scale bar is 10cm.

…and thinking about images like this:

Physical sections through pneumatic vertebrae of Giraffatitan. Janensch (1950: figs. 71-73).

Turns out, that’s pretty good practice for fossil prospecting in the Salt Wash member of the Morrison Formation, where we frequently find things like this:

That’s a bit hard to read, so let’s pull it out from the background:

This is almost certainly a pneumatic vertebra of a sauropod, sectioned more-or-less randomly by the forces of erosion to expose a complicated honeycomb of internal struts and chambers. The chambers are full of sandstone now, but in life they were full of air. I say “almost certainly” because there is small chance that it could belong to a very large theropod, but it looks more sauropod-y to me (for reasons I may expand upon in the comments if anyone is curious).

I’m not 100% certain what section this is. At first I was tempted to read it as a transversely-sectioned dorsal, something like the Allosaurus dorsal shown in this post (link) but from a small, possibly juvenile sauropod. But the semi-radial, spoke-like arrangement of the internal struts going to the round section at the bottom looks very much like the inside of the condyle of a sauropod cervical or cervico-dorsal–compare to fig. 71 from Janensch (1950), shown above. And of course there is no reason to suspect that the plane of this cut is neatly in any of the cardinal anatomical directions. It is most likely an oblique cut that isn’t purely transverse or sagittal or anything else, but some combination of the above. It’s also not alone–there are bits and bobs of bone to the side and above in the same chunk of sandstone, which might be parts of this vertebra or of neighboring bones. Assuming it is a sauropod, my guess is Diplodocus or Brachiosaurus, because it looks even more complex than the sectioned cervicals and dorsals I’ve seen of Haplocanthosaurus, Camarasaurus, or the apatosaurines.

Sometimes we can do a little better. This is one of my favorite finds from the Salt Wash. This boulder, now in two parts, fell down out of a big overhanging sandstone cliff. When the boulder hit, it broke into two halves, and the downhill half rolled over 180 degrees, bringing both cut faces into view in this photo. And there in the boulder is what looks like two vertebrae, but is in fact the neatly separated halves of a single vertebra. I know I refer to erosion and breakage as “Nature’s CT machine”, but this time that’s really on the nose. Let’s take a closer look:

Here’s what I see:

It’s a proportionally long vertebra with a round ball at one end and a hemispherical socket at the other end: a cervical vertebra of a sauropod. Part of the cervical rib is preserved on the upper side, which I suspect is the left side. The parapophysis on the opposite side is angled a bit out of the rock, toward the camera. Parapophyses of sauropod cervicals tend to be angled downward, and if we’re looking at the bottom of this vertebra, then the rib on the upper side is the left. The right cervical rib was cut off when the boulder broke. All we have on this side are the wide parapophysis and the slender strut of the diapophysis aiming out of the rock toward the missing rib, which must still be embedded in the other half of the boulder–and in fact you can see a bit of it peeking out in the counterpart in the wide shot, above.

Can we get a taxonomic ID? I think so, based on the following clues:

  • The cervical ribs are set waaay out to either side of the centrum, by about one centrum diameter. Such wide-set cervical ribs occur in Camarasaurus and the apatosaurines, Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus, but not typically in Diplodocus, Brachiosaurus, or other Morrison sauropods.
  • The cervical rib we can see the most of is pretty slender, like those of Camarasaurus, in contrast to the massive, blocky cervical ribs of the apatosaurines (for example).
  • We can see at least bits of both the left and right cervical ribs in the two slabs–along with a section right through the centrum. So the cervical ribs were set wide from the centrum but not displaced deeply below it, as in Camarasaurus, and again in contrast to the apatosaurines, in which the cervical ribs are typically displaced far below (ventral to) the centrum (see this).
  • This one is a little more loosey-goosey, but the exposed internal structure looks “about right” for Camarasaurus. There is a mix of large and small chambers, but not many small ones, and nothing approaching the coarse, regular honeycomb we’d expect in Apatosaurus, Brontosaurus, or Diplodocus, let alone the fine irregular honeycomb we’d expect in Barosaurus or Brachiosaurus (although I will show you a vert like that in an upcoming post). On the other hand, the internal structure is too complex for Haplocanthosaurus (compare to the top image here).
  • As long as Camarasaurus is on the table, I’ll note that the overall proportions are good for a mid-cervical of Cam as well. That’s not worth much, since vertebral proportions vary along the column and almost every Morrison sauropod has cervicals with this general proportion somewhere in the neck, but it doesn’t hurt.

So the balance of the evidence points toward Camarasaurus. In one character or another, every other known Morrison sauropod is disqualified.

When it’s too dark to hunt for sauropods, you can look at other things.

Now, Camarasaurus is not only the most common sauropod in the Morrison, it’s also the most common dinosaur of any kind in the formation. So this isn’t a mind-blowing discovery. Still, it’s nice to be able to get down to a genus-level ID based on a single vertebra fortuitously sectioned by Mother Nature. In upcoming posts, I’ll show some of the more exciting critters that we’ve been able to ID out of the Salt Wash, ‘we’ here including Brian Engh, John Foster, ReBecca Hunt-Foster, Jessie Atterholt, and Thuat Tran. Brian will also be showing many of these same fossils in the next installment of Jurassic Reimagined. Catch Part 1 here (link), and stay tuned to Brian’s paleoart channel (here) for more in the very near future.

References

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in #JurassicReimagined, brachiosaurids, camarasaurs, cervical, CT, dorsal, everything's better cut in half, field photos, Giant Oklahoma apatosaurine, Giraffatitan, Morrison Formation, pneumaticity
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Back in business

May 31, 2018

Many thanks to all of the good folks in the radiology department at the Hemet Valley Medical Center, especially John Yasmer, DO, my partner in crime, and Heather Salzwedel, who did all of the actual work of scanning while the rest of us stood around making oooh and aaah noises.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in caudal, CT, Haplocanthosaurus, timely
6 Comments »

Photography and illustration talk, Part 11: Maps and territories

March 20, 2014

Illustration talk slide 47

Illustration talk slide 48

Illustration talk slide 49

Illustration talk slide 50

That last one really hurts. Here’s the original image, which should have gone in the paper with the interpretive trace next to it rather than on top of it:

Sauroposeidon C6-C7 scout

The rest of the series.

Papers referenced in these slides:

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in cervical, cross sections, CT, ostrich, paleontologists behaving badly, pneumaticity, prosauropod, Sauroposeidon, stinkin' theropods, Wedel 2014 photography and illustration talk
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Photography and illustration talk, Part 10: Figure parts and placement

March 13, 2014

Illustration talk slide 44

Illustration talk slide 45

Illustration talk slide 46

On that last slide, I also talked about two further elaborations: figures that take up the entire page, with the caption on a separate (usually facing) page, and side title figures, which are wider than tall and get turned on their sides to better use the space on the page.

Also, if I was doing this over I’d amend the statement on the last slide with, “but it doesn’t hurt you at all to be cognizant of these things, partly because they’re easy, and partly because your paper may end up at an outlet you didn’t anticipate when you wrote it.”

And I just noticed that the first slide in this group has the word ‘without’ duplicated. Jeez, what a maroon. I’ll try to remember to fix that before I post the whole slide set at the end of this exercise.

A final point: because I am picking illustrations from my whole career to illustrate these various points, almost all fail in some obvious way. The photos from the second slide should be in color, for example. When I actually gave this talk, I passed out reprints of several of my papers and said, “I am certain that every single figure I have ever made could be improved. So as you look through these papers, be thinking about how each one could be made better.”

Previous posts in this series.

References

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in Apatosaurus, cervical, cross sections, CT, diplodocids, dorsal, Sauroposeidon, Wedel 2014 photography and illustration talk
3 Comments »

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.]

Big Bend Vanessa 182 small

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!”

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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.

Sauroposeidon C5 cross section Wedel 2007b fig 14

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.

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.

Figure 12. 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.

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.

Figure 14. 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.

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.

Figure 13. 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.

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.

Figure 15. 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.

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.

Figure 16. 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.

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

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in Apatosaurus, cartilage, cross sections, CT, diplodocids, I'm stupid, juvenile, Sauroposeidon
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Sauropod-related travel: Utah, 2008

February 5, 2010

Here’s one of those text-light photo posts that we always aspire to but almost never achieve. In the spring of 2008 I flew to Utah to do some filming for the History Channel series “Evolve”, in particular the episode on size, which aired later that year. I always intended to post some pix from that trip once the show was done and out, and I’m just now getting around to it…a bit belatedly.

Utah 2008 01 mountains from museum door

Here’s the view out the back door of the BYU Earth Sciences Museum in Provo, Utah. Not bad–the mountains actually made me drag my eyes away from sauropod vertebrae for a few seconds here and there.

Utah 2008 02 Brooks driving forklift

Here’s the view in other direction, with Brooks  Britt using a forklift to retrieve the big Supersaurus cervical.

Utah 2008 03 Supes and giraffe

And here is said cervical, with a mid-cervical of a giraffe for scale. You may remember the big cervical from this post (and if you click that link, notice how much nicer the new collections area is than the off-site barn where I first encountered the Cervical of Doom). Sauropods FTW!

Utah 2008 04 taping down Diplo vert

While the film crew were shooting Brooks and picking up some establishing shots, I was ransacking the collections for pretty vertebrae. We took our treasures up to the University of Utah med center in Salt Lake for CT scanning. Here Kent Sanders is helping me tape down a Diplodocus cervical.

Utah 2008 05 Kent in reading room

And here’s Kent in the CT reading room playing with the data. Like old times–I spent most of my Saturdays in 1998 and 1999 scanning verts with Kent when he was at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center.

Utah 2008 06 NAMAL main drag

The next morning we went to the North American Museum of Ancient Life in Lehi. Here’s a view down the main drag, with the mounted Supersaurus on the left, mounted Brachiosaurus in the center, and original Supersaurus sacrum (on loan from BYU) in the case on the right.

Utah 2008 07 Matt in lift

The highlight of my day trip year.

I was back at BYU just a few months ago shooting another documentary, but that story will have to wait for the dramatically appropriate moment. Stay tuned!

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in brachiosaurids, Brachiosaurus, cervical, collections, cross sections, CT, diplodocids, Diplodocus, fame, mounts, other long-necks, sacral, stinkin' mammals, Supersaurus, travel
11 Comments »

Another mystery: embossed laminae and “unfossae”

December 7, 2009

Broadly speaking, pneumatic sauropod vertebrae come in two flavors. In more primitive, camerate vertebrae, modeled here by Haplocanthosaurus, the centrum is a round-ended I-beam and the neural arch is composed of intersecting flat plates of bone called laminae (lam above; fos = fossa, nc = neural canal, ncs = neurocentral suture; Ye Olde Tyme vert pic from Hatcher 1903).

In more derived, camellate vertebrae, the centrum and neural arch are both honeycombed with many small air spaces. This inflated-looking morphology is very similar to that seen in birds, like the turkey we recently discussed. The fossae and foramina on the outside tend to be smaller and more numerous than in camerate vertebrae, as shown here in a titanosauriform axis from India (Figure 3 from Wilson and Mohabey 2006). The green arrows show that the fossae visible on the external surface are excavations or depressions into the honeycombed internal structure of the bone.

External fossae on bones can house many different soft tissues, including muscles, pads of fat or cartilage, and pneumatic diverticula (O’Connor 2006). Pneumatic fossae are often strongly lipped and internally subdivided and may contain pneumatic foramina, which makes them easier to diagnose (but they may also be simple, smooth, and “blind”, which makes them harder to diagnose as pneumatic). But in all of these cases we are usually talking about the same thing: a visible excavation into a corpus of bony tissue, which may have marrow spaces inside if it is apneumatic, or air spaces inside if it is pneumatic (the corpus of bone, not the dent). That’s probably how most of us think about fossae, and it would hardly need to be explained…except that sometimes, something much weirder happens.

Consider this cervical of Brachiosaurus (this is BYU 12866, from Dry Mesa, Colorado). Brachiosaurus and Giraffatitan have an in-between form of vertebral architecture that my colleagues and I have called semicamellate (Wedel et al. 2000); the centrum does have large simple chambers (camerae), but smaller, thin-walled camellae are also variably present, especially along the midline of the vertebra and in the ends of the centrum. As in Haplocanthosaurus, the neural arch is composed of intersecting plates of bone; unlike Haplocanthosaurus, these laminae are not flat or smooth but are instead highly sculpted with lots of small fossae. Janensch (1950) called these “Aussenkaverne”, or accessory outside cavities, because and they are smaller and more variable than the large fossae and foramina that invade the centrum.

And that’s the weird thing. As the red arrows in the above image show, the “Aussenkaverne” are not excavations or depressions into anything, except the space on the other side of the lamina (which in life would have been occupied by another diverticulum). The neural arches of Brachiosaurus and Giraffatitan are not excavated by fossae, they’re embossed, like corporate business cards and fancy napkins.

What’s up with that!? We tend to think of pneumaticity as reducing the mass of the affected elements, but the shortest distance between two vertebral landmarks is a smooth lamina. These embossed laminae actually require slightly more bony material than smooth ones would.

As you can see above, the outer edges of the laminae are thick but the bone everywhere else is very thin. Maybe, like the median septa in pneumatic sauropod vertebrae, the thin bone everywhere except the edges of the laminae was just not loaded very much or very often, and was therefore free to get pushed around by the diverticula on either side, in the sense of being continually and quasi-randomly remodeled into shapes that don’t strike us as being very mechanically efficient. But also like the median septa, the thin parts of the laminae are only rarely perforated (but it does happen), for possible (read: arm-wavy) reasons discussed in the recent FEA post. And maybe the amount of extra bone involved in making embossed laminae versus smooth ones was negligible even by the very light standards of sauropod vertebrae.

Another question: since these thin sheets of bone were sandwiched in between two sets of diverticula, why are the “unfossae” always embossed into them, in the medial or inferior direction? Why don’t any of them pop out laterally or dorsally, looking like domes or bubbles instead of holes, like Mount Fist-of-God from Larry Niven’s Ringworld? Did the developmental program get accustomed to making fossae that went down and into a corpus of bone, and just kept on with business as usual even when there was no corpus of bone to excavate into? I’m only half joking.

I don’t have good answers for any of these questions. I scanned this vert a decade ago and I only noticed how weird the “unfossae” were a few months ago. I’m putting all this here because “Hey, look at this weird thing that I can only wave my arms about” is not a great basis for a peer-reviewed paper, and because I’d like your thoughts on what might be going on.

In Other News

The Discovery Channel’s Clash of the Dinosaurs premiered last night. I would have given you a heads up, except that I didn’t get one myself. I only discovered it was on because of a Facebook posting (thanks, folks!).

COTD is intended to be the replacement, a decade on, for Walking With Dinosaurs. I’m happy to report that one of the featured critters is Sauroposeidon. I grabbed a couple of frames from the clips posted here.

I haven’t seen the series yet, because I don’t have cable. But I’m hoping to catch it at a friend’s place next Sunday night, Dec. 13, when the entire series will be shown again. With any luck, I’ll have more news next week.

Finally, I got to do an interview at Paw-Talk, a forum for all things animal. I’m very happy with how it turned out, so thanks to Ava for making it happen. While you’re over there, have a look around, there’s plenty of good stuff. Brian Switek, whom you hopefully know from this and this, is a contributor; check out his latest here.

References

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in brachiosaurids, Brachiosaurus, cervical, cross sections, CT, fame, Haplocanthosaurus, life restorations, pneumaticity, Sauroposeidon
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