We were probably wrong about caudal pneumaticity in Ca13 of the Brontosaurus excelsus holotype YPM 1980

March 20, 2023

This is one of those posts where the title pretty much says it all, but here’s the detailed version.

Recap: the 2013 paper

In Matt’s and my 2013 paper Caudal pneumaticity and pneumatic hiatuses in the sauropod dinosaurs Giraffatitan and Apatosaurus (Wedel and Taylor 2013b), we wrote about the Brontosaurus excelsus holotype 1980:

Much more convincing, however, are two isolated lateral fossae: one on the left side of caudal 9, the other on the right side of caudal 13 (Figure 10). Both of these are much larger than the aforementioned foramina – about 6 cm across – and have distinct lips. There is absolutely no trace of similar fossae in any of the other caudals, so these fossae represent a bilateral pneumatic hiatus of at least seven vertebrae

And we illustrated the right side of Ca13 in our figure 10:

Wedel and Taylor (2013:figure 10). An isolated pneumatic fossa is present on the right side of caudal vertebra 13 in Apatosaurus excelsus holotype YPM 1980. The front of the vertebra and the fossa are reconstructed, but enough of the original fossil is visible to show that the feature is genuine.

Fast forward to 2023

The Yale Brontosaurus has been dismounted and sent to RCI in Canada for some long overdue TLC. It’s being re-prepared, and Brian Curtice has seen the material close up. The news from Brian is not good: I quote some of his emails. First, on 26 January:

The 1980 caudal 13 it isn’t pneumatic. That whole hole is plaster. The 2 verts in front of it have similar damage but on the opposite side. It looks like they were damaged during preservation, excavation, or preparation.

Then on 27 January:

Quick caudal pneumatic update: other than the fact 1980 has a large number of what I dub nutrient foramina there isn’t any shiny surfaces, no odd sculpting, fluting, etc. the bone is exquisite in these areas but will soon be painted black.

Later that day:

It was also exceptionally difficult to sometimes tell what was actual bone. Barbour [1890 — ed.] is spot on at what Marsh had done. The preparators sometimes couldn’t be sure without acetone and an air scribe… I did the best I could but my goodness it was tough and may have errors. Thus I stayed towards what I was positive on.

On 3 February, I wrote back to Brian asking:

My question about the “pneumatic fossa” in caudal 13 is: why did they sculpt it like that? It would have been the simplest thing in the world to give it a simple flat lateral aspect, like the other caudals, so what made them put the fossa in? One possible answer is that that’s what the bone was actually like, but smashed up, and they “repaired” it. I guess we are unlikely ever to know.

He replied the same day:

There are 3 caudals (11-13, pics attached) with similarly damaged bone, punky and smashed and “beat up”, with 11 and 12 having the damage on the left and ventral and 13 on the right. I suspect they were lying close to one another. I couldn’t tell if it was trampling, but it didn’t seem like it was from being hacked from the ground.
[…]
As to why they did it? I suspect because 13’s damage wasn’t as jagged, they could plaster over it easier? We’ll never know for sure.

Brian sent a photo of the re-prepared caudal 13, showing … well, see for yourself:

Truthfully, I don’t find this especially compelling. But that’s about the inadequacy of photos for this kind of work. My inclination is to trust Brian’s interpretation, while wondering how Matt and I were both fooled back in June 2012 when we visited YPM together and spent significant time gazing at this caudal.

So what now?

The good news for us is that this doesn’t really change any of our arguments or conclusion in the 2013 paper. We said that there is previously undocumented evidence of caudal pneumaticity in apatosaurines[1] — and there still is, in the other specimen we figured, FMNH P25112, in our figure 9. And the significant conclusion of the papers was the intermittent and unpredictable pneumatization along the tails of sauropods is compelling evidence for extensive “cryptic pneumaticity” — that is, for soft-tissue pneumatization alongside vertebrae that did not penetrate the bone. That conclusion is still good.

But still: one of the data-points we relied on in making that argument no longer looks solid, and it feels like the honest thing is to document that. It probably doesn’t warrant a follow-up paper or even an erratum. But it does warrant a blog-post, and this is it.

Thanks to Brian for bringing it to our attention!

Notes

[1]. In the paper we said “in Apatosaurus“, not “in apatosaurines”. But that was back when Apatosaurus was the only recognized apatosaurine, so it amounted t0 the same thing. If we were writing it in the post-Tschopp-et-al. world of today, we’d say “in apatosaurines”.

References

 

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in Brontosaurus, caudal, pneumaticity, Yale Peabody Museum
2 Comments »

An arresting image of an apatosaur vertebra

March 3, 2023

Here’s a cool photo of an apatosaur cervical in anterior view. This is from R. McNeill Alexander’s wonderful book Bones: The Unity of Form and Function, which was published in 1994. The whole book is packed with gorgeous full-color photos like this, and you can still get new copies for cover price (f’rinstance).

I remember stumbling across this image not long after I started working on sauropod vertebrae back in the late 90s, and being completely taken aback by the size of the cervical ribs. Up to that point I’d mostly been grokking the long, graceful cervicals of brachiosaurs, and the ridiculously overbuilt apatosaurine cervical morphology was a real kick in the brainpan. That’s well-trod ground here at SV-POW!, but this is still a beautiful photo. I suspect that the vertebra has been at least somewhat restored — some of the texturing on the condyle and under the diapophyses looks suspiciously like it was applied with tools or maybe just human fingers — but in general this is a pretty faithful representation of what an apatosaur cervical looks like from the front.

One thing that always strikes me about views like this is that you could take the centrum of this vertebra, strip off the neural arch and all the apophyses, and stick it through either one of the cervical ribs loops without scraping the sides. If life, the cervical rib loops held the (comparatively small) vertebral arteries and the (comparatively gigantic) intertransverse diverticula. We know this because that’s how birds are built, and because different apatosaurine specimens show pneumatic traces almost all the way around the inside of the cervical rib loop. The same is true in theropods like Majungasaurus, as Pat O’Connor showed in a lovely figure in his 2006 paper (O’Connor 2006: fig. 16). The volume of air in each of the paired cervical rib loops would have simply dwarfed the volume of air inside or even alongside the centrum. I wanted to visualize that better so I took my trusty old CT cross-section of OMNH 1094 and pasted it on top of this vert, stretching it a bit in GIMP to improve the fit:

Another thing that this photo shows nicely are the pneumatic fossae on the anterior surfaces of the cervical ribs. I’ve seen those features on loads of apatosaur cervical ribs, but I’ve never seen them discussed anywhere. I have thoughts on why those fossae are there, but that story will have to keep for another time.

References

 

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in Apatosaurus, Brontosaurus, cervical, cervical ribs, diplodocids, pneumaticity
6 Comments »

How can we get post-publication peer-review to happen?

February 20, 2021

Today marks the one-month anniversary of my and Matt’s paper in Qeios about why vertebral pneumaticity in sauropods is so variable. (Taylor and Wedel 2021). We were intrigued to publish on this new platform that supports post-publication peer-review, partly just to see what happened.

Taylor and Wedel (2021: figure 3). Brontosaurus excelsus holotype YPM 1980, caudal vertebrae 7 and 8 in right lateral view. Caudal 7, like most of the sequence, has a single vascular foramen on the right side of its centrum, but caudal 8 has two; others, including caudal 1, have none.

So what has happened? Well, as I write this, the paper has been viewed 842 times, downloaded a healthy 739 times, and acquired an altmetric score 21, based rather incestuously on two SV-POW! blog-posts, 14 tweets and a single Mendeley reader.

What hasn’t happened is even a single comment on the paper. Nothing that could be remotely construed as a post-publication peer-review. And therefore no progress towards our being able to count this as a peer-reviewed publication rather than a preprint — which is how I am currently classifying it in my publications list.

This, despite our having actively solicited reviews both here on SV-POW!, in the original blog-post, and in a Facebook post by Matt. (Ironically, the former got seven comments and the latter got 20, but the actual paper none.)

I’m not here to complain; I’m here to try to understand.

On one level, of course, this is easy to understand: writing a more-than-trivial comment on a scholarly article is work, and it garners very little of the kind of credit academics care about. Reputation on the Qeios site is nice, in a that-and-two-bucks-will-buy-me-a-coffee kind of way, but it’s not going to make a difference to people’s CVs when they apply for jobs and grants — not even in the way that “Reviewed for JVP” might. I completely understand why already overworked researchers don’t elect to invest a significant chunk of time in voluntarily writing a reasoned critique of someone else’s work when they could be putting that time into their own projects. It’s why so very few PLOS articles have comments.

On the other hand, isn’t this what we always do when we write a solicited peer-review for a regular journal?

So as I grope my way through this half-understood brave new world that we’re creating together, I am starting to come to the conclusion that — with some delightful exceptions — peer-review is generally only going to happen when it’s explicitly solicited by a handling editor, or someone with an analogous role. No-one’s to blame for this: it’s just reality that people need a degree of moral coercion to devote that kind of effort to other people’s project. (I’m the same; I’ve left almost no comments on PLOS articles.)

Am I right? Am I unduly pessimistic? Is there some other reason why this paper is not attracting comments when the Barosaurus preprint did? Teach me.

References

 

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in Brontosaurus, caudal, help SV-POW!, papers by SV-POW!sketeers, Peer review, pneumaticity, Shiny digital future, stinkin' reviewers, What counts?, Yale Peabody Museum
12 Comments »

Happy Valentine’s Day from Apatosaurinae

February 15, 2021

This is RAM 1619, a proximal caudal vertebra of an apatosaurine, in posterior view. It’s one of just a handful of sauropod specimens at the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology. It’s a donated specimen, which came with very little documentation. It was originally catalogued only to a very gross taxonomic level, but I had a crack at it on a collections visit in 2018, when I took these photos. I told Andy Farke and the other Alf folks right away, I just never got around to blogging about it until now.

Why do I think it’s an apatosaurine? A few reasons: 

  • it’s slightly procoelous, which is pretty common for diplodocids, whereas caudals of Haplocanthosaurus, Camarasaurus, and Brachiosaurus are all either amphicoelous or amphiplatyan;
  • it has big pneumatic fossae above the transverse processes, unlike Haplo, Cam, and Brachio, but it lacks big pneumatic fossae below the transverse processes, unlike Diplodocus and Barosaurus. 
  • and finally the clincher: the centrum is taller than wide, and broader dorsally than ventrally.

In the literature this centrum shape is described as ‘heart-shaped’ (e.g., Tschopp et al. 2015), and sometimes there is midline dorsal depression that really sells it. That feature isn’t present in this vert, but overall it’s still much closer to a heart-shape than the caudals of any non-apatosaurine in the Morrison. Hence the literal 11th-hour Valentine’s Day post (and yes, this will go up with a Feb. 15 date because SV-POW! runs on England time, but it’s still the 14th here in SoCal, at least for another minute or two).

RAM 1619 in postero-dorsal view.

Back to the pneumaticity. Occasionally an apatosaurine shows up with big lateral fossae ventral to the transverse processes–the mounted one at the Field Museum is a good example (see this post). And the big Oklahoma apatosaurine breaks the rules by having very pneumatic caudals–more on that in the future. But at least in the very proximal caudals of non-gigantic apatosaurines, it’s more common for there to be pneumatic fossae above the transverse processes, near the base of the neural arch. You can see that in caudal 3 of UWGM 15556/CM 563, a specimen of Brontosaurus parvus:

I don’t think I’d figured out this difference between above-the-transverse-process (supracostal, perhaps) and below-the-transverse-process (infracostal, let’s say) pneumatic fossae when Mike and I published our caudal pneumaticity paper back in 2013. I didn’t start thinking seriously about the dorsal vs ventral distribution of pneumatic features until sometime later (see this post). And I need to go check my notes and photos before I’ll feel comfortable calling supracostal fossae the apatosaurine norm. But I am certain that Diplodocus and Barosaurus have big pneumatic foramina on the lateral faces of their proximal caudals (see this post, for example), Haplocanthosaurus and brachiosaurids have infracostal fossae when they have any fossae at all in proximal caudals (distally the fossae edge up to the base of the neural arch in Giraffatitan), and to date there are no well-documented cases of caudal pneumaticity in Camarasaurus (if that seems like a hedge, sit tight and W4TP). 

RAM 1619 has asymmetric pneumatic fossae, which is pretty cool, and also pretty common, and we think we have a hypothesis to explain that now–see Mike’s and my new paper in Qeios.

And if I’m going to make my midnight deadline, even on Pacific Time, I’d best sign off. More cool stuff inbound real soon.

References

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in Apatosaurus, Brontosaurus, caudal, diplodocids, pneumaticity
12 Comments »

Apatosaurine cervicals of the ancient Maya civilisation

March 25, 2020

Our old sparring partner Cary Woodruff is a big fan of Monarobot, a Mexican artist who does all of her pieces in a Maya artistic style. So he commissioned this piece:

Anyone can tell that this is an apatosaurine cervical in anterior view — but which apatosaurine cervical? SV-POW Dollars(*) await the first person to correctly identify it.

Cary points out that one neat thing about the art is the colours: where possible, Monarobot uses colors the Mayas used. That blue in the vertebra is a special plant-based pigment they created.

As things stand, Cary owns the world’s only copy of this piece. But he points out that it’s born-digital, so anyone else who wants a copy is at liberty to order one; and he’s gracious enough not to object to the dilution of his print’s uniqueness. I don’t think there is a way to order directly online, but you can contact Monarobot in various places:

 

(*) Street value of SV-POW Dollars: zero.

 

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in Apatosaurus, Art, Brontosaurus, cervical, diplodocids
7 Comments »

Nature’s CT machine, part 2: an apatosaurine in the Salt Wash

January 28, 2020

In the last post, we looked at some sauropod vertebrae exposed in cross-section at our field sites in the Salt Wash member of the Morrison Formation. This time, we’re going to do it again! Let’s look at another of my faves from the field, with Thuat Tran’s hand for scale. And, er, a scale bar for scale:

And let’s pull the interesting bits out of the background:

Now, confession time. When I first saw this specimen, I interpeted it as-is, right-side up. The round thing in the middle with the honeycomb of internal spaces is obviously the condyle of a vertebra, and the bits sticking out above and below on the sides frame a cervical rib loop. I figured the rounded bit at the upper right was the ramus of bone heading for the prezyg, curved over as I’ve seen it in some taxa, including the YPM Barosaurus. And the two bits below the centrum would then be the cervical ribs. And with such big cervical rib loops and massive, low-hanging cervical ribs, it had to an apatosaurine, either Apatosaurus or Brontosaurus.

Then I got my own personal Cope-getting-Elasmosaurus-backwards moment, courtesy of my friend and fellow field adventurer, Brian Engh, who proposed this:

Gotta say, this makes a lot more sense. For one, the cervical ribs would be lateral to the prezygs, just as in, oh, pretty much all sauropods. And the oddly flat inward-tilted surfaces on what are now the more dorsal bones makes sense: they’re either prezyg facets, or the flat parts of the rami right behind the prezyg facets. The missing thing on what is now the right even makes sense: it’s the other cervical rib, still buried in a projecting bit of sandstone. That made no sense with the vert the other way ’round, because prezygs always stick out farther in front than do the cervical ribs. And we know that we’re looking at the vert from the front, otherwise the backwards-projecting cervical rib would be sticking through that lump of sandstone, coming out of the plane of the photo toward us.

Here’s what I now think is going on:

I’m still convinced that the bits of bone on what is now the left side of the image are framing a cervical rib loop. And as we discussed in the last post, the only Morrison sauropods with such widely-set cervical ribs are Camarasaurus and the apatosaurines. So what makes this an apatosaurine rather than a camarasaur? I find several persuasive clues:

  • If we have this thing the right way up, those prezygs are waaay up above the condyle, at a proportional distance I’ve only seen in diplodocids. See, for example, this famous cervical from CM 3018, the holotype of A. louisae (link).
  • The complexity of the pneumatic honeycombing inside the condyle is a much better fit for an apatosaurine than for Camarasaurus–I’ve never seen that level of complexity in a camarasaur vert.
  • The bump on what we’re now interpreting as the cervical rib looks suspiciously like one of the ventrolateral processes that Kent Sanders and I identified in apatosaurine cervicals back in our 2002 paper. I’ve never seen them, or seen them reported, in Camarasaurus–and I’ve been looking.
  • Crucially, the zygs are not set very far forward of the cervical ribs. By some rare chance, this is pretty darned close to a pure transverse cut, and the prezygs, condyle (at its posterior extent, anyway), and the one visible cervical rib are all in roughly the same plane. In Camarasaurus, the zygs strongly overhang the front end of the centrum in the cervicals (see this and this).

But wait–aren’t the cervical ribs awfully high for this to be an apatosaurine? We-ell, not necessarily. This isn’t a very big vert; max centrum width here is 175mm, only about a third the diameter of a mid-cervical from something like CM 3018. So possibly this is from the front of the neck, around the C3 or C4 position, where the cervical ribs are wide but not yet very deep. You can see something similar in this C2-C5 series on display at BYU:

Or, maybe it’s just one of the weird apatosaurine verts that has cervical rib loops that are wide, but not very deep. Check out this lumpen atrocity at Dinosaur Journey–and more importantly, the apatosaur cervical he’s freaking out over:

UPDATE just a few minutes later: Mike reminded me in the comments about the Tokyo apatosaurine, NSMT-PV 20375, which has wide-but-not-deep cervical ribs. In fact, C7 (the vertebra on the right in this figure) is a pretty good match for the Salt Wash specimen:

UpchurchEtAl2005-apatosaurus-plate2-C3-6-7

NSMT-PV 20375, cervical vertebrae 3, 6 and 7 in anterior and posterior views. Modified from Upchurch et al. (2005: plate 2).

UPDATE the 2nd: After looking at it for a few minutes, I decided that C7 of the Tokyo apatosaurine was such a good match for the Salt Wash specimen that I wanted to know what it would look like if it was similarly sectioned by erosion. In the Salt Wash specimen, the prezygs are sticking out a little farther than the condyle and cervical rib sections. The red line in this figure is my best attempt at mimicking that erosional surface on the Tokyo C7, and the black outlines on the right are my best guess as to what would be exposed by such a cut (or pair of cuts). I’ve never seen NSMT-PV 20375 in person, so this is just an estimate, but I don’t think it can be too inaccurate, and it is a pretty good match for the Salt Wash specimen.

Another way to put it: if this is an apatosaurine, everything fits. Even the wide-but-not-low-hanging cervical ribs are reasonable in light of some other apatosaurines. If we think this is Camarasaurus just because the cervical ribs aren’t low-hanging, then the pneumatic complexity, the height of the prezygs, and the ventrolateral process on the cervical rib are all anomalous. The balance of the evidence says that this is an apatosaurine, either a small, anterior vert from a big one, or possibly something farther back from a small one. And that’s pretty satisfying.

One more thing: can we take a moment to stand in awe of this freaking thumb-sized cobble that presumably got inside the vertebra through one its pneumatic foramina and rattled around until it got up inside the condyle? Where, I’ll note, the internal structure looks pretty intact despite being filled with just, like, gravel. As someone who spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about how pneumatic vertebrae get buried and fossilized, I am blown away by this. Gaze upon its majesty, people!

This is another “Road to Jurassic Reimagined, Part 2″ post. As before, Part 1 is here, Part 2 will be going up here in the near future. As always, stay tuned.

References

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in #JurassicReimagined, Apatosaurus, Brontosaurus, BYU Museum of Paleontology, cervical, cervical ribs, cross sections, Dinosaur Journey Museum of Western Colorado, diplodocids, field photos, hands used as scale bars, I'm stupid, Morrison Formation, museums, stinkin' appendicular elements, stinkin' mammals, stinkin' SV-POW!sketeers
8 Comments »

The Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus project is now a museum exhibit

November 16, 2019

A life-size silhouette of the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus, with Thierra Nalley, me, and Jessie Atterholt for scale. Photo by Jeremiah Scott.

Tiny Titan, a temporary exhibit about the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus project, opened at the Western Science Center in Hemet, California, last night. How? Why? Read on.

Things have been quieter this year on the Haplo front than they were in 2018, for many reasons. My attention was pulled away by a lot of teaching and other day-job work–we’re launching a new curriculum at the med school, and that’s eaten an immense amount of time–and by some very exciting news from the field that I can’t tell you about quite yet (but watch this space). Things are still moving, and there will be a paper redescribing MWC 8028 and all the weird and cool things we’ve learned about it, but there are a few more timely things ahead of it in the queue.

One of the things going on behind the scenes this year is that Jessie Atterholt, Thierra Nalley, and I have been working with Alton Dooley, the director of the Western Science Center, on this exhibit. Alton has had a gleam in his eye for a long time of using the WSC’s temporary exhibit space to promote the work of local scientists, and we had the honor of being his first example. He also was not fazed by the fact that the project isn’t done–he wants to show the public the process of science in all of its serendipitous and non-linear glory, and not just the polished results that get communicated at the end.

Everything’s better cut in half. Photo by Jessie Atterholt.

Which is not to say that the exhibit isn’t polished. On the contrary, it looks phenomenal. Thanks to a loan from Julia McHugh at Dinosaur Journey in Colorado, most of the real fossils are on display. We’re only missing the ribs and most of the sacrum, which is too fragmentary and fragile to come out of its jacket. As you can see from the photo up top, there is a life-size vinyl silhouette of the Snowmass Haplo, with 3D prints of the vertebrae in approximate life position. Other 3D prints show the vertebrae before and after the process of sculpting, rescanning, and retrodeformation, as described in our presentation for the 1st Palaeontological Virtual Congress last year (that slideshow is a PeerJ Preprint, here). The exhibit also includes panels on “What is Haplocanthosaurus” and its relationships, on pneumaticity in sauropods, on the process of CT scanning and 3D modeling, and on the unusual anatomical features of the Snowmass specimen. The awesome display shown above, with the possibly-bumpy spinal cord and giant intervertebral discs reconstructed, was all Alton–he did the modeling, printing, and assembly himself.

Haplo vs Bronto. Thierra usually works on the evolution and development of the vertebral column in primates, so I had to show her how awesome vertebrae can be when they’re done right. Photo by Brittney Stoneburg.

My favorite thing in the exhibit is this striking comparison of one the Snowmass Haplo caudals with a proximal caudal from the big Oklahoma apatosaurine. This was Alton’s idea. He asked me if I had any photos of caudal vertebrae from really big sauropods that we could print at life size to compare to MWC 8028, and my mind went immediately to OMNH 1331, which is probably the second-largest-diameter vertebra of anything from all of North America (see the list here). It was also Alton’s idea to fill in the missing bits using one of Marsh’s plates of Brontosaurus excelsus from Como Bluff in Wyoming. It’s a pretty amazing display, and it turns out to have been a vehicle for discovery, too–I didn’t realize until I saw the verts side-by-side that the neural canal of the Snowmass Haplo caudal is almost as big as the neural canal from the giant apatosaurine caudal. It’s not a perfect comparison, because the OMNH fossil doesn’t preserve the neural canal, and the Como specimen isn’t that big, but proportionally, the Snowmass Haplo seems to have big honkin’ neural canals, not just at the midpoint (which we already knew), but all the way through. Looks like I have some measuring and comparing to do.

(Oh, about the title: we don’t know if the Snowmass Haplo was fully grown or not, but not all haplocanthosaurs were small. The mounted H. delfsi in Cleveland is huge, getting into Apatosaurus and Diplodocus territory. Everything we can assess in the Snowmass Haplo is fused, for what that’s worth. We have some rib chunks and Jessie will be doing histo on them to see if we can get ontogenetic information. I’ll keep you posted.)

Brian’s new Haplocanthosaurus restoration, along with some stinkin’ mammals. Photo by Jessie Atterholt.

Brian Engh contributed a fantastic life restoration of Haplocanthosaurus pro bono, thanks to this conversation, which took place in John Foster’s and ReBecca Hunt-Foster’s dining room about a month ago:

Brian: What are you drawing?

Me: Haplocanthosaurus.

Brian: Is that for the exhibit?

Me: Yup.

Brian (intense): Dude, I will draw you a Haplocanthosaurus.

Me: I know, but you’re a pro, and pros get paid, and we didn’t include a budget for paleoart.

Brian (fired up): I’m offended that you didn’t just ask me to draw you a Haplocanthosaurus.

Then he went to the Fosters’ couch, sat down with his sketchbook, and drew a Haplocanthosaurus. Not only is it a stunning piece on display in the exhibit, there are black-and-white printouts for kids to take and color (or for adults to take to their favorite tattoo artists, just sayin’). [Obligatory: this is not how things are supposed to work. We should all support original paleoart by supporting the artists who create it. But Brian just makes so damn many monsters that occasionally he has to kick one out for the heck of it. Also, I support him on Patreon, and you can, too, so at a stretch you could consider this the mother of all backer rewards.]

One special perk from the opening last night: Jessica Bramson was able to attend. Who’s that, you ask? Jessica’s son, Mike Gordon, found the first piece of bone from the Snowmass Haplo on their property in Colorado over a decade ago. Jessica and her family spent two years uncovering the fossils and trying to get paleontologists interested. In time she got in touch with John Foster, and the rest is history. Jessica lives in California now, and thanks to John’s efforts we were able to invite her to the exhibit opening to see her dinosaur meet the world. Stupidly, I did not get any photos with her, but I did thank her profusely.

A restored, retrodeformed caudal of the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus, 3D-printed at life size for the exhibit. Photo swiped from the WSC Facebook page.

I owe a huge thanks to Alton Dooley for taking an interest in our work, and to the whole WSC crew for their hard work creating and promoting the exhibit. You all rock.

The exhibit will run through the end of March, 2020, at least. I deliberately did not show most of it, partly because I was too busy having fun last night to be diligent about taking photos, but mostly because I want you to go see it for yourself (I will do a retrospective post with more info after the exhibit comes down, for people who weren’t able to see it in person). If you make it out to Hemet, I hope you have half as much fun going through the exhibit as we did making it.

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in 3D prints, Art, Brian Engh, Brontosaurus, caudal, diplodocids, Haplocanthosaurus, museums, nervous system, neural canal, People we like, public galleries, stinkin' mammals, stinkin' SV-POW!sketeers, timely, Uncategorized, Western Science Center
16 Comments »

How our week at the Carnegie Museum went

March 17, 2019

In a word, amazingly. After 6 days (counting public galleries last Sunday), 4300 photos, 55 videos, dozens of pages of notes, and hundreds of measurements, we’re tired, happy, and buzzing with new observations and ideas.

We caught up with some old friends. Here Mike is showing an entirely normal and healthy level of excitement about meeting CM 584, a specimen of Camarasaurus from Sheep Creek, Wyoming. You may recognize this view of these dorsals from Figure 9 in our 2013 PeerJ paper.

We spent an inordinate amount of time in the public galleries, checking out the mounted skeletons of Apatosaurus and Diplodocus (and Gilmore’s baby Cam, and the two tyrannosaurs, and, and…).

I had planned a trip to the Carnegie primarily to have another look at the Haplocanthosaurus holotypes, CM 572 and CM 879. I was also happy for the chance to photograph and measure these vertebrae, CM 36034, which I think have never been formally described or referred to Haplocanthosaurus. As far as I know, other than a brief mention in McIntosh (1981) they have not been published on at all. I’m planning on changing that in the near future, as part of the larger Haplocanthosaurus project that now bestrides my career like a colossus.

The real colossus of the trip was CM 555, which we’ve already blogged about a couple of times. Just laying out all of the vertebrae and logging serial changes was hugely useful.

Incidentally, in previous posts and some upcoming videos, we’ve referred to this specimen as Brontosaurus excelsus, because McIntosh (1981) said that it might belong to Apatosaurus excelsus. I was so busy measuring and photographing stuff that it wasn’t until Friday that I realized that McIntosh made that call because CM 555 is from the same locality as CM 563, now UWGM 15556, which was long thought to be Apatosaurus excelsus but which is now (i.e., Tschopp et al. 2015) referred to Brontosaurus parvus. So CM 555 is almost certainly B. parvus, not B. excelsus, and in comparing the specimen to Gilmore’s (1936) plates of CM 563, Mike and I thought they were a very good match.

Finding the tray of CM 555 cervical ribs was a huge moment. It added a ton of work to our to-do lists. First we had to match the ribs to their vertebrae. Most of them had field numbers, but some didn’t. Quite a few were broken and needed to be repaired – that’s what I’m doing in the above photo. Then they all had to be measured and photographed.

It’s amazing how useful it was to be able to reassociate the vertebrae with their ribs. We only did the full reassembly for c6, in part because it was the most complete and perfect of all of the vertebrae, and in part because we simply ran out of time. As Mike observed in his recent post, it was stunning how the apatosaurine identity of the specimen snapped into focus as soon as we could see a whole cervical vertebra put back together with all of its bits.

We also measured and photographed the limb bones, including the bite marks on the radius (above, in two pieces) and ulna (below, one piece). Those will of course go into the description.

And there WILL BE a description. We measured and photographed every element, shot video of many of them, and took pages and pages of notes. Describing even an incomplete sauropod skeleton is a big job, so don’t expect that paper this year, but it will be along in due course. CM 555 may not be the most complete Brontosaurus skeleton in the world, but our ambition is to make it the best-documented.

In the meantime, we hopefully left things better documented than they had been. All of the separate bits of the CM 555 vertebrae – the centra, arches, and cervicals ribs – now have the cervical numbers written on in archival ink (with permission from collections manager Amy Henrici, of course), so the next person to look at them can match them up with less faffing about.

We have people to thank. We had lunch almost every day at Sushi Fuku at 120 Oakland Avenue, just a couple of blocks down Forbes Avenue from the museum. We got to know the manager, Jeremy Gest, and his staff, who were unfailingly friendly and helpful, and who kept us running on top-notch food. So we kept going back. If you find yourself in Pittsburgh, check ’em out. Make time for a sandwich at Primanti Bros., too.

We owe a huge thanks to Calder Dudgeon, who took us up to the skylight catwalk to get the dorsal-view photos of the mounted skeletons (see this post), and especially to Dan Pickering, who moved pallets in collections using the forklift, and moved the lift around the mounted skeletons on Tuesday. Despite about a million ad hoc requests, he never lost patience with us, and in fact he found lots of little ways to help us get our observations and data faster and with less hassle.

Our biggest thanks go to collections manager Amy Henrici, who made the whole week just run smoothly for us. Whatever we needed, she’d find. If we needed something moved, or if we needed to get someplace, she’d figure out how to do it. She was always interested, always cheerful, always helpful. I usually can’t sustain that level of positivity for a whole day, much less a week. So thank you, Amy, sincerely. You have a world-class collection. We’re glad it’s in such good hands.

What’s next? We’ll be posting about stuff we saw and learned in the Carnegie Museum for a long time, probably. And we have manuscripts to get cranking on, some of which were already gestating and just needed the Carnegie visit to push to completion. As always, watch this space.

References

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in Apatosaurus, Brontosaurus, camarasaurs, Carnegie Museum, caudal, cervical, cervical ribs, collections, diplodocids, Diplodocus, dorsal, Haplocanthosaurus, mounts, museums, notebook, public galleries, radius, stinkin' appendicular elements, stinkin' mammals, stinkin' SV-POW!sketeers, ulna
7 Comments »

Behold! The glory that is CM 555

March 12, 2019

Matt and I have completed Day 2 of our excursion to the Carnegie Musuem in Pittsburgh. Day 1 was spent in the public galleries, because collections aren’t open on Sunday, but today we got into the Big Bone room.

One of our targets was CM 555, a very nice nearly complete neck (C1-C14) from a subadult apatosaurine — quite possibly Brontosaurus excelsus, which is what John McIntosh catalogued it as, though I am not yet 100% convinced it’s the same thing as YPM 1980, the holotype of that species.

We were able to lay out the full sequence on the floor, on styroforam sheets, and spend quality time just looking at it and thinking about it. I don’t just mean documenting it for later analysis, but making use of that precious time right there with the physical specimen to think through together what it’s telling us. We have a bunch of new insights, which we’ll share when we’re not completely exhausted.

Here’s Matt with the first six cervicals. C1 (the atlas) is as usual an unprepossessing lump, but then things get interesting. C2 to C6 are all unfused, so the centra and neural arches are separate.

Behind C6, the arches are fused to the centra (though the fusion lines are still apparent in C7 and C8). This is a nice example of how, in sauropods, serial position recapitulates ontogeny — one of the great confounding factors when studying isolated vertebrae.

We’ve learned a lot already from CM 555. Tomorrow will be spent with the two big mounted diplodocids (Diplodocus carnegii CM 84 and Apatosaurus louisae CM 3018). We’ll let you know how it goes. I predict: awesome.

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in Brontosaurus, Carnegie Museum, cervical, necks
8 Comments »

BRONTOSMASH! in a kids’ book

February 15, 2019

Thanks to a comment from long-time reader Andrew Stuck, I realised he is also the tweeter @dinodadreviews, who pointed us to Xenoposeidon in a kids’ book. Now, a review on his website of Ted Rechlin‘s comic-book Jurassic has pointed me to what I think is the first depiction of the BRONTOSMASH! hypothesis in a kids’ book:

This is nice work: it captures the mass of the animals, and resists the nearly ubiquitous tendency to make their necks too slender and elegant. The necks do look rather too short here, but I think we can explain that away as perspective foreshortening.

You’d have to say, though, that it owes more than a little inspiration to the third of Brian Engh’s early sketches:

I suppose there are only a certain number of ways to draw two apatosaurs fighting.

Anyway, it’s great to see what we consider a solidly supported palaeobiological hypothesis out there influencing young hearts and minds. We should also take this as a well-deserved prod to get on with the actual paper, which after all was meant to follow hard on the heels of our 2015 SVPCA presentation.

By the way, folks: the spelling and punctuation is “BRONTOSMASH!”. Not “Brontosmash”, not “BRONTOSMASH”: all in capitals, with an exclamation mark. It’s “the BRONTOSMASH! hypothesis”.

 

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in #Brontosmash, Art, Brontosaurus, necks
8 Comments »
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