How did the horrible Yale “Brontosaurus” skull come to be?
November 14, 2014
A while back, Ben Miller reminded me that when I posted about the old Yale “Brontosaurus” skull, I promised:
So how did the YPM come to make such a monstrosity? What was it based on? Tune in next time for the surprising details!
I told him at the time that I’d soon get around to writing a post. But before I did, he wrote a post on this himself: Bully for Camarasaurus. And it’s excellent. Go and read it!
I don’t have a lot to add to what Ben has written, except regarding this:
What Marsh had instead [when restoring the skull for his 1891 “Brontosaurus” reconstruction] were a few fragmentary bits of Camarasaurus cranial material, plus a snout and jaw (USNM 5730) now considered to be Brachiosaurus.
Here’s what Marsh came up with:
But what of the supposed Brachiosaurus skull that he used as a reference? It was finally described 107 years later by Carpenter and Tidwell (1998), in a paper that helpfully also lays out the history behind it. Here’s how it looks:
The skull was found by a crew under the supervision of M. P. Felch in the western part of his Quarry 1, Garden Park, Colorado. Felch reported it to O. C. Marsh in a letter of 8 September 1883. It was found by a meter-long cervical vertebra that probably belonged to Brachiosaurus “which was destroyed during attempts to collect it” (McIntosh and Berman 1975:196). [Of course, Felch and Marsh could hardly have been expected to identify this vertebra correctly, as Brachiosaurus would not be discovered and named for another twenty years (Riggs 1903), and the nature of its neck would not become apparent until Janensch (1914) described the related brachiosaurid Giraffatitan (= “Brachiosaurus“) brancai.]
The Felch skull, along with other material from the quarry, was shipped to Marsh at Yale in October of that year, and was initially assigned the specimen number YPM 1986. At that time it was only partially prepared, hence the rather poor resemblance between the restored version above and Marsh’s hypothetical “Brontosaurus” [= Apatosaurus] skull that was based on it.
It’s notable that Holland (1915) was quite certain that this was not a skull of Brontosaurus, and that a Diplodocus-like skull found with the A. louisae holotype belonged to it. It’s worth reading the skull section of his paper to see just how solid his reasoning was. And it’s extraordinary to think that Osborn’s power, all the way over in New York, was so great that he was able to successfully bully Holland, 370 miles away in Pittsburgh, into not putting the evidently correct skull on the Carnegie Museum’s Apatosaurus mount. That mount remained sadly headless until after Holland’s death.
Aaanyway, YPM 1986 was pretty much ignored after Marsh’s abuse of it as a reference for the Brontosaurus reconstruction’s skull. After Marsh’s death in 1899, much of the material collected by Felch was transferred to the Smithsonian (US National Museum of Natural History). The skull was among these specimens, and so was re-catalogued as USNM 5730.
As so often, it was Jack McIntosh who rediscovered this skull and recognised its true affinities. Some time after his tentative identification of the skull as pertaining to Brachiosaurus (presumably on the basis of its resemblance to that of Giraffatitan), Carpenter borrowed the skull, had it more fully prepared, wrote the description, and had a restored model constructed from casts of the preserved elements and models of the missing ones.
Carpenter and Tidwell (1998:fig. 2) also handily showed the restored Felch quarry skull alongside those of other sauropods:
By re-ordering the top row, we can see what a neat intermediate it is between the skulls of Camarasaurus (left) and Giraffatitan (= “Brachiosaurus” of their usage):
I provisionally accepted USNM 5730 as belonging to Brachiosaurus in my re-evaluation of 2009, and included it in my reconstruction (Taylor 2009:fig. 7):
Taylor (2007: figure 7). Skeletal reconstruction of Brachiosaurus altithorax. White bones represent the elements of the holotype FMNH P 25107. Light grey bones represent material referred to B. altithorax: the Felch Quarry skull USNM 5730, the cervical vertebrae BYU 12866 (C?5) and BYU 12867 (C?10), the “Ultrasauros” scapulocoracoid BYU 9462, the Potter Creek left humerus USNM 21903, left radius and right metacarpal III BYU 4744, and the left metacarpal II OMNH 01138. Dark grey bones modified from Paul’s (1988) reconstruction of Giraffatitan brancai. Scale bar equals 2 m.
But as noted by Carpenter and Tidwell (1998:82), the lack of comparable parts between the Felch skull and the Brachiosaurus holotype (which remains the only definitive Brachiosaurus material) means that the assignment has to remain tentative.
What we really need is a more complete Brachiosaurus specimen: one with both a skull and good postcervical elements that let us refer it definitively to Brachiosaurus altithorax by comparison with the holotype. And heck, while we’re at it, let’s have a specimen with a good neck, too!
The real question remains: how did Marsh, using a brachiosaur skull as his basis, come up with this?
And stranger still, how someone at the Yale Peabody Museum — we don’t know who — used it, or more likely Marsh’s reconstruction, as a basis for this sculpture:
The Yale mount didn’t go up until 1931 — the last of the Big Four Apatosaurus mounts after the AMNH, Carnegie and Field Museum, which is surprising as it was the first of those specimens to be found. So by the time the skull was sculpted, sauropod skulls were actually reasonably well known. It’s not clear quite how anyone working from a decent reconstruction of, say, a Camarasaurus skull — the one in Osborn and Mook (1921:figure 30), say — could come up with this monster.
The last thing to say is this: it does credit to the YPM that they display this historically important sculpture rather than hiding it away and pretending it never happened. For me, part of the fascination of palaeontology is seeing not just how organisms evolved through prehistory but how ideas evolved through history. It’s great that we can still see important mistakes, alongside their corrections (i.e. the new and lovely skull on the YPM Apatosaurus mount.)
References
- Carpenter, Kenneth, and Virginia Tidwell. 1998. Preliminary description of a Brachiosaurus skull from Felch Quarry 1, Garden Park, Colorado. Modern Geology 23:69-84.
- Holland, William J. 1915. Heads and tails: a few notes relating to the structure of the sauropod dinosaurs. Annals of the Carnegie Museum 9:273-278.
- Janensch, Werner. 1914. Ubersicht uber der Wirbeltierfauna der Tendaguru-Schichten nebst einer kurzen Charakterisierung der neu aufgefuhrten Arten von Sauropoden. Archiv fur Biontologie, Berlin III, 1(1):81-110.
- Marsh, O. C. 1891. Restoration of Triceratops (with plates XV and XVI). American Journal of Science, 3rd series 41(244):339-342.
- McIntosh, John S., and David, S. Berman. 1975. Description of the palate and lower jaw of the sauropod dinosaur Diplodocus (Reptilia: Saurischia) with remarks on the nature of the skull of Apatosaurus. Journal of Paleontology 49(1):187-199.
- Osborn, Henry Fairfield, and Charles C. Mook. 1921. Camarasaurus, Amphicoelias and other sauropods of Cope. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, n.s. 3:247-387, and plates LX-LXXXV.
- Riggs, Elmer S. 1903. Brachiosaurus altithorax, the largest known dinosaur. American Journal of Science 15(4):299-306.
- Taylor, Michael P. 2009. A re-evaluation of Brachiosaurus altithorax Riggs 1903 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) and its generic separation from Giraffatitan brancai (Janensch 1914). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29(3):787-806.
Horrible sauropod skulls of the Yale Peabody Museum, part 2: Brontosaurus; and no, I do not mean Apatosaurus
April 15, 2014
How can it be?
All credit to the Yale Peabody Museum for having the courage to display this historically important object in their public gallery instead of hiding it in a basement. It’s the skull from the original mount of the Brontosaurus (= Apatosaurus) excelsus holotype YPM 1980.
Needless to say, it bears no resemblance at all to the actual skull of Apatosaurus, and the one they now have on the mount is much, much better:
But how did the YPM people ever arrive at this double-plus-ugly skull above? We see a similar skull in Marsh’s (1891) second attempt at restoring the skeleton of Brontosaurus:
But even this is not as ugly and Just Plain Wrong as the physical model they made. (Marsh’s first restoration of the Brontosaurus skeleton, in 1893, had a much less clear skull.)
So how did the YPM come to make such a monstrosity? What was it based on? Tune in next time for the surprising details!
Bizarrely, we’ve never really featured the YPM 1980 mount here on SV-POW! — we’ve often shown individual bones, but the mounted skeleton appears only in the background of the much less impressive Morosaurus (= Camarasaurus) lentus mount. We’ll fix that real soon.
“Look at all the things you’ve done for me
Opened up my eyes,
Taught me how to see,
Notice every tree.”
So sings Dot in Move On, the climactic number of Stephen Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize-winning music Sunday in the Park with George, which on the surface is about the post-impressionist painter Georges Seurat, but turns out to be a study of obsession and creativity.
Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte – 1884 [A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte – 1884]
In fact, the psychology of perception is complicated and sophisticated, and the brain does an extraordinary amount of filtering of the visual signals we get, to save us the bother of having to consciously process way too much data. This is a whole scientific field of its own, and I’m going to avoid saying very much about it for fear of making a fool of myself — as scientists so often do when wandering outside their own field. But I think it’s fair to say that we all have a tendency to see what we expect to see.
Phylogeny of Sauropoda, strict consensus of most parsimonious trees according to Wilson (2002:fig. 13a)
In the case of sauropods, this tendency has meant that we’ve all been startlingly bad at seeing pneumaticity in the caudal vertebrae of sauropods. Because the literature has trained us to assume it’s not there. For example, in the two competing sauropod phylogenies that dominated the 2000s, both Wilson (2002) and Upchurch et al. (2004) scored caudal pneumaticity as very rare: Wilson’s character 119, “Anterior caudal centra, pneumatopores (pleurocoels)”, was scored 1 only for Diplodocus and Barosaurus; and Upchurch et al. (2004:286) wrote that “A few taxa (Barosaurus, Diplodocus, and Neuquensaurus) have pleurocoel-like openings in the lateral surfaces of the cranial [caudal] centra that lead into complex internal chambers”. That’s all.
And that’s part of the reason that every year since World War II, a million people have walked right past the awesome mounted brachiosaur in the Museum Für Naturkunde Berlin without noticing that it has pneumatic caudals. After all, we all knew that brachiosaur caudals were apneumatic.
But in my 2005 Progressive Palaeontology talk about upper limits on the mass of land animals estimated through the articular area of limb-bone cartilage, I included this slide that shows how much bigger the acetabulum of Giraffatitan is than the femoral head that it houses:
And looking at that picture made me wonder: those dark areas on the sides of the first few caudals (other than the first, which is a very obvious plaster model) certainly look pneumatic.
Then a few years later, I was invited to give a talk at the Museum Für Naturkunde Berlin itself, on the subject “Brachiosaurus brancai is not Brachiosaurus“. (This of course was drawn from the work that became my subsequent paper on that subject, Taylor 2009) And as I was going through my photos to prepare the slides of that talk, I thought to myself: darn it, yes, it does have pneumatic caudals!
So I threw this slide into the talk, just in passing:
Those photos were pretty persuasive; and a closer examination of the specimen on that same trip was to prove conclusive.
Meanwhile …
Earlier in 2009, I’d been in Providence, Rhode Island, with my Index Data colleagues. I’d managed to carve a day out of the schedule to hop along the coast to the Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven, Connecticut. My main goal was to examine the cervicals of the mounted Apatosaurus (= “Brontosaurus“) excelsus holotype (although it was also on that same trip that I first saw the Barosaurus holotype material that we’ve subsequently published a preprint on).
The Brontosaurus cervicals turned out to be useless, being completely encased in plaster “improvements” so that you can’t tell what’s real and what’s not. hopefully one day they’ll get the funding they want to take that baby down off its scaffold and re-prep the material.
But since I had the privilege of spending quality time with such an iconic specimen, it would have been churlish not to look at the rest of it. And lo and behold, what did I see when I looked at the tail but more pneumaticity that we thought we knew wasn’t there!
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. (Wedel and Taylor 2013b: Figure 10).
What does this mean? Do other Giraffatitan and Apatosaurus specimens have pneumatic tails? How pervasive is the pneumaticity? What are the palaeobiological implications?
Stay tuned! All will be revealed in Matt’s next post (or, if you can’t wait, in our recent PLOS ONE paper, Wedel and Taylor 2013b)!
References
- Taylor, Michael P. 2009. A re-evaluation of Brachiosaurus altithorax Riggs 1903 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) and its generic separation from Giraffatitan brancai (Janensch 1914). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29(3):787-806.
- Upchurch, Paul, Paul M. Barrett and Peter Dodson. 2004. Sauropoda. pp. 259-322 in D. B. Weishampel, P. Dodson and H. Osmólska (eds.), The Dinosauria, 2nd edition. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles. 861 pp.
- Wedel, Mathew J., and Michael P. Taylor. 2013. Caudal pneumaticity and pneumatic hiatuses in the sauropod dinosaurs Giraffatitan and Apatosaurus. PLOS ONE 8(10):e78213. 14 pages. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0078213
- Wilson, J.A. 2002. Sauropod dinosaur phylogeny: critique and cladistic analysis. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 136:217-276.
Citing artwork in academic papers
August 13, 2013
In a paper for which we’re currently handling the revisions, I and Matt cite several pieces of artwork, including Knight’s classic Brontosaurus and Burian’s snorkelling Brachiosaurus.
All we have for the references are:
- Knight CR (1897) Restoration of Brontosaurus.
- Burian Z (1941) Snorkelling Brachiosaurus.
But a reviewer asked us:
Please edit the reference list with additional information, e.g.: “on the NE wall of the AMNH Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs” or whatever is appropriate for [these references].
I don’t really have any idea what the right way is to cite artwork — does anyone?
And does anyone have the necessary information? We all know that Zallinger’s “Age of Reptiles” mural is on the wall of the YPM dinosaur hall, but where are the originals of the Knight Brontosaurus and the Burian Brachiosaurus?
Help!
I don’t have time to write about this properly, but a few people have asked me about the new Sellers et al. (2012) paper on measuring the masses of extinct animals — in particular, the Berlin Giraffatitan — by having a CAD program generate minimal complex hulls around various body regions. Rather than write something new about it, I’m going to publish the comments that I sent Ed Yong for his Discover piece on the new technique:
Hi, Ed, good to hear from you. Yes, it’s a good paper: a useful new technique that has some useful properties, most importantly that it requires no irreproducible judgements on the part of the person using it, and that it’s ground-truthed on solid data from extant animals.
It’s a reassuring sanity-check to find that my (2009) mass estimate falls well within their method’s 95% confidence interval, and is in fact within 0.6% of their best estimate.
There are a couple of problems with this study, which I hope will be addressed in followups. The authors are honest enough to touch on all of these problems themselves, though! They are:
1. All the extant animals used to determine the fudge factor are mammals, which means they are not necessarily completely relevant to dinosaurs. In particular I would very much like to have seen regression lines and correlation coefficients for this method for birds and crocodilians, both of which are much more closely related to Giraffatitan.
2. Much depends on the reconstruction of the torso, particular the position of the ribs, which is very difficult to do well and confidently with dinosaurs. In my volumetric analysis (Taylor 2009:803) I found that the torso accounts for 70% of total body volume in Giraffatitan, so rib orientation will make a big difference to overall mass. Sauropod ribs that are well preserved and undistorted along their whole length are extremely rare.
3. Use of a single density value for the whole animal, while appropriate for mammals, really isn’t for brachiosaurs, in which the very long neck likely had a density no more than half that of the legs. I’m not sure what can be done about this, though, since any attempt to correct for density variation involves subjective guesswork. Then again, so do all guesses at overall body density in dinosaurs.
Issue 1 bothers me most, because the convex hulls of limb segments in mammals will be proportionally much larger than in sauropods, due to the complex shapes of mammalian long-bone ends. I worry that using mammals as a baseline will underestimate sauropod leg mass.
Still, even with these caveats, it’s a good exposition of an important new method which I expect to see widely adopted.
Hope that’s helpful.
In short: good work, widely applicable, and probably the best mass-estimation technique we now have available for complete and near-complete skeletons. It would be good to see it applied to (say) the Yale, AMNH and CM apatosaurs.
Composite illustration from Sellers et al.’s press release. Top left: bear skeleton from the Oxford University Natural History Museum, presumably Ursus maritimus: original skeleton, derived point cloud and convex hulls (also used as Sellers et al. 2012:fig. 1). Top right: shedloads of awesome. Bottom: complex hulls around body segments of Giraffatitan.
References
169 years of sauropod research in 26 pages
October 11, 2010
You may remember that when I wrote about Amphicoelias diplobrontobarowassea the other day, I rather ungraciously complained that “I don’t want to talk about that. There are other things I do want to talk about”. Well, with A. suuwatorneriosaurodocus now firmly dealt with, I can talk about what I wanted to — which is Taylor (2010), a little number that I like to call Sauropod dinosaur research: a historical review. You can download the PDF from my website (more on that subject next time) and get the high-resolution versions of the figures separately if you wish.
Taylor 2010:fig. 3. Early reconstructions of Camarasaurus. Top: Ryder’s 1877 reconstruction, the first ever made of any sauropod, modified from Osborn & Mook (1921, plate LXXXII). Bottom: Osborn & Mook’s own reconstruction. modified from Osborn & Mook (1921, plate LXXXIV).
It’s a comprehensive history of research into sauropod dinosaurs, starting in 1831 with the genera Cardiodon and Cetiosaurus, and bringing us right up to 2008 (which is when the paper was accepted — see below). I cover this history in five stages:
- Stage 1: early studies, isolated elements (1841-1870)
- Stage 2: the emerging picture (1871-1896)
- Stage 3: interpretation and controversy (1897-1944)
- Stage 4: the dark ages (1945-1967)
- Stage 5: the modern renaissance (1968-present)
You could say the the main part of the story begins with Phillips’s (1871) description of Cetiosaurus oxoniensis, the first reasonably complete sauropod, and really kicks into gear with the Marsh-Cope bone wars, but there are plenty of twists and turns between then and now, including — finally — the publication of the table of brachiosaur mass-estimates that I alluded to back in Xenoposeidon week. [Executive summary: published estimates for the single individual HMN SII have varied by a factor of 5.75. Wow.]
History of the history paper
This paper had its genesis in the one-day conference convened at the Geological Society of London on 6 May 2008. [Announcement on Tetrapod Zoology; Tet Zoo report part 1 and part 2]. The extended abstract of my talk has been on my web-site for a long time, and was included in the rather handsome abstracts volume of the conference — which has now been superseded by the proceedings volume containing the full-length papers of which mine is one.
We’d been told to prepare 30-minute talks — a much heftier slot than the 20 minutes we get at SVPCA (or indeed the 15 allowed at SVP, though I wouldn’t know what that’s like as I have never, ever managed to get a talk accepted there). I tend to move very quickly through my talks anyway, so I prepared a monster presentation of 76 slides (plus another 11 that I had to cut from the talk, but which I left hanging around at the end of the slideshow). By the way, this is the very talk that my wife, Fiona, fell asleep in the middle of while I was rehearsing it at her.
So I’d prepared a thirty-minute talk that used every second of every minute. Then on the day of the conference itself, they handed out the schedules, and … the talks were down to twenty-five minutes. Arrrgh! I had absolutely no fat to trim in my thirty minutes, so all I could do was talk even faster, and keep going when I reached the 25-minute mark.
Me giving my sauropod-history talk on 6 May 2008 with, apparently, only Eric Buffetaut in the audience. (It was better attended that it seems from this picture!) Photograph by Luis Rey.
So there I was, talking about how Russell and Zheng (1993) pioneered the use of cladistics in sauropod systematics, when the session moderator — our very own Darren Naish — started trying to wave me off the podium. By the time I was talking about Sander’s (2000) work on the long-bone histology of Tendaguru-Formation sauropods, Darren was edging on to the stage, trying to bring my talk to an end by making moves for the microphone, while I was talking faster and faster in manner more than a little reminiscent of Monty Python’s microphone-stealing sketch.
Poor Darren. I actually don’t quite recall how things ended up, but as far as I know I got through all my slides before being persuaded to retire, and here for your edification is the Conclusions slide.
Anyway, with the conference over, all of us who’d given talks were invited to contribute papers to a proceedings volume, and that’s what’s just come out. (According to the Geological Society’s own page, the book won’t be available to buy until 19 November, but all the PDFs are available to download to those who have the relevant access rights.)
Is my paper worth reading? For seasoned palaeontologists, much of what I cover is going to be familiar ground, though I hope most people will find one or two nuggets of interesting new information in there. But perhaps it will be most useful as a primer for people new to the field, or first approaching sauropods having previously worked on other groups.
Edited volumes vs. journals
You know how some with papers, you submit them, they go through review and then … nothing? I’ve heard horror stories of papers that have been in press for ten years or more, and I am relieved to say that I’ve never experienced that kind of delay. But the reviewed, revised and resubmitted version of my sauropod-history manuscript was accepted and in press as of January 2009, so this has been the best part of two years coming.
I think this is pretty much standard for edited volumes, because they are basically stalled until all the contributing authors have got their jobs done. To be fair to the Geological Society, who were the publishers in this case, I think they’ve done a nice job on the layout, and they got all my proof corrections done. But still: nearly two years in press is a looong time. And the end result is that the paper is in a book that most people will consider very expensive — $190 at amazon.com, £95 at amazon.co.uk — which means that fewer people will read it than I would like. (I will talk more about the price in a subsequent post.)
So would I do it again? This paper is my first contribution to an edited volume, and although I’m pleased to have done it this time, I think it will take a particularly special opportunity for me to do it again: a book that I wouldn’t want not to be in, such as another of the all-sauropods-all-the-time volumes that glutted our shelves in the glorious year of 2005.
Taylor 2010:fig. 6. Two classic sauropod paintings by Knight. Left: swamp-bound ‘Brontosaurus’ (now Apatosaurus), painted in 1897, with static terrestrial Diplodocus in background. Right: athletic Diplodocus, painted in 1907.
Journals are fundamentally wired to move faster: they handle manuscripts on an individual basis, then push out a volume according to a schedule, and your work goes in as soon as there’s a free slot. That can hardly help but be a more efficient model than the edited-volume approach where, however efficiently I get my work done, it can’t be published until 21 other authors have done theirs.
For a much more distressing example, consider my two remaining in-press manuscripts, those defining the clades Sauropoda and Sauropodomorpha for the PhyloCode companion volume. (These are multiple-author works, as we wanted to represent a consensus view among multiple sauropod/sauropodomorph workers.)
I was first invited to put together the Sauropoda entry on 5 March 2007, and told to send it “at your earliest convenience”. I’d put together an initial draft by 11 March, which I circulated to all the co-authors on that date. Because of the wording of the invitation, I told the co-authors that “timelines are very tight for this work — I really need to get a submission back to the editors within a week or so. So if you’re in a position to contribute, I’d appreciate it if you could do so as soon as possible.” Then on 12 March, we were invited to contribute the Sauropodomorpha entry as well, so we worked on both of these in parallel.
All five authors worked hard and quickly on multiple drafts of both of these entries, and we bashed our way through real — though polite — disagreements about the most appropriate definitions to use. (I’ll say right now that it was a pleasure to work with all the co-authors, and I would be delighted to work with any of them again if the opportunity arose.) Because of the difficulties of co-ordinating the work across three continents, it took a little longer than we’d hoped to get the manuscripts finished and polished, but we submitted them both on 17 April, 43 days after the initial invitation was issued.
And now here we are, three and a half years later, and nothing has happened. For all I know, the authors haven’t even all submitted their manuscripts yet — I know they hadn’t a year ago, we can only hope that another twelve months has been long enough for them to get their fingers out.
Really. It makes you want to weep.
Taylor 2010:fig. 1. Historically significant isolated sauropod elements. (a) The holotype tooth of Cardiodon in labial and distal views, modified from Owen (1875a, plate IX, figs 2 and 3); (b) anterior caudal vertebra of Cetiosaurus brevis in anterior view, part of the holotype, photograph by the author; (c) holotype right humerus of Pelorosaurus in anterior view, modified from Mantell (1850, plate XXI, fig. 1b); and (d) lectotype dorsal vertebra of Ornithopsis (see Blows 1995, p. 188) in anterior view, exposing pneumatic cavities owing to erosion of the anterior articular surface, modified from Owen (1875a, plate IX, fig. 1). The scale bar is 5 cm for (a), 10 cm for (b) and (d), and 30 cm for (c).
And now, on to a happier thought:
My dissertation is 60% published!
I was very taken with Andy Farke’s recent post Crossing the Finish Line for the Dissertation on his fine blog, The Open Source Paleontologist. In it, he celebrates the fact that all the chapters of his dissertation have now been published as peer-reviewed papers. As I said in a comment, I like the perspective that you’re not really done with your dissertation until you’ve made it redundant. I’ve heard too many tales about people who sit on their dissertations for years, always meaning to publish the chapters but never quite getting around to it, until they were obsolete.
So my goal is to avoid that fate. Instead, in emulation of Andy, I want to get all five of my chapters out there in the world as soon as possible. So here’s the score:
- Chapter 1. Sauropod dinosaur research: a historical review — published in the Geological Society special volume.
- Chapter 2. A re-evaluation of Brachiosaurus altithorax Riggs 1903 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) and its generic separation from Giraffatitan brancai (Janensch 1914) — published in JVP.
- Chapter 3. An unusual new neosauropod dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Hastings Beds Group of East Sussex, England — published in Palaeontology
- Chapter 4. A new sauropod dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Cedar Mountain Formation, Utah, U.S.A. — in review at a journal that, once revisions are submitted, tends to get papers out pretty quickly.
- Chapter 5. Vertebral morphology and the evolution of long necks in sauropod dinosaurs — in revision after having been rejected for what I frankly thought were specious reasons, but let’s not get into that.
With a trailing wind, I could conceivably be finished by the end of the calendar year. But realistically that would have to classified as a optimistic schedule.
Ah well. Onward and upward.
References
- Phillips, J. 1871. Geology of Oxford and the Valley of the Thames. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
- Russell, Dale A., and Zheng, Zhong. 1993. A large mamenchisaurid from the Junggar Basin, Xinjiang, China. Canadian Journal of Earth Science 30(10/11): 2082-2095.
- Sander, P. Martin. 2000. Longbone histology of the Tendaguru sauropods: implications for growth and biology. Paleobiology 26(3): 466-488.
- Taylor, Michael P. 2010. Sauropod dinosaur research: a historical review. pp. 361-386 in: Richard T. J. Moody, Eric Buffetaut, Darren Naish and David M. Martill (eds.), Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: a Historical Perspective. Geological Society of London, Special Publication 343. doi: 10.1144/SP343.22
—
Taylor, M. (2010). Sauropod dinosaur research: a historical review Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 343 (1), 361-386 DOI: 10.1144/SP343.22
Off-topic: Get down, get fuzzy, Tianyulong!
March 19, 2009
That clanking sound you just heard was pretty much the entire field of paleontology evolutionary biology wired humanity dropping a solid gold brick: Tianyulong, a basal ornithischian from (where else?) China, has been found with dino-fuzz (Zheng et al. 2009). Not exactly protofeathers, but pretty darn similar. And if they’re in theropods and ornithischians, they were probably primitive for Dinosauria (at least; comparisons of these integumentary structures to pterosaur ‘hair’ are probably coming). It’s certainly possible that the common ancestor of Ornithodira (the pterosaurs+dinosaurs clade, which encompasses most non-croc-line archosaurs) was fuzzy.
(So much for the “fact” that we “know” that small dinosaurs couldn’t have been endotherms because of their naked skin–see, e.g., pretty much everything ever written by Feduccia, Ruben, and the rest of the BANDits [Birds Are Not Dinosaurs cultists]).
The holotype of Tianyulong (Zheng et al. 2009:fig. 1a)
It’s true that we have skin impressions from many dinosaurs that show scaly skin, so if dino-fuzz was primitive for dinosaurs it must have been lost, or had a restricted distribution on the body (like a midline crest), or been ontogenetically transient (possibly present only in babies) in many taxa. If there were any shaggy sauropod skin impressions out there, we’d really, RE-hee-huh-HEEELLY like to know. So far, zip. Even the skin impressions from the Argentinian sauropod embryos show bare, scaly skin (Chiappe et al. 1998).
Still, those skin patches don’t cover the entire embryo. We can’t rule out some fuzz even in the Argentinian embryos, and except for a scrap of bone shard of excellence here and there (Britt and Naylor 1994), sauropod embryos and their skin are otherwise ridiculously unknown to our planet. So we can dream, for a while longer anyway. Back in 1994, Greg Paul drew a hatchling sauropod with dino-fuzz (Paul 1994:fig. 15.3, above), and we’re bringing it back in honor of Tianyulong.
Here’s your obligatory sauropod vert shot for this post. Tremble as the ancient, bloated hulk looms out of the mists of deathless time, like an ageworn stone idol or some eldritch Lovecraftian horror!
Oh, and behind Mike you can just make out the AMNH Brontosaurus (yeah, we know, we’d like to bring that back, too).
UPDATE: MARCH 19
James O’Donoghue wrote a piece for New Scientist on sauropod gigantism, which you can read for free here. He kindly cited my work on air sacs, and even more kindly threw in a link to an SV-POW! post, which I’ll let you find for yourself. Now that I’m sending you there, the hyperlink circle is complete.
Two great things came in the mail yesterday, but those will be subjects of future posts. Stay tuned, true believers!
References
- Britt, B.B., and Naylor, B.G. 1994. An embryonic Camarasaurus (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation (Dry Mesa Quarry, Colorado); pp. 256-264 in Carpenter, K., Hirsch K.F., and Horner, J.R. (eds), Dinosaur Eggs and Babies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
- Chiappe, L. M., Coria, R. A., Dingus, L., Jackson, F., Chinsamy, A., and Fox, M. 1998. Sauropod dinosaur embryos from the Late Cretaceous of Patagonia. Nature 396: 258–261.
- Paul, G.S. 1994. Dinosaur reproduction in the fast lane: implications for size, success, and extinction; pp. 244-255 in Carpenter, K., Hirsch K.F., and Horner, J.R. (eds), Dinosaur Eggs and Babies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
- Zheng, X.-T., You, H.-L., Xu, X., and Dong, Z.-M. 2009. An Early Cretaceous heterodontosaurid dinosaur with filamentous integumentary structures. Nature 458:333-336.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 