Turns out that if Mike and I don’t post about sauropods for a while, people start doing it for us! This very interesting project by Tom Johnson of Loveland, Colorado, first came to my attention when Tom emailed Mark Hallett about it and Mark kindly passed it on to me. I got in touch with Tom and asked if he’d be interested in writing it up for SV-POW!, and here it is. Many thanks to Tom for his willingness to share his work with us. Enjoy! – Matt Wedel
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The sauropod formerly known as Apatosaurus in the American Museum of Natural History was the first permanently mounted sauropod dinosaur in the world, and for many years, the most famous (Brinkman 2010). The greater part of the skeleton consists of the specimen AMNH 460 from the Nine Mile Crossing Quarry north of Como Bluff, Wyoming, supplemented with bones from other AMNH specimens from Como Bluff, Bone Cabin Quarry, and with plaster casts of the forelimbs of the holotype specimen of Brontosaurus excelsus (YPM 1980) at the Yale Peabody Museum.
A herd of Brontosaurus skeleton models parading before four box covers issued between the 1950s and 1990s.
Like many aging boomer dinophiles, my dinosaur epiphany was the result of books, movies, and toys available in the 1950s, but especially a series of plastic model dinosaur skeletons that appeared around 1958. The Brontosaurus was my personal favorite, and, like the Tyrannosaurus and Stegosaurus models in the series, was very obviously based on the AMNH mount. The models were reissued at least three times over the years and can still be found either “mint in box” or more often in various stages of completion.
Apatosaurus lousiae 1/12 scale skeleton, modelled by Phil Platt, assembled and photographed by Brant Bassam. Image courtesy of BrantWorks.com.
The crème de la crème today, of course, is the 1:12 scale Apatosaurus skeleton model by Phil Platt, available from Gaston Design in Fruita, Colorado. A particularly nice example is the one completed and mounted by Brant Bassam of BrantWorks. The Platt skeleton is a replica in the true sense of the word. The plastic models are pretty crude in comparison, as cool as they appeared to us as kids.
I was interested in skeletal illustrations I have seen of Tyrannosaurus rex, which compare the completeness of various specimens by showing the actual bones included by coloring them red. A 2005 study of Apatosaurus by Upchurch et. al. examined eleven of the most complete Apatosaurus individuals, and I was interested to see the actual bones known for each specimen. Using published descriptions, red markers, and copies of a skeletal silhouette of Apatosaurus (permission obtained from the artist), I prepared a comparison of the most completely known Apatosaurus specimens. It was clear, of course, that Apatosaurus louisae (CM 3018) is the most complete specimen of the Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus group. But it also was apparent that old AMNH 460 included a substantial portion of the skeleton, even if it is a composite.
I grabbed some additional markers and, using the illustration of the mount in William Diller Matthew’s popular book Dinosaurs (Matthew 1915, fig. 20, which I trust is in the public domain by now), I color-coded the bones according to the composition as listed in Matthew’s (1905) article:
- AMNH 460, Nine-Mile Crossing Quarry: 5th, 6th, 8th to 13th cervical vertebrae; 1st to 9th dorsal; 3rd to 19th caudal; all ribs; both coracoids; “parts of” sacrum and ilia; both ischia and pubes; left femur and astragalus; and “part of” the left fibula. RED
- AMNH 222, Como Bluff: right scapula, 10th dorsal vertebra, right femur and tibia. GREEN
(Visitors to AMNH: you can see the rest of AMNH 222 under the feet of the hunched-over Allosaurus) - AMNH 339, Bone Cabin Quarry: 20th to 40th caudal vertebrae. LIGHT BLUE
- AMNH 592, Bone Cabin Quarry: metatarsals of the right hind foot. VIOLET
- YPM 1980, Como Bluff: left scapula, forelimb long bones (casts). YELLOW
- The remaining parts of the skeleton are either modeled in plaster or are unspecified (“a few toe bones”). BLACK
It occurred to me that I might have sufficient spare parts of old ITC and Glencoe Brontosaurus models to create a three-dimensional version. I did, and painting prior to assembly definitely made the job easier.
There are obviously limitations to using Matthew’s (1915) reconstruction (e.g., only 13 cervicals) and the model (12 cervicals). It is also not clear from Matthew’s description how much of the sacrum and ilia were restored. Nevertheless, the painted model does provide a colorful, if crude, visualization of the composition of the composite.
Here are some more photos of the finished product:
A view from the front of the model, compared with a historical AMNH photo of the forelimbs and pelvic girdle.
Long considered a specimen of Brontosaurus excelsus or Apatosaurus excelsus, AMNH 460 was referred to Apatosaurus ajax by Upchurch et. al. in 2005. In the most comprehensive analysis of diplodocid phylogeny to date, Tschopp et. al. (2015) found AMNH 460 to be an “indeterminate apatosaurine” pending a “detailed analysis of the specimen.” What to call it? Oh, yeah, that’s been covered in another post!
This is a nostalgia shot for the old brontophiles. Notice that the Triceratops is entering the lake for a swim!
Tom Johnson with the mounted skeleton of Amphicyon, a Miocene “bear-dog”,
in the Raymond Alf Museum of Paleontology in Claremont, California.
References
- Brinkman , Paul D. (2010). The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush, University of Chicago Press, 2010.
- Matthew, William Diller, (1905). “The Mounted Skeleton of Brontosaurus,” The American Museum Journal, Vol. V, No. 2, April.
- Matthew, W.D. (1915). Dinosaurs, With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections, American Museum of Natural History, New York.
- Tschopp, Emanuel, Octávio Mateus, and Roger Benson. (2015). “A Specimen-Level Phylogenetic Analysis and Taxonomic Revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda).” Ed. Andrew Farke. PeerJ 3 (2015): e857.
- Upchurch, P., Tomida, Y., Barrett, P.M. (2005). “A new specimen of Apatosaurus ajax (Sauropoda: Diplodocidae) from the Morrison Formation (Upper Jurassic) of Wyoming, USA”. National Science Museum Monographs (Tokyo) 26 (118): 1–156.
Richard Butler: seeking volunteers for the SVPCA committee
October 15, 2015
Following on from his recent, and extensively discussed, offer to host SVPCA 2017, and a plan for the future, Richard Butler is now circulating his update, soliciting volunteers for the committee that virtually everyone agreed was a good idea.
Dear SVPCA/SPPC friends and colleagues,
We have identified you as a member of the SVPCA/SPPC community through having attended the meeting within the last five years. Many of you will doubtless be aware of the vibrant, lengthy, and occasionally fiery debate currently taking place about the future of the meeting on Mike Taylor and Matt Wedel’s SV-POW blog.
The least controversial proposal for change in the meeting has been my suggestion that we establish a ‘steering group’ to (i) try and solve some of the short-term and long-term logistical challenges (bank accounts, abstract submission and online registration issues etc.); (ii) provide support to meeting organisers and develop a comprehensive set of useful information; (iii) help identify and encourage future hosts to come forward; (iv) think about and discuss the future of the meeting, including discussing how best to make sure the meeting appeals to the entire community, from students to amateurs and from professors to preparators.
As there has been no opposition and plenty of support for a steering group, I propose we move forward with establishing this. No alternative to my proposal for the composition of this group has been put forward: I proposed a group of seven including past, current and future organisers (Gareth Dyke, Peter Falkingham, me as proposed host for a 2017 Birmingham meeting), and four elected members representing the student, early career academic (up to 10 years post-PhD), senior academic, and non-professional communities. This would not draw any museum/university distinction when it comes to students and academics. Although I have not heard formally from the GCG, I understand there is interest in one of their members being co-opted onto the steering group to represent SPPC. Elected steering group members could serve three-year terms, to match the terms served by meeting hosts.
At this stage we need volunteers: people willing to stand for election to this group and help secure and shape the future of the meeting! If you are a member of the SVPCA/SPPC community and are interested in serving, then please email me and Richard Forrest and let us know which of the four elected positions you wish to stand for. We would like volunteers by October 23rd. After this date, we will set-up online elections to allow the SVPCA/SPPC community to vote for each of the positions.
I look forward to hearing from you and to working together to shape the future of the meeting.
We’re delighted to host this guest-blog on behalf of Richard Butler, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, and guru of basal ornithischians. (Note that Matt and I don’t necessarily endorse or agree with everything Richard says; but we’re pleased to provide a forum for discussion.)
Dear friends and colleagues within the SVPCA community;
I am posting here courtesy of Mike and Matt with two objectives. First, I would like to provisionally offer Birmingham as a venue for the 2017 SVPCA meeting, with a host committee of myself, Ivan Sansom, and our postdocs and students. I propose to host the meeting at the University of Birmingham and the Lapworth Museum of Geology, following the latter’s redevelopment and reopening in 2016. Second, I would note that this offer is conditional on the implementation of some changes in SVPCA organisation that I believe will help secure the future of the meeting, while retaining its current atmosphere. Although I have already discussed these proposed changes with many colleagues via email, a broad scale and open consultancy and discussion within the community is needed, hence this post and open comment section.
Despite the apparent success of recent meetings, there are a couple of factors that give me substantial concern about its future. There is a trend, noted by several people, toward increasing disengagement from a large component of the early postdoctoral career and established academic community, with many of these individuals (including myself) attending SVPCA less and less frequently. Numbers provided by Richard Forrest show a small but steady decline in the number of people paying full registration (i.e. non-students) over the last five years. Having discussed this with a number of colleagues, it is clear to me that it stems from multiple reasons, including meeting length and structure, ever-increasing time constraints, and competition with the myriad other meetings such as PalAss, SVP, EAVP, ICVM etc. This disengagement is worrying for a number of reasons, but perhaps most pressingly because it is exactly this part of the vertebrate palaeontology community who are generally expected to organise the meeting in future years.
I am also concerned that people are not queuing up to organise the meeting. We are just about getting by from year to year, but offers are sparse at exactly a time when there are almost certainly more vertebrate palaeontologists employed in the UK than ever before. Why is this? Well, taking on the organization of SVPCA in its current form is not exactly attractive in the current academic world of REF, impact, museum cuts, and the ongoing marketization of universities, with charges for the use of lecture theatres and other spaces increasing rapidly. The meeting is long relative to its size (particularly when SPPC is considered) and its budget is low, and the lack of any formal organization to SVPCA means that there is limited support or continuity from year to year. Hosting it is unlikely to substantially enhance your CV, but it will certainly impact negatively on your other outputs (i.e. papers, grant applications) for that year. We risk reaching a point in the near future where there is no-one willing to host the meeting and the meeting grinds to a halt.
My proposal is that the meeting could bear a small degree of formalisation and modernisation without losing its character, and doing so would ease pressures on hosts. Following discussion with a broad range of colleagues within the SVPCA community, I am proposing that a small SVPCA steering group be established as part of the planning for the Birmingham meeting. This steering group could be established in a simple, representative, democratic, cost-free, and light-touch manner. This group would not need to meet in person other than at SVPCA itself so there would be no financial cost. There would then be an open and democratic basis for deciding upon the future of the meeting and ensuring continuity from year to year.
This committee could come up with an agreed list of recommendations for how the meeting should be organised in the future, addressing topics such as meeting length, the role of SPPC, the relationship of the meeting to PalAss (who already provide significant financial and logistic support), the abstract review process, and innovations such as lightning talks, workshops and keynotes. It could also find solutions to the significant logistic issues to do with bank accounts, payments and the like, all of which place unnecessary strain on the local organisers. Local organisers would still have considerable autonomy, but they would receive more support.
As an initial proposal I suggest a small committee that attempts to represent the different communities that make up SVPCA. The last and next meeting hosts should be on, as well as perhaps five additional elected members, serving limited terms, to represent the student, early career researcher (up to 10 years post-PhD), senior academic, museum, and non-professional communities. Pretty much all of the feedback from colleagues for this idea to date has been positive. Note that this does not imply the formation of a formal society (although that would be an option that a steering committee could discuss), and nor does it challenge many of the aspects of SVPCA that so many of us find attractive, such as its friendly atmosphere or the absence of parallel sessions. I hope it will provide a framework for us to continue to promote scientific excellence and drive up standards in UK vertebrate palaeontology, and help secure the future of the meeting for the next 60 years. I would love to hear any opinions that the community has on this proposal, and the future of SVPCA more broadly.
[Today’s live-blog is brought to you by Yvonne Nobis, science librarian at Cambridge, UK. Thanks, Yvonne! — Mike.]
Session 1 — The Journal Article: is the end in sight?
Slightly late start due to trains – !
Just arrived to hear Aileen Fyfe University of St Andrews saying that something similar to journal articles will be needed for ‘quite some time’.
Steven Hall, IOP.
The article still fulfils its primary role — the registration, dissemination, certification and archiving of scholarly information. The Journal Article still provides a fixed point — and researchers still see the article as a critical part of research — although it is now evolving into something much more fluid.
Steve then outlined some of the initiatives that IOP have implemented. Examples include the development of thesauri — every article is ‘semantically fingerprinted’. No particular claims are made for IOP innovation — some are broad industry initiatives — but demonstrate how the journal article has evolved.
(Personal bias: as a librarian I like the IOP journal and ebook offering!) IOP have worked with RIN on a study on the researcher behaviour of physical sciences — to research the impact of new technology on researchers. Primary conclusion: researchers in the physical sciences are conservative and oddly see the journal article as most important method of communicating research. (This seems at odds with use of arXiv?)
Discussion
Mike Brady discusses the ‘floribunda’ of the 19th century scholarly publishing environment.
Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford) questions the move from the gentleman scholar to the publishing machinery of the 21st century and wonders if there will be a resurgence due to citizen science?
Tim Smith (CERN) proposes that change is being technologically driven.
Stuart Taylor (Royal Society publishing) agrees with Steve that there is disconnect between reality and outlandish speculations about what should be in place, and the ‘bells and whistles’ that publishers are adding in to the mix that are not used.
Cameron Neylon: what the web gives us the ability to separate content from display — and this gives us a huge opportunity — and many of us in the this room did predict the death of the article several years ago …(This was premature!)
Herman Hauser makes the valid point that it is well nigh impossible for a researcher now to understand the breadth of a whole field.
Ginny Barbour raises the question of incentives (the article still being the accepted de facto standard). The point was also raised that perhaps this meeting should be repeated with an audience 30 years younger…
No panel comment on this point, however I fear what many would say is that this meeting represents the apex of a pyramid, where these discussions have occurred for years in other conferences (for example, the various science online and force meetings) and have driven both innovation (novel publishing models) and the creation of tools.
I asked about (predictably enough) about use of arXiv — slightly surprised at the response to the RIN study.
Steve Hall: ‘science publishers are service providers’ — if scientific communities become clear about what they want, we can provide such services — but coherent thinking needs to underwrite this. Steve also questions the incentives put in place for researchers to publish in certain high impact journals and how this is damaging.
David Coloquhan raises the issues of perverse incentives for judging researchers, including altmetrics.
Steve Hall: arXiv won’t allow publishers on their governing bodies –and interestingly librarians (take note!) should be engaging with the storage of the data!
Aileen, in conclusion, questions how did the plurality of modes of communication we had in the 18th and 19th centuries get closed down to the level of purely journals? The issue of learned societies and their relationship with commercial agencies is often a cause for concern…
Session 2 How might scientists communicate in the future?
Mike Brady
the role of the speakers is to catalyse discussion amongst ourselves…
Anita de Waard (Elsevier)
350 years ago science was an individual enterprise, although now many large collaborations, much scientific discussion is still on a peer to peer level.
How do we unify the needs of the collective and individual scientists?
We need to create the systems of knowledge management that work for scientists, publishers and librarians.
Quotes John Perry Barlow: ‘Let us endeavour to build systems that allow a kid in Mali who wants to learn about proteomics to not be overwhelmed by the irrelevant and the untrue’ (It would be cruel to mention various issues with the Journal of Proteomics last year…)
Problem is the the paper is the overarching modus operandi. Citations to data are often citations to pictures. We need better ways of citing and connecting knowledge. ‘Papers are stories that persuade with data’, says Anita. She argues we need better ways of citing claims, and constructing chains of evidence that can be traced to their source.
For this we need tools and to build habits of citing evidence into all aspects of our educational system (starting at kindergarten)!
Another problem is data cannot be found or integrated (this to my view is something that the academic community should be tackling, not out-sourcing, which is the way I see this going…)
An understanding needs to evolve that science is a collective endeavour.
Anita is now covering scientific software (‘scientific software sucks’ is the quote attributed to Ben Goldacre yesterday) — it compares unfavourably to Amazon … not sure how true this is?
Anita is very dismissive of scientific software not being adequate — often code is written for a particular purpose. (My view is that this is not something that can easily be commercially outsourced — High energy physics anyone?)
Mark Hahnel, FigShare
(FigShare was built as a way for Mark to curate/publish his own research.)
Mark opens with policies from different funders (at Cambridge we are feeling the effect of these already) for data mandates — especially EPSRC: all digital outputs from funded research now must be made available.
Mark talks around the Open Academic Tidal Wave — sorry not a great link but the only one I can find (thanks Lou Woodley): and we are at level 4 of this.
Mark surveyed publishers about what they see the future of publishing in 2020 — and they replied ‘Version control on papers, data incorporated within the article’, but the technology is there already — and uses the example of F1000 Research.
Discussion
Mike Brady: It’s as well Imelda Marcos was not a scientist — following on from Anita’s claims that software for buying shoes is more fit for purpose than scientific software!
Herman Hauser: willing to fund things that help with an ‘evidence engine’ to avoid repeats of the MMR fiasco!
David Coloquhan: science is not the same as buying shoes! Refreshingly cynical.
Wendy Hall stresses the importance of linking information — every publisher should have a semantically linked website (and on the science of buying shoes).
Comment from the floor: Getting more data into repositories may not be exciting but is essential. Mark agrees — once the data is there you can do things with it, such as building apps to extract what you need.
Richard Sever (Cold Harbour Press) with a great quote: “The best way to store genomic data is in DNA.”
Mike Taylor: when we discuss how data is associated with papers we must ensure that this is ‘open’, this includes the APIs, to avoid repeating the ‘walled garden of silos’ in which we find ourselves now.
Question of electronic access in the future (Dave Garner) — how do we future-proof science? Very valid — we can’t access material from 1980s floppy disks!
Anita: data is entwined with software and we need to preserve these executable components. Issues returning to citation and data citations and incentives again which has been a pervasive theme over the last couple of days.
Cameron Neylon: we need to move to a situation where we can publish data itself, and this can be an incremental process, not the current binary ‘publish or not publish’ situation (which of course comes back to incentives).
In summary, Mark questions timescales, and Anita wonders how the Royal Society can bring these topics to the world?
Time for lunch, and now over to Matthew Dovey to continue this afternoon (alongside Steven Hall another of my former colleagues)!
Richard Poynder on the need for transparency in publishing
April 28, 2015
[This is a guest-post by Richard Poynder, a long-time observer and analyst of academic publishing now perhaps best known for the very detailed posts on his Open and Shut blog. It was originally part of a much longer post on that blog, the introduction to an interview with the publisher MDPI. I’m pleased to reproduce it here with Richard’s kind permission — Mike.]
In light of the current lack of information available to enable us to adequately judge the activities of scholarly publishers, or to evaluate the rigour of the publication process that research papers undergo, should not both scholarly publishers and the research community be committing themselves to much greater transparency than we see today?
For instance, should not open peer review now be the norm? Should not the reviews and the names of reviewers be routinely published alongside papers? Should not the eligibility criteria and application procedures for obtaining APC waivers be routinely published on a journal’s web site, along with regularly updated data on how many waivers are being granted? Should not publishers be willing to declare the nature and extent of the unsolicited email campaigns they engage in in order to recruit submissions?
Should not the full details of “big deals” and hybrid OA “offsetting agreements” be made publicly available? Should not publishers be more transparent about why they charge what they charge for APCs? Should not publishers be more transparent about their revenues and profits? For instance, should not privately owned publishers make their accounts available online (even where there is no legal obligation to do so), and should not public companies provide more detailed information about the money they earn from publicly-funded research and exactly how it was earned? And should not publishers whose revenue comes primarily from the public purse be entirely open about who owns the company, and where it is based?
Should not the research community refuse to deal with publishers unwilling to do all the above? Did not US Justice Louis D. Brandeis have a point when he said, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”
[Hi folks, Matt here. I’m just popping in to introduce this guest post by Adam Marsh (UT Austin page, LinkedIn, ResearchGate). Adam is a PhD student at UT Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences, currently working for a semester as a Visiting Student Researcher at my old stomping ground, Berkeley’s UCMP. Adam’s been working at Petrified Forest National Park in the summers and most of his research is on the Navajo Nation in Arizona. His major interest is in how we perceive extinctions in the fossil record. Specifically, he’s exploring the geochronology of the Glen Canyon Group to look at the biotic response to the end-Triassic mass extinction. He’s also working on an overhaul of the early saurischian dinosaurs of western North America – hence this post. It’s timely because I was just talking in the last post about putting together infographics to spread your ideas; here Adam’s very nice diagram serves as a quick guide and pointer to several papers by Jeff Wilson and colleagues. Many thanks to Sarah Werning for suggesting that Adam and I get acquainted over vertebrae. Update the next day: both the diagram above and the PDF linked below have been updated to fix a couple of typos. Also, there are now black and white versions – see below.]
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If you’re like me, you don’t count sheep when you fall asleep, you count laminae. These struts of bone and their affiliated fossae connect and span between major structural features on vertebral neural arches such as prezygapophyses, postzygapophyses, parapophyses, diapophyses, hyposphenes, hypantra, and the neural spine. Presumably, laminae bracket and fossae house outgrowths of pneumatic diverticula from the respiratory system, which has been covered extensively on this blog in sauropodomorph dinosaurs.
Talking about these complicated structures is cumbersome; they’ve been called buttresses, ridges, struts, etc. throughout descriptive skeletal literature. But what we call things is important, especially when we introduce laminae and other vertebral structures to the rigors of phylogenetic systematics, where homologous apomorphies reign supreme. In order to avoid arguing about whether one structure is called the potato or the tomato, Jeff Wilson and others introduced a strategy of naming vertebral laminae (Wilson, 1999) and the fossae (Wilson et al., 2011) that they surround using the same vertebral landmarks that most tetrapod anatomists agree upon (see the parade of –apophyses above). The process is very simple. Vertebral laminae are named for the two structures that they connect; the prezygodiapophyseal lamina (prdl) connects the prezygapophysis and the diapophysis, so each neural arch will have two prdls. Vertebral fossae are named for the two major laminae that constrain them; the prezygocentrodiapophyseal fossa (prcdf) opens anterolaterally and is delineated dorsally by the prezygodiapophyseal lamina and ventrally by the anterior centrodiapophyseal lamina. Again, each neural arch will have two prcdfs. Those of you who are black belt vertebral anatomists, to borrow a favorite phrase from my advisor, might be interested in serial variation and how these structures change up and down the vertebral column. Until I get my act together and publish some cool new saurischian data, I will refer you to Wilson (2012). [We’ve also touched on serial variation in laminae in this post and this one. – MJW]
Same thing in black and white, with labels
You might have noticed that the names are a mouthful and take up their fair share of typed characters. In my research of early saurischian dinosaurs, I’ve run across quite a few of these laminae everywhere from herrerasaurids to sauropodomorphs to coelophysoids to Dilophosaurus. Even though I’ve drawn, photographed, and written about various laminae and fossae, I still need to remind myself of what goes where and what it’s called. Believe me, vertebral lamina nomenclature does not lend itself well to Dem Bones covers. As a result, I’ve put together a reference figure that might be useful for those of you who are dealing with this or even teaching it to students. At the very least, you can put it on the ceiling above your bed so that it’s the first thing you see when you open your eyes in the morning.
Four main vertebral laminae are present plesiomorphically in archosaurs: the anterior and posterior centrodiapophyseal laminae, the prezygodiapophyseal lamina, and the postzygodiapophyseal lamina. This means that the prezygocentrodiapophyseal, postzygocentrodiapophyseal, and centrodiapophyseal fossae are present, and sometimes the top of the transverse process is concave between the neural spine and the zygapophyses to form the spinodiapophyseal fossa. I know that a certain sister group of Sauropodomorpha can get disparaged around these parts, but the truth is that theropods build long necks, too, and sometimes in very different ways than sauropodomorphs. When you are writing about the various vertebral buttresses and chonoses, don’t get frustrated with the names, because Wilson and his colleagues have actually made it much easier for us to talk to one another about presumably homologous structures without needing an additional degree in civil engineering.
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Here’s the figure again in PDF form: Marsh, Adam 2015 saurischian laminae and fossae diagram v2
And in black and white for those who prefer it that way: Marsh, Adam 2015 saurischian laminae and fossae diagram v2 bw
References
- Wilson, J. A. 1999. A nomenclature for vertebral laminae in sauropods and other saurischian dinosaurs. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 19(4): 639-653. DOI: 10.1080/02724634.1999.10011178
- Wilson, J. A., Michael, D. D., T. Ikejiri, E. M. Moacdieh, and J. A. Whitlock. 2011. A nomenclature for vertebral fossae in sauropods and other saurischian dinosaurs. PLoS One 6(2): e17114. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0017114
- Wilson, J. A. 2012. New vertebral laminae and patterns of serial variation in vertebral laminae of sauropod dinosaurs. Contributions From The Museum of Paleontology, University of Michigan 32(7): 91-110. ISSN 0097-3556
Guest post: the genesis of Davide Bonadonna’s Spinosaurus painting
September 16, 2014
In the last post I pointed out some similarities between Davide Bonadonna’s new Spinosaurus painting and Brian Engh’s Spinosaurus painting from 2010. I also suggested that Davide might have borrowed from Brian and might have crossed a line in doing so. I was mistaken about that, as this post will show, and I’m sorry.
I woke up this morning to find that Mike and Davide had a very fruitful and collegial discussion going in email, which they had kindly copied me on. Davide had offered to send his in-progress sketches, Mike had offered to put them up here as a guest post, “because it’ll be a fascinating post — NOT as any kind of defense” (his words, with which I fully agree), and Davide had kindly assented (Brian’s post on how his Spinosaurus came to be is on his own blog). Davide and I corresponded directly this morning and he’s been very gracious and generous with his time, thoughts, and art.
We are always thrilled when we have the opportunity to show how awesome paleoart came into being (like this and this), and this case is no exception. Best now if I just get out of the way, so — over to Davide!
— Matt
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About the illustration:
In early November 2013, I was commissioned by NGMag, via Nizar Ibrahim of the University of Chicago, to create an illustration for a page in the October 2014 issue.
Working for about six years with Simone Maganuco, co-author of the study, on the Spinosaurus (I made the digital model from which the model exhibited in Washington was printed, Nizar left us carte blanche.
Some key points were essential, however: showing the Spinosaurus while swimming, his webbed feet, show its prey in the environment of Kemkem, possibly including all the major players in the scene, Mawsonia, Alanqa and Carcharodontosaurus.
Problems: the Spinosaurus is very long, the subjects to be represented too many. It was decided first of all to exclude the Carcharodontosaurus and then framing a foreshortened Spinosaurus, which would allow us to make room for the actors. Given the size and shape of Spinosaurus we knew that we would inevitably get what I call the “Luis Rey-effect” style. So, after gathering plenty of references, I made my sketches, suggesting a frontal dynamic sight (4) and a back view (1-2-3), presenting both solutions to Nizar at last SVP in L.A.
1
2
3
4
Meanwhile the size of the final art had to be changed because from the mag they asked for a double opening page of the article. And in the same time, thanks to a friend suggestion, I drew a third version (5), with the Idea to put all them together (8).
5
8
But the scene was too crowded and we decided to use just two animals, so I tried different combinations (6).
6
And the best one was to put both frontal versions together, one close to the other (7).
7
And again the two-pages image had to be changed because NG decided to turn it in a three-pages wide illustration, something that helped me to put Mawsonia in the background (9).
9
When finished, before approval, the NG editorial staff asked me to put an animal familiar to the modern public, which could help the reader to feel how big was the Spinosaurus, and a turtle was the chosen one (10).
10
Brian Engh’s illustration:
I vaguely remember I once had seen Brian’s illustration before today and I did not put it in my archive as a reference. All my main references are these: crocodile photos, patchworks made with my 3D digital model and Dinoraul one (11).
11
The water view comes from an NG poster about marine reptiles (12).
12
Most of my illustrations have a fisheye distortion, this is not the first one I make (see on my website Scipionyx, Neptunidraco, Diplodocus–Allosaurus and others).
You can easily see from the sketches progress how a traditional vanishing point becomes gradually a curve.
Conclusion:
This is a case of illustrative convergence. ;-)
That’s all folks, I think. If you have any other doubt, just ask. I’m at your disposal.
Best,
Davide
http://www.davidebonadonna.it/
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Davide-Bonadonna/286308368137641?fref=ts
Guest Post: Jan Velterop on open-access licences
January 31, 2014
[Introduction from Mike. I’m on the OKFN’s open-access mailing list, where we’re currently embroiled in a rather tedious reiteration of the debate about the merits of the various open-access licences. On Monday, veteran of the OA wars Jan Velterop posted a message so perfect that I immediately asked him for permission to re-publish it as a guest post here on SV-POW!. He kindly agreed, so over to Jan for the rest of this post. The only changes I’ve made are to highlight what I consider the key passages.]
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I’ve been following this discussion with increasing bemusement. Frankly, it’s getting ridiculous, at least in my humble opinion. A discussion such as this one about licensing and copyright only serves to demonstrate that copyright, once conceived as a way to stimulate and enable science and the arts, has degenerated into a way to frustrate, derange and debilitate knowledge exchange.
I’m not the first one to point out that absolutely anything, under any copyright licence or none, could be abused for evil purposes or, in more mild circumstances, lead to misunderstandings and accidental abuse. I agree with all those who said it.
The issue here is what science and scientific results stand for. Their purpose is emphatically not “to be copyrightable items”. Copyright, invented to combat commercial abuse, has become a means of commercial abuse. The purpose of science and scientific results is to enrich the world’s knowledge. Any commercial advantage – appropriate for industrially funded research – can be had by 1) keeping results secret (i.e. not publishing them), or 2) getting a patent. Science, particularly modern science, is nothing without a liberal exchange of ideas and information.
Ideally, scientific publications are not copyrightable at all, and community standards take care of proper acknowledgement. We don’t live in an ideal world, so we have to get as close as we can to that ideal, and that is by ameliorating the insidious pernicious effects of copyright with CC-Zero and CC-BY licences.
The existence of the NC rider or stipulation for CC licences is unfortunate and quite damaging. Mainly because of the vagueness and ambiguity of what ‘commercial use’ means. Ideas in published articles can be freely used for commercial purposes of any kind, as ideas are not copyrightable. Only “the way the ideas have been formulated” is covered by copyright, and thus by the NC clause in copyright licences. In my interpretation that means that most usage of published material that is not a straightforward selling of text or images can be freely done. But that’s my interpretation. And that’s exactly where it rubs, because all the NC clause does is introduce hypothetical difficulties and liabilities. As a result of which, NC practically means: “stay away from using this material, because you never know with all those predatory legal eagles around”. In other words, it’s virtually useless for modern, sophisticated scientific knowledge discovery, which doesn’t just consist of reading papers any longer, but increasingly relies on the ability to machine-process large amounts of relevant information, as human ocular reading of even a fraction of the information is not possible anymore. At least not in most fast-moving areas of the sciences. Read this article, or similar ones, if you want to be convinced: On the impossibility of being expert, BMJ 2010; 341 (Published 14 December 2010 – unfortunately behind a paywall).
The taxpayer angle (“must be open because the taxpayer paid for it”), leading to Kent Andersonian notions of knowledge protectionism (“results of research paid by US taxpayers should not be available to non-US citizens unless they pay for it”), is a most unfortunate, visceral and primitive reaction and a complete red herring. For many reasons, not least because the taxpayer, or vicariously the taxman, isn’t the party that pockets any money payed for paywalled information. Besides, how far do you go? Americans not being allowed to stay alive due to a cure that was developed with public money in Switzerland unless they pay through the nose for it to the Swiss tax authorities? The “as-long-as-I-am-well-the-rest-of-you-can-go-to-hell” personality disorder. The whole idea is so against the ethos of science that those even thinking in that direction must be taken to be utterly and entirely unsuitable to any role in the scientific community.
Access control and restriction via copyright was at best a necessary evil in the print era; the ‘necessary’, though, has disappeared in the web environment.
Have a nice day!
Jan Velterop
AN ALIEN IS COMING!
February 19, 2012
Re-posted with permission.
Of course, these these days John is better known for this work on the evolution of musculature on the line to birds, tyrannosaur hindlimb mechanics, and elephant anatomy. But it seems the world lost a promising novelist.
[Originally posted on Twitter, by John.]
See also: Acaren and the Evil Wizards.
The World’s Largest Dinosaurs @AMNH
April 21, 2011
[This is a guest post by frequent commenter Heinrich Mallison. Heinrich is maybe best known to SV-POW! readers for his work on digital modelling of sauropodomorphs, though that may change now that his paper on sauropod rearing mechanics is out. Read on …]
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Maybe this post should have been titled “How sauropods breathed, ate, and farted”. Or maybe not. But breathing, eating and fermenting the food will play an important role.
Last week held a special pleasure for me. I spent it in New York, digitizing sauropods bones in the American Museum of Natural History’s Big Bone Room. Treasure trove that this room is, the museum still held something even better: the opening of a new special exhibit titled The World’s Largest Dinosaurs. While all such exhibits are of general interest to me, this one is special. Mark Norell, famous palaeontologist and curator at the AMNH, had a co-curator for this exhibit, Martin Sander of Bonn University, who is the head and speaker of the German Research Foundation Research Unit FOR 533 “Sauropod Biology”. As a member of FOR 533, and having received funding for both my PhD work and my first post-doc project, I am obviously somewhat biased, so please take this into account when you read this report.
The exhibition does not show a large amount of sauropods material. Not that it wouldn’t make for a nice exhibit, as the AMNH’s Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs doesn’t really have that many sauropods (one Apatosaurus mount, to be exact, with a mashed up Barosaurus vertebral column half-hidden away and a wonderful but obviously depressed “prosauropod”, my old friend Plateosaurus, thrown in to make up a bit for the many, many stinkin’ theropod specimens). But instead of showcasing some of the usually hidden-away bones of the AMNH collection (and believe me, there is some wonderful stuff there), it rather focuses on those parts of the animal that are usually missing: the soft tissues. “How did sauropods get so big?”, or, reversing the question: “Why did and does no other group of terrestrial vertebrates reach such gigantic body sizes?” These were the questions our research group has been busily investigating for the last six years, and the answers to these question are what the exhibit now tries to communicate to the public. And it does so quite successfully!
The centerpiece of the AMNH exhibit: the belly of Mama Mamenchisaurus.
The centrepiece is a full-sized, fleshed out model of a sauropod (Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis), but on one side the skin and superficial musculature has been cut away. The visitor can see the neck vertebrae, the trachea, the carotid artery, and the ribcage. And the ribcage is also a projection area, on which a video is played that shows the internal organs and how they work.
With a voice-over that explains the actions in simple terms, the principle of the avian-style unidirectional lung and the air sacs is explained (albeit with a small error, as lung physiologist and FOR 533 member Steve Perry was quick to point out – the AMNH has promised to fix things), as well as the basic principles of sauropod reproduction (high number of offspring). Many things are not said or shown here, which is a good thing as it allows for the normal short attention span of the average museum visitor for one piece of exhibit. Instead, interesting stuff like how much fodder a sauropod needed per day (or even per hour), a comparison of a sauropod’s and an elephant’s heart, and of a giraffe’s and a sauropod’s neck vertebra (wow, how light the sauropod one is!) are explored at small science stations spread around the room. I won’t go into a detailed description here, you can find that elsewhere on the web. The AMNH did a blogger’s preview a while ago, and invited the press for a press conference and walk-through of the exhibit with the chance to interview the scientists present on Wednesday, so much info has already been plastered all over the web. Instead, I’ll just show you some pics and talk a bit about the concept of the exhibition, and how various issues were handled that can make or break a show.
One thing is how to catch the attention of visitors and direct it to the content of the exhibit. You don’t want people just going “aw, sh*t! That is one HUGE bone/animal!” and wandering off into the next room. If you want to educate them (and that, may I remind you, is the central purpose of a museum exhibit), you need to get them interested in stuff. Get them to read texts, look at stuff (not just let their eyes wander across it for a few seconds), try to get their brains going. The sauropod exhibit manages this by, first of all, being behind a closed door you can’t see through. Usually, the AMNH halls are accessible either through an open doorway, or in a few cases through glass doors. Secondly, the exhibit, especially the rather confined area you enter first, is dark. Very dark. Again a marked contrast to the AMNH’s usually well-lit halls. Just a few plants greet the visitor, and it takes a second to adjust to the dark – enough time to look around a bit and notice the neck and head of Argentinosaurus (fleshed out model) above.
My esteemed colleague Vivian Allen from Royal Veterinary College London going "Aw, sh*t! That is one HUGE sauropod!"
Next, the visitor is channeled along, with only a very few specimens to catch his attention. Well done, because these few pieces (sauropod leg, Komodo dragon skeleton, human skeleton, etc.) focus on getting the main message across (sauropods = way larger than everything else), aided by the largest animals (or their silhouettes) or various groups painted on the wall. Only once the message has been driven home, as I could detect from the comments I overheard, are the visitors released into the main area that contains the sauropod model and the various detail exhibits around it.
The next thing is giving people time to check things out. If you herd them too much, they will get driven along by the masses. That’s why the larger, opener area around the sauropod model and the smaller bits around it works so well: people can sit down to see the projected videos on the sauropod belly, or they can drift around from one specimen or science station to the next.
The stations are not just glass cabinets with some bones in them. Instead, at many of them you can DO things. One allows you to measure either an adult or baby sauropod femur or your own, and then calculate how heavy a sauropod of that size was. At another you can pump a sauropod’s and an elephant’s lung. One I liked very much simply had an unpainted sauropod model, and two sets each (adult and children height) of oculars. One showed a colorful “show-off” version, the other a “camouflage” one. “Which one is true? We don’t know!” is how I’d paraphrase the text that goes with it. One that innocently hides in the corner is among the most impressive: a 5 ½ ft cube (1.7 m, for the civilized) made from Plexiglas filled with sauropod food. A serving sufficient for one day! On it, also, the various plant groups available in the Mesozoic were rated for various factors, getting an easily understood rating in stars. That’s another big thing: make things easily understandable, visualize them!
Yummy! 100% Recommended Daily Value for your average sauropod.
With all these things well done, there remains only one more thing: make things fun for kids! And the AMNH did just that by adding a kids’ dinosaur dig. OK, it is one of those cheesy things where you use brushes and stuff to brush sand off fossils (cast), but it was done well enough that kids lined up like there was no tomorrow.
Overall, the exhibit gets two big thumbs up from me. If you make it to NY while it is on, or to any of its future stations, go see it! However, as FOR 533 member Steve Perry was quick to point out: if you’re in it only for the size, you’ll be disappointed! Aside from a few isolated bones, not much of the largest dinosaurs (Argentinosaurus and Amphicoelias) is to be seen in bone. It is the biological details that matter! But don’t get me started about the tail musculature, especially the caudofemoralis, of the big model.
And then, there is the other thing about it that is closely tied to shameless self-promotion: the AMNH did not produce a catalogue or anything similar. Instead, the latest book from the “Life of the Past” series (Editor: James Farlow) of Indiana University Press was presented at the press conference. The lucky reporters all even got a free copy! The title is Biology of the Sauropod Dinosaurs: Understanding the Life of Giants, edited by N. Klein, K. Remes, C. T. Gee and P. M. Sander. And by now, I am sure, you have figured out who the authors are … It is intended to be a summary of the research findings of the first (and part of the second) funding period of FOR 533, and yours truly has two chapters in it. The first doesn’t really give much new information; most is already contained in my two papers here and here. The second, however, presents novel research that didn’t make it into the AMNH exhibit. But hey, why spoil the surprise – go and buy our book!) Overall, it is quite a technical book, so laypeople beware, but we did try to make the research as accessible as possible while retaining a high standard. For the even more technically minded there is the summary of our research group’s work (which cost the DFG ~€6.000.000) to be found in Sander et al. 2010. However, reading that paper is not half as much fun as the book, or the exhibit.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 