How stupid was the neck of Camarasaurus?
February 19, 2021
What if I told you that when Matt was in BYU collections a while ago, he stumbled across a cervical vertebra — one labelled DM/90 CVR 3+4, say — that looked like this in anterior view?
I think you would say something like “That looks like a Camarasaurus cervical, resembling as it does those illustrated in the beautiful plates of Osborn and Mook (1921)”. And then you might show me, for example, the left half of Plate LXII:
And then you might think to yourself that, within its fleshy envelope, this vertebra might have looked a bit like this, in a roughly circular neck:
Reasonable enough, right?
But when what if I then told you that in fact the vertebra was twice this wide relative to its height, and looked like this?
I’m guessing you might say “I don’t believe this is real. You must have produced it by stretching the real photo”. To which I would reply “No no, hypothetical interlocutor, the opposite is the case! I squashed the real photo — this one — to produce the more credible-seeming one at the top of the post”.
You would then demand to see proper photographic evidence, and I would respond by posting these three images (which Matt supplied from his 2019 BYU visit):
BYU specimen DM/90 CVR 3+4, cervical vertebra of ?Camarasaurus in anterior view. This is the photo from which the illustration above was extracted.
The same specimen in anteroventral view.
The same specimen in something approaching ventral view.
So what’s going on here? My first thought was that this speicmen has to have been dorsoventrally crushed — that this can’t be the true shape.
And yet … counterpoint: the processes don’t look crushed: check out the really nice 3d preservation of the neural spine metapophyses, the prezygs, the transverse processes, the nice, rounded parapophyseal rami, and even the ventral aspect of the centrum. This vertebra is actually in pretty good condition.
So is this real? Is this the vertebra more or less as it was in life? And if so, does that mean that the flesh envelope looked like this?
Look, I’m not saying it isn’t ridiculous; I’m just saying this seems to be more or less where the evidence is pointing. We’ve made a big deal about how the necks of apatosaurines were more or less triangular in cross-section, rather than round as has often been assumed; perhaps we need to start thinking about whether some camarasaur necks were squashed ovals in cross section?
Part of what’s crazy here is that this makes no mechanical sense. A cantilevered structure, such as a sauropod neck, needs to be tall rather than wide in order to attain good mechanical advantage that can take the stress imposed by the neck’s weight. A broad neck is silly: it adds mass that needs to be carried without providing high anchors for the tension members. Yet this is what we see. Evolution doesn’t always do what we would expect it to do — and it goes off the rails when sexual selection comes into play. Maybe female camarasaurus were just really into wide-necked males?
Final note: I have been playing fast and loose with the genus name Camarasaurus and the broader, vaguer term camarasaur. Matt and I have long felt (without having made any real attempt to justify this feeling) that Camarasaurus is way over-lumped, and probably contains multiple rather different animals. Maybe there is a flat-necked species in among them?
(Or maybe it’s just crushing.)
The other side of the other side of that one cool specimen
November 11, 2019
Way back in 2009–over a decade ago, now!–I blogged about the above photo, which I stole from this post by ReBecca Hunt-Foster. It’s a cut and polished chunk of a pneumatic sauropod vertebra in the collections at Dinosaur Journey in Fruita, Colorado.
This is the other side of that same cut; you’ll see that it looks like a mirror image of the cut at the top, but not quite a perfect mirror image, because some material was lost to the kerf of the saw and to subsequent polishing, and the bony septa changed a bit just in those few millimeters.
And this is the reverse face of the section shown above. As you can see, it is a LOT more complex. What’s going on here? This unpolished face must be getting close to either the condyle or the cotyle, where the simple I-beam or anchor-shaped configuration of the centrum breaks up into lots of smaller chambers (as described in this even older post). It’s crazy how fast that can happen–this shard of excellence is only about 4 or 5 cm thick, and in that short space it has gone from anchor to honeycomb. I think that’s amazing, and beautiful.
It’s probably Apatosaurus–way too complex to be Camarasaurus or Haplocanthosaurus, not complex enough to be Barosaurus, no reason to suspect Brachiosaurus, and although there is other stuff in the DJ collections, the vast majority of the sauropod material is Apatosaurus. So that’s my null hypothesis for the ID.
Oh, back in 2009 I was pretty sure these chunks were from a dorsal, because of the round ventral profile of the centrum. I’m no longer so certain, now that I know that the anchor-shaped sections are so close to the end of the centrum, because almost all vertebrae get round near the ends. That said, the anchor-shaped sections are anchor-shaped because the pneumatic foramina are open, and having foramina that open, that close to the end of the vertebra still makes me think it is more likely a dorsal than anything else. I’m just less certain than I used to be–and that has been the common theme in my personal development over the last decade.
Matt bought an Iguanodon pelvis … OR DID HE???!
September 16, 2019
We’re just back from an excellent SVPCA on the Isle of Wight. We’ll write more about it, but this time I just want to draw attention to a neat find. During a bit of down time, Matt and Vicki were wandering around West Cowes (the town where the scientific sessions were held), when they stumbled across a place called That Shop. Intrigued by all the Lego figures in the window, they went in, and Matt found a small section of fossils. Including … an Iguanodon pelvis, supposedly certified as such by the Dinosaur Isle museum.
Here it is: I imagine that whoever classified it read this elongate concave surface as part of the acetabulum. Matt’s hypothesis is that they mistook it for a sacral vertebra and that became “pelvis” via over-simplification.
It’s about 18 cm in a straight line across the widest part, or 20 cm around the curve.
Here is an actual documentary record of Matt’s moment of discovery:
Yep, you got it! It’s a sauropod vertebra! (Matt would never have spent good money on a stinkin’ appendicular element of a stinkin’ ornithopod.)
Specifically, it’s the bottom half of the front part of the centrum of a dorsal vertebra:
“Eucamerotus” dorsal vertebra NHMUK PV R88 in right lateral and anterior views. Non-faded portions show the location of the Wedel Specimen. Modified from Hulke (1880: plate IV).
In these photos, we’re looking down into it more or less directly dorsal view, with anterior to the left. Click through the photos, and — once you know what you’re looking at — you can clearly see the pneumatic spaces: nice patches of finished bone lining the camellae, with trabecular bone in between.
Clearly there’s nowhere near enough of this to say what it is with any certainty. But our best guess is that it seems compatible with a titanosauriform identity, quite possibly in same space as the various Wealden sauropod dorsals that have been assigned to Ornithopsis or Eucamerotus.
References
- Hulke, J. W. 1880. Supplementary Note on the Vertebræ of Ornithopsis, Seeley, = Eucamerotous, Hulke. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society 36:31–35. doi:10.1144/GSL.JGS.1880.036.01-04.06
Supersaurus, Ultrasaurus and Dystylosaurus in 2019, part 8: we finally get to Ultrasauros!
July 9, 2019
One of the strange things about Jensen’s 1985 paper is that the abstract implies that he informally considered the Ultrasauros scapulocoracoid to be the type specimen.
Cast of BYU 9462, scapulocoracoid referred to Ultrasaurus macintoshi (possibly intended to the be the holotype), at Brigham Young Museum. This photo is one of a series in which I turned the cast in place to obtain photos for a photogrammetric model.
Here’s what Jensen (1985:697) says:
From 1972 to 1982 three exceptionally large sauropod scapulocoracoids […] were collected from the base of the Brushy Basin Member of the Upper Jurassic, Morrison Formation, in western Colorado. Two of the scapulae are conspecific, but the third represents a second genus and possibly a new family. The two conspecific specimens are described here as Supersaurus vivianae; the second genus is described as Ultrasaurus mcintoshi.
But on page 704, he formally and unambiguously nominated the dorsal vertebra as the holotype:
Family Brachiosauridae
Ultrasaurus macintoshi, n. gen., n. sp.
[…]
Holotype.—BYU 5000, posterior dorsal vertebra.
Referred material.—BYU 5001, scapulocoracoid.
Stranger still, two years after this, Jensen (1987:603) straight up claimed – quite incorectly — that the scap was the Ultrasaurus holotype:
In 1979 a scapulocoracoid, 2.70 m (8’10”) long (Figs. 6A-B, 9I) was collected in the Dry Mesa Quarry. This scapula, BYU 5000 [sic; he meant BYU 5001], is readily referrable to the Brachiosauridae (Fig. 9H) and is the holotype of Ultrasaurus macintoshi Jensen, 1985.
But it sayin’ it’s so don’t make it so. The joint evidence of the 1985 abstract and the 1987 extract suggest that Jensen probably intended the scap to be the holotype and somehow accidentally designated the wrong element — or was persuaded to do so against his own judgement. But however it came about, the scap is not the holotype.
BYU 9462, the scapulocoracoid referred by Jensen to Ultrasauros. Mike Taylor for scale, doing a Jensen. Note that the actual specimen is very much a mosaic of bone fragments, rather than the solid, complete bone that the cast might suggest.
Instead, the holotype remains the large posterior dorsal vertebra BYU 9044 (BYU 5000 of Jensen’s usage) which Curtice et al. (1996) convincingly showed to be diplodocid, and referred to Supersaurus, making Ultrasaurus (and its subsequent replacement Ultrasauros) a junior synonym of that name.
Ultrasauros macintoshi holotype dorsal vertebra BYU 9044, in left lateral view, photographed at the North American Museum of Natural Life. Sorry about all the reflections off the glass case.
But wait, wait. We’ve shown that there are probably two big diplodocids in the Dry Mesa quarry: Barosaurus (represented by the big cervical BYU 9024) and something different (represented by the “Dystylosaurus” dorsal, BYU 4503). The Ultrasauros holotype vertebra probably belongs to one of these (unless there are three big diplodocids in there but we’ll ignore that possibility). But we can’t tell whether the Ultrasauros dorsal belongs with the Barosaurus cervical or the Dystylosaurus dorsal.
All of this means that Ultrasauros is a synonym, but we don’t know of what. It might be Barosaurus; it might be Supersaurus, whatever that is, if it’s not a nomen dubium; and it might be Dystylosaurus, if Supersaurus is a nomen dubium. Yikes.
Well, then. Is it Barosaurus? Here are the dorsal vertebrae of the fairly complete AMNH specimen, in a composite that I put together a few years ago from McIntosh’s (2005) illustrations:
Barosaurus lentus AMNH 6341 dorsal vertebrae 1 to 9 in anterior, left lateral and posterior views. Modified from McIntosh (2005:figure 2.5)
We can compare these with the photo above of the Ultrasauros dorsal in left lateral view, and with this one in posterior view:
Ultrasauros macintoshi holotype dorsal vertebra BYU 9044, in posterior view, photographed at the North American Museum of Natural Life. Sorry about all the reflections off the glass case.
I wouldn’t want to hang too much on those poor quality, postage-stamp-sized monochrome photos of the Barosaurus dorsals. And I’m also more than aware of the imperfections in my photos of the “Ultrasauros” dorsal. But to the naked eye, there’s nothing here that immediately screams they couldn’t be the same thing.
Lull’s (1919) monograph on the original Barosaurus specimen YPM 429 also illustrated a posterior dorsal, which he designated D9. Lull helpfully provided both drawings and photographs:
Lull (1919: plate IV: parts 4-6). Barosaurus lentus holoype YPM 429, 9th dorsal vertebra in anterior, right lateral and posterior views (line drawing).
Lull (1919: plate IV: parts 4-6). Barosaurus lentus holoype YPM 429, 9th dorsal vertebra in anterior, right lateral and posterior views (photographs).
With something a bit more substantial to go on, the case for the Ultrasaurus vertebra being Barosarus doesn’t look so good.
Most obviously, its centrum is much longer than that of the Barosaurus dorsal — and indeed, than any posterior dorsal vertebra of any diplodocid. This character is the reason — the only reason — that Jensen (1985:704) initially thought it was brachiosaurid: “Ultrasaurus shares the family characteristic of a long dorsal centrum with Brachiosaurus, but in other features it has no parallel with that genus”. Curtice et al. (1996:90) argued that “extensive transverse and oblique crushing artificially elongate the centrum […]. Without the crushing […] the centrum shrinks considerably in length”. Based on my photos, I can’t really see any justification for this claim, but Curtice spent waaay more time with this specimen than I have done, so I’m going to hold that observation lightly.
But there are other features of BYU 9044 that are not a good match for Lull’s illustrations. These include a less robust looking and more prominently laminated subzygapophyseal neural arch, and a neural spine that is anteroposteriorly broader but transversely narrower than in Lull’s specimen. Also, the apex of the neural spine in anterior or posterior view is convex in BYU 9044 but concave in YPM 429.
None of these characters can be considered to definitely separate BYU 9044 from Barosaurus, especially in light of that element’s crushing, the imperfect preservation of Lull’s specimen, the possibility of serial variation, and the fact that I am working only from photographs and drawings of both. But when you put all the differences together, they combine to at least suggest that Ultrasaurus is not Barosaurus — and that it is therefore most likely Supersaurus/Dystylosaurus.
So what about the scapulocoracoid?
It looks brachiosaurid, as Jensen observed. Curtice et al. (1996) concurred, and referred it to Brachiosaurus sp. In fact, when compared with the best-preserved scapula of a known brachiosaurid Giraffatitan HMN Sa 9), it’s not all that similar:
Brachiosaurid scapulocoracoids. Left: cast of BYU 9462, right scapulocoracoid referred to Ultrasauros macintoshi, at Brigham Young Museum, with Mike Taylor for scale. Right: HMN Sa 9, left scapula only (coracoid is not co-ossified) of Giraffatitan brancai, scaled to same blade length as BYU 9462, photo by FunkMonk (Michael B. H.), CC By-SA.
It’s apparent, when looking at the two scaps together, that there are significant differences: BYU 9462 is in every respect less robust, having a less expanded distal blade, a more constricted midshaft, a less promiment and narrower acromial ridge and a much less robust ventral ridge. In addition, the acromion process is hooked in Sa 9, so that its tip projects laterally, whereas it is rounded in BYU 9462. Finally, the shapes of the distal blades differ, having a gently rounded profile in BYU 9462 but a distinct kink in Sa 9 where the dorsal part of the margin inclines anterodorsally.
What does all this mean? We don’t know. I’m certainly not arguing that BYU 9462 is not brachiosaurid, as it does seem to differ less from Giraffatitan scapulae than from those of other sauropods. All I’m saying is that it’s not all that Giraffatitan-like. But then every bone that we know from both Giraffatitan and Brachiosaurus is significantly different between them (Taylor 2009:798), so if a subsequently discovered associated skeleton one day shows us that this is just what the scapulocoracoid of Brachiosaurus altithorax looks like, it would not be a huge shock.
Still, as things stand, I’m not really convinced that the referral to Brachiosaurus sp. — based on a not-particularly-close resemblance to a completely different brachiosaurid — is rock solid. Had the scap been the type specimen, as Jensen probably intended, I would consider that the sound move would be to continue to consider Ultrasauros as a distinct taxon from Brachiosaurus, unless and until an associated specimen demonstrates that synonymy is warranted.
But that’s all in Shoulda-Coulda-Woulda territory. In fact the scapulocoracoid is not the type specimen, and so the name Ultrasauros remains sunk, even though we can’t tell whether it’s a synonym of Barosaurus, Supersaurus or Dystylosaurus. That will remain the case unless someone takes the initiative to raise a new name for the scapulocoracoid — which we can, at least, be confident does not belong the diplodocid Ultrasauros. I think that would be a reasonable move for someone to make, but it’s not one that I feel moved to make myself.
… and with that, I think we have finally reached the end of this series. We may revisit it in the future to say more about Jimbo, or maybe Dinheirosaurus, but this series has been the substance of what we have to say. Hope you’ve enjoyed it!
References
- Curtice, Brian D., Kenneth L. Stadtman and Linda J. Curtice. 1996. A reassessment of Ultrasauros macintoshi (Jensen, 1985). M. Morales (ed.), “The continental Jurassic”. Museum of Northern Arizona Bulletin 60:87–95.
- Jensen, James A. 1985. Three new sauropod dinosaurs from the Upper Jurassic of Colorado. Great Basin Naturalist 45(4):697–709.
- Jensen, James A. 1987. New brachiosaur material from the Late Jurassic of Utah and Colorado. Great Basin Naturalist 47(4):592–608.
- Lull, Richard S. 1919. The sauropod dinosaur Barosaurus Marsh. Memoirs of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 6:1–42.
- McIntosh, John S. 2005. The genus Barosaurus Marsh (Sauropoda, Diplodocidae). pp. 38-77 in: Virginia Tidwell and Ken Carpenter (eds.), Thunder Lizards: the Sauropodomorph Dinosaurs. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana. 495 pp.
- 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.
Supersaurus, Ultrasaurus and Dystylosaurus in 2019, part 7: at last, Dystylosaurus has its day!
July 8, 2019
Poor Dystylosaurus. Always the bridesmaid. No-one seems to care much about it, yet the one and only vertebra that bears that name is the single most diagnostic elements out of all the individual bones that have been assigned to Supersaurus over the years.
A nice drawing of the “Dystylosaurus” dorsal vertebra in anterior and right lateral views. It’s probably Tracey Ford’s work (awaiting confirmation), from the PaleoFile page on Supersaurus.
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to learn a whole ton about this vertebra on the Sauropocalypse visit. We did see it, but it was flat on its back on a shelf not much taller than the anteroposterior length of the bone itself, so we weren’t able to get a good look at it in anything but dorsal and ventral views. If we’d had more time to get things arranged, I’m sure the BYU people would have been happy to get it down from the shelf for us, but we simply had so much to do in their collections that time was never made for it.
BYU 4503, the holotype and only element of Dystylosaurus edwini, an anterior dorsal vertebra. here seen in approximately dorsal view with anterior to the top. Matt Wedel for scale.
Matt actually got some rather better photos a few years ago, though (based on his comment on that post), there are probably no more than the couple in that old blog-post. (By the way, notice how very different the colour of the bone appears in Matt’s old photos from how it appears in my more recent one above.)
Why do I say so confidently that the Dystylosaurus vertebra is diagnosable? Because it has a whole suite of characters that tell us it’s an anterior dorsal vertebra from a diplodocid (dual centroprezygapophyseal laminae, anteroposteriorly compressed spine composed primarily of spinozygapophyseal rather than spinodiapophyseal laminae, drooping transverse processes), yet two features of the spine are never seen in such vertebrae: the spine is wholly unsplit without even a hint of bifurcation, even featuring macronarian-like lateral apices; and it’s hollow inside rather than being constructed from intersecting plates of bone. (You can see the internal hollow in the photo above.)
So what happens to its genus name given the doubts about Supersaurus‘s diagnosability? The general trend of comments on these posts has been that Supersaurus should stand or fall on its holotype, and I am inclined to agree that parachuting in the Dystylosaurus vertebra or Jimbo as a neotype to save the name would be a mistake. For one thing, despite its numerous appearances in kids’ books, the name Supersaurus is not that important in the technical literature: for example, no-one has named a clade Supersaurinae or similar. For another, the holotypic scapulocoracoid BYU 9025 is only questionably undiagnosable. There would always be the possibility that if someone nominated a neotype and wrestled it through the ICZN petition process, someone else would find a good solid way to diagnose the original holotype. That would be embarrassing.
The rare ventral-ish view of the Dystylosaurus dorsal vertebra BYU 4503. Sorry it’s not better. I do have 93 photos of it in this shelf, all of them individually pretty terrible, which I took in the forlorn hope that one day we’ll get photogrammetry software simple enough and clever enough to make some kind of model out of them.
So I think we need to simply accept that the name Dystylosaurus, while perfectly diagnosable based on its holotype and only specimen, is destined to remain a junior synonym for as long as Supersaurus is considered taxonomically valid.
But it does leave Dystylosaurus in a bit of a quantum superposition. When Supersaurus is considered diagnosable, it ceases to exist, like a cat in a box. When Supersaurus is considered undiagnosable, it pops back into existence, like … well, a cat in a box. It’s an unsatisfactory kind of existence, but I think that’s the way it has to be.
So Dystylosaurus has its day — and it ends up being disappointing. Despite being perfectly diagnosable, it’s dependent for its validity on our assessment of other taxa. Some fossils just can’t catch a break.
Supersaurus, Ultrasaurus and Dystylosaurus in 2019, part 6: what happens to Supersaurus now?
July 2, 2019
Since the previous installment of this epic, we’ve taken two brief digressions on how little importance we should attach the colours of bones in our photographs when trying to determine whether they’re from the same individual: cameras do lie, and in any case different bones of the same individual can age differently. Since then — newsflash! — a third reason has become apparent in the case of the two Supersaurus scaps: the object we discussed as Scap A turns out to be a cast. A really good one, sure, but still: its colour tells us little about the colour of the actual bone.
If you doubt that, consider the scapulocoracoid referred to Ultrasauros (which we’ll be meeting again in the next post). Here is the real bone, at the North American Museum of Ancient Life (NAMAL), with me for scale:
BYU 9462, the scapulocoracoid referred by Jensen to Ultrasauros. Mike Taylor for scale, doing a Jensen. The signage reads: Brachiosaurus scapula and coracoid. Originally believed to belong to the genus Ultrasaurus (now invalid), this shoulder blade is from the giant herbivorous dinosaur Brachiosaurus, a replica of which is mounted in this room. The dinosaur that owned this scapula was over 65 feet long and could tower 45 feet above the ground. When collected by Jim Jensen at Dry Mesa Quarry (Colorado) in 1989, the scapula was believed to represent the largest dinosaur ever found. Note how many separate pieces are within the specimen. A tremendous amount of work is required to complete a fossil of this size. Specimen on loan from Brigham Young University’s Earth Science Museum. Late Jurassic/Early Cretaceous (about 144 million years ago)
And here’s Matt with the cast of the same bone that resides in the BYU collections:
As you can see, the cast has been prepared in a darker and browner colour than the pale greenish grey of the real bone (though don’t forget that cameras lie about colours, so we shouldn’t over-interpret this difference).
Aaanyway …
We finished up last time with the observation that the holotype scapulocoracoid of Supersaurus, BYU 9025, is not obviously diagnostic; and that since the cervical BYU 9024 that has been referred to it actually belongs to Barosaurus, we can’t trust any of the other referrals of big Dry Mesa diplodocid bones to Supersaurus; and that the name must therefore be considered a nomen dubium, resting as it does on non-diagnostic material.
Can the name Supersaurus survive? I think it can, and I see four possible routes to that happening.
Method 0: Everyone ignores these blog posts
This is only a blog, after all. No-one is obliged to pay any attention to anything we say here.
That said, Matt and I do have previous in transforming series of blog posts in to actual papers. Having invested so much effort into writing these posts, I do hope that I’ll be able to do the same thing in this case, so at some stage the ideas from this series should become part of the formal scientific record. (I make no promises about how long that will take.)
So assuming that we can’t all just walk away and pretend that none of this ever happened, are there better ways to save the name Supersaurus?
Method 1. Someone finds autapomophies
Matt and I are of course primarily vertebra jockies. We are not above studying the occasional taxon based on appendicular material, but our expertise lies in the domain of the axial. It’s perfectly possible that someone who understands sauropod appendicular anatomy better than we do could isolate some autapomorphies in the holotype scap BYU 9025, and Supersaurus would then be firmly founded on a diagnostic type specimen.
Can we find hope for this outcome in the results of phylogenetic analyses?
In Whitlock’s (2011) diplodocoid analysis, Supersaurus emerges with but a single autapomophy: “Anterior caudal neural spine height less than 150% centrum height” (page 44). Based, as it is, on a referred element, that doesn’t help us much here. (Although it’s worth noting that Whitlock scored this character as 0 for Supersaurus and 1 for Barosaurus, which does very slightly suggest that the referred caudal is not Barosaurus and therefore might belong to the same individual as the Supersaurus holotype. Yes, this is weak sauce.)
Tschopp et al.’s (2015) unnumbered supplementary file Apomorphies recovered by TNT under implied weighting is difficult to interpret: for example, a heading on the first page says simply “R_iw” and its counterpart on page 8 is simply “P_iw“. But the Supersaurus-relevant entries are the same under both headings. In both cases, they read:
Supersaurus vivianae BYU
Char. 258: 1 –> 0
Char. 274: 1 –> 0
WDC DMJ-021
Char. 165: 1 –> 2
Char. 172: 0 –> 1
Char. 174: 0 –> 1
Char. 257: 1 –> 2Node 137 (Supersaurus vivianae)
Char. 183: 1 –> 2
I read this as meaning that the two OTUs have autapomorphies as listed, and the node uniting them has a single synapomorphy. But all of these characters related to the presacral vertebrae (C165-C183 in the cervicals, C257-C274 in the dorsals). So again, there is nothing here to help us diagnose Supersaurus on the basis of the holotype scapulocoracoid.
Of course, that doesn’t prove that there there aren’t any diagnostic characters. Someone with a good eye for sauropod scapulocoracoids might find details missed by these phylogenetic analyses, whose remits were much broader. But the news so far is not good.
Method 2. Nominate a neotype from the BYU material
If we accept that there are probably no more than two big diplodocoids in the Dry Mesa quarry, and that one of them is Barosaurus (based in the big cervical BYU 9024), and that the “Dystylosaurus” vertebra BYU 4503 is not Barosaurus, then it must follow that it belongs to Supersaurus. Unlike the type scapulocoracoid BYU 9025, that vertebra probably is diagnostic (it’s an anterior diplodocid dorsal, yet its spine is unsplit) so perhaps Supersaurus could survive by being diagnosed on that basis.
How would this work nomenclaturally? I think it would be difficult. If I have properly understood Article 75 of the ICZN, you can only go ahead and designate a neotype “when no name-bearing type specimen (i.e. holotype, lectotype, syntype or prior neotype) is believed to be extant”. But the holotype scapulocoracoid exists (so far as we know, though we’re not sure where it is).
All is not necessarily lost, though. Paragraph 75.5 (Replacement of unidentifiable name-bearing type by a neotype) says “When an author considers that the taxonomic identity of a nominal species-group taxon cannot be determined from its existing name-bearing type (i.e. its name is a nomen dubium), and stability or universality are threatened thereby, the author may request the Commission to set aside under its plenary power [Art. 81] the existing name-bearing type and designate a neotype.” But that means writing an ICZN petition, and I’m not sure anyone wants to do that. The process is technical, picky and prolonged, and its outcome is subject to the whim of the committee. It’s quite possible someone might go to all the trouble of writing a petition, then wait five years, only to have it rejected.
The irony here is that when Curtice and Stadtman (2001) referred the “Dystylosaurus” dorsal BYU 4503 to Supersaurus, they were at liberty to sink Supersaurus into Dystylosaurus rather than vice versa. Then the unique dorsal vertebra would have become the holotype, and the surviving genus would have been nicely diagnosable. Curtice and Stadtman (2001) did not discuss this possibility; nor did Curtice et al. (1996) discuss the possibility of folding Supersaurus into Ultrasauros when determining that the holotype vertebra of the latter belongs to the same taxon as the former.
Curtice and his collaborators were likely following the principle of “page priority”: preferring Supersaurus over the other two genera as it was the first one named in Jensen’s (1985) article that named all three. However, page priority does not exist at all in the present version of the Code (see Article 24, Precedence between simultaneously published names, spellings or acts), and even in earlier versions was only a non-binding recommendation. So it was really Curtice’s and his friends’ choice which genus to retain.
But that ship has now sailed. According to the principle of first reviser (Section 24.2.1), the pubished actions of Curtice and colleagues established a new status quo, and their choice of genus stands.
Method 3. Nominate Jimbo as a neotype
We might conceivably give up on the mixed-up Dry Mesa material as too uncertain to base anything on, and nominate WDC DM-021 (“Jimbo”) as the neotype specimen instead. It may have less material in total than has been referred to Supersaurus from the Dry Mesa quarry, but the association is somewhat more solid (Lovelace et al. 2008:528).
In some ways this might be the most satisfactory conclusion: it would give us a more solid basis on which to judge whether or not subsequent specimens can be said to belong to Supersaurus. But as with method 2, it could only be done via a petition to the ICZN, and I suspect the chances of such a petition succeeding would be low because clause 75.3.6 of the Code says that neotype designation should include “evidence that the neotype came as nearly as practicable from the original type locality [of] the original name-bearing type”.
So I don’t think this is likely to work, but I mention it for completeness. (Also, I am not 100% sure how solid the association of the Jimbo elements is, as the wording in Lovelace et al. (2008:528) does hedge a little.)
In conclusion …
I think the best hope for the survival of the name Supersaurus would be the recognition of unambiguously diagnostic characters in the holotype scapulocoracoid BYU 9025. In comments on the last post, John D’Angelo has started to think about what characters might work here. We’ll see how that thread pans out.
On the other hand, do we even particularly want the name Supersaurus to survive? It’s a pretty dumb name. Maybe we should just let it die peacefully.
Next time — in what really, really, really will be the last post in this series — we’ll consider what all this means for the other two names in Jensen’s trio, Dystylosaurus and Ultrasauros.
References
- Curtice, Brian D. and Kenneth L. Stadtman. 2001. The demise of Dystylosaurus edwini and a revision of Supersaurus vivianae. Western Association of Vertebrate Paleontologists and Mesa Southwest Museum and Southwest Paleontologists Symposium, Bulletin 8:33-40.
- Curtice, Brian D., Kenneth L. Stadtman and Linda J. Curtice. 1996. A reassessment of Ultrasauros macintoshi (Jensen, 1985). M. Morales (ed.), “The continental Jurassic”. Museum of Northern Arizona Bulletin 60:87–95.
- Jensen, James A. 1985. Three new sauropod dinosaurs from the Upper Jurassic of Colorado. Great Basin Naturalist 45(4):697–709.
- Lovelace, David M., Scott A. Hartman and William R. Wahl. 2008. Morphology of a specimen of Supersaurus (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) from the Morrison Formation of Wyoming, and a re-evaluation of diplodocid phylogeny. Arquivos do Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro 65(4):527–544.
- Tschopp, Emanuel, Octávio Mateus and Roger B. J. Benson. 2015. A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda). PeerJ 2:e857. doi:10.7717/peerj.857
- Whitlock, John A. 2011. A phylogenetic analysis of Diplodocoidea (Saurischia: Sauropoda). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 161(4):872-915. doi:10.1111/j.1096-3642.2010.00665.x
Supersaurus, Ultrasaurus and Dystylosaurus in 2019, part 3: the material of Supersaurus
June 17, 2019
Having surveyed what we know from the published literature about Jensen’s Big Three sauropods, and what Matt and I concluded about its big cervical BYU 9024, and having thought a bit more about the size of the BYU 9024 animal, we’re getting to the point where we can consider what all this means for Jensen’s taxa.
The Supersaurus pelvis BYU 13018 in right lateral view, at the North American Museum of Ancient Life (NAMAL). Signage reads: “Supersaurus pelvis. In 1988 the pelvis of Supersaurus was discovered at Dry Mesa Quarry. Brian Versey, Cliff Miles and Ken Stadtman of Brigham Young University’s Earth Science Museum found the pelvis while they were trying to close the quarry for the season. The discovery generated a huge media event, making headlines around the world. This pelvis is the largest dinosaur bone complex ever discovered. It is on display here for the very first time. Specimen on loan from Brigham Young University’s Earth Science Museum. Late Jurassic/Early Cretaceous (about 144 million years ago)
As Curtice and Stadtman (2001:36-39) pointed out, Supersaurus is actually known from quite a lot of material, all assigned to the holotype individual. I’ll quote them at length rather than paraphrasing, but if you want a tabular summary, you can skip the quote and pick up down below.
Supersaurus vivianae roll call
The name “Supersaurus” first appeared in a Reader’s Digest article (George, 1973) describing a pair of 8′ long scapulocoracoids uncovered from Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry near Delta, Colorado. When formally described (Jensen, 1985) a number of elements were referred to the holotype including the left scapulocoracoid discovered in 1972 (BYU 9025), a right scapulocoracoid (BYU 12962), a right ischium (BYU 12946), a distal proximal caudal vertebra (BYU 12843) and 12 articulated mid-caudal vertebrae (BYU 9084). An additional caudal vertebra (BYU 9077) is referred to (and figured as) Supersaurus in the text of Jensen (1985). The specimen numbers used in Jensen (1985), no longer valid, have created confusion in the literature (e.g., Paul, 1988) and thus current BYU specimen numbers are used here throughout.
Jensen (1987) later referred a mid-cervical vertebra (BYU 9024) and Curtice and Curtice (1996) a proximal caudal vertebra (BYU 9045), both originally assigned to Ultrasauros, to Supersaurus. Numerous additional elements belong to Supersaurus, including a left ischium (BYU 12555), which is clearly the mate to the referred right ischium (BYU 12946), a right pubis (BYU 12424), a carpal (BYU 12390), a phalanx (BYU 9000), a left ulna (BYU 13744), at least five caudal vertebrae (BYU 4839, 9045, 12639, 12819, 12843) and a pelvis (BYU 13018) consisting of a left ilium and four sacral vertebrae.
Jensen never referred the two Supersaurus scapulocoracoids to the same individual due to a 260 mm discrepancy in length. Stripping away the paint and resin on BYU 9025 revealed the proximal end had been inadvertently lengthened during preservation. Close examination of the actual bone surface nets a total scapulocoracoid length less than 50 mm longer than BYU 12962, an amount easily accounted for by scapular variation and thus here both are referred to the same individual. Concerning the large brachiosaur scapulocoracoid (BYU 9462) Jensen (1985) listed as part of the material belonging to Ultrasauros, it is demonstrably smaller than the largest Tendaguru scapula and has been referred to Brachiosaurus sp. (Curtice and Curtice, 1996; Curtice et al., 1996). As such all exceptionally large sauropod elements from Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry can be referred to one of two individuals, one a Supersaurus and one a Brachiosaurus.
A dorsal vertebra (BYU 9044) referred to Supersaurus (Curtice and Curtice, 1996; Curtice et al., 1996) results in Ultrasaurus macintoshi becoming a junior synonym of Supersaurus vivianae, as BYU 9044 was the type specimen of Ultrasauros. A second dorsal vertebra, BYU 12814, is also here referred to Supersaurus based on its similarities to BYU 9044. All of the three large dorsal vertebrae mentioned herein were found within the confines of the paired Supersaurus scapulae further strengthening the suggestion all of the large diplodocid elements belong to a single individual.
(Yes, it really does say “a distal proximal caudal vertebra”.)
Curtice and Stadtman say that the pelvis consists of left ilium plus four sacral vertebrae; but as the photo above clearly shows, it is the right ilium that is preserved.
Here is a summary table, in standard anatomical order:
| Specimen | Element | Referred by | |
| 9024 | Mid-cervical vertebra | Jensen 1987 | |
| 4503 | Anterior dorsal vertebra | Curtice & Stadtman 2001 | |
| 9044 | Posterior dorsal vertebra | Curtice et al. 1996 | |
| 12814 | Posterior dorsal vertebra | Curtice & Stadtman 2001 | |
| 13018 | Pelvis (right ilium, four sacral vertebrae) | Curtice & Stadtman 2001 | |
| 9045 | Proximal caudal vertebra | Curtice & Curtice 1996 | |
| 12843 | “Distal proximal” caudal vertebra | Jensen 1985 | |
| 9084 | Twelve articulated mid-caudal vertebrae | Jensen 1985 | |
| 9077 | Caudal vertebra | Jensen 1985 | |
| 4839 | Caudal vertebra | Curtice & Stadtman 2001 | |
| 9045 | Caudal vertebra | Curtice & Stadtman 2001 | |
| 12639 | Caudal vertebra | Curtice & Stadtman 2001 | |
| 12819 | Caudal vertebra | Curtice & Stadtman 2001 | |
| 12843 | Caudal vertebra | Curtice & Stadtman 2001 | |
| 9025 | Left scapulocoracoid | Holotype | |
| 12962 | Right scapulocoracoid | Jensen 1985 | |
| 13744 | Left ulna | Curtice & Stadtman 2001 | |
| 12390 | Carpal | Curtice & Stadtman 2001 | |
| 12424 | Right pubis | Curtice & Stadtman 2001 | |
| 12946 | Right ischium | Jensen 1985 | |
| 12555 | Left ischium | Curtice & Stadtman 2001 | |
| 9000 | Phalanx | Curtice & Stadtman 2001 |
This is an impressively complete specimen — especially for a giant sauropod, as these tend only to survive in the form of isolated elements.
But is it really one specimen? That’s the subject of the next post.
(This post is rather slender by recent standards. That’s because I accidentally hit Publish when it was only half written. Rather than leave it to slowly change as I write more, I think it’s better to let this first half stand as its own post, and write the rest as its own post next time.)
References
- Curtice, Brian D. and Linda J. Curtice. 1996. Death of a dinosaur: a reevaluation of Ultrasauros macintoshi (Jensen 1985). Journal of Vertebrae Paleontology 16(3):26A.
- Curtice, Brian D. and Kenneth L. Stadtman. 2001. The demise of Dystylosaurus edwini and a revision of Supersaurus vivianae. Western Association of Vertebrate Paleontologists and Mesa Southwest Museum and Southwest Paleontologists Symposium, Bulletin 8:33-40.
- Curtice, Brian D., Kenneth L. Stadtman and Linda J. Curtice. 1996. A reassessment of Ultrasauros macintoshi (Jensen, 1985). M. Morales (ed.), “The continental Jurassic”. Museum of Northern Arizona Bulletin 60:87–95.
- Jensen, James A. 1985. Three new sauropod dinosaurs from the Upper Jurassic of Colorado. Great Basin Naturalist 45(4):697–709.
- Jensen, James A. 1987. New brachiosaur material from the Late Jurassic of Utah and Colorado. Great Basin Naturalist 47(4):592–608.
Supersaurus, Ultrasaurus and Dystylosaurus in 2019, part 2b: the size of the BYU 9024 animal
June 16, 2019
In part 2, we concluded that BYU 9024, the large cervical vertebra assigned by Jensen to the Supersaurus holotype individual, is in fact a perfectly well-behaved Barosaurus cervical — just a much, much bigger one than we’ve been used to seeing. Although we heavily disclaimered our size estimates, Andrea Cau quite rightly commented:
Thanks for the disclaimer: unfortunately, it is going to be ignored by the Internet.
[…]
So, my boring-conservative mind asks: what is the smallest size that is a valid alternative explanation? I mean, if we combine all possible factors (position misinterpretation, deformation effects, allometry and so on) what could be the smallest plausible size? Only the latter should be taken as “the size” of this animal, pending more material.
Andrea is right that we should take a moment to think a bit more about the possible size implications of BYU 9024.
BYU 9024, the huge cervical vertebra assigned to Supersaurus but which is actually Barosaurus, in left dorsolateral view, lying on its right side with anterior to the right. In front of it, for scale, a Diplodocus cervical from about the same serial position. (Note that the Diplodocus vertebra here appears proportionally bigger than it really is, due to being much closer to the camera.)
What we know for sure is that the vertebra is 1380 mm long (give or take a centimeter or two due to the difficulties of measuring big complex bones in an objective way, something we should write about separately some time.)
We are 99% certain that the bone is a Barosaurus cervical.
We are much less certain about the serial position of that bone. When we were at BYU, we concluded that it most resembled C9 of the AMNH specimen, but I honestly can’t remember the detail of our reasoning (can you, Matt?) and our scanned notebooks don’t offer much in the way of help. We know from McIntosh (2005) that the neural spine of C8 is unsplit and that C9 has the first hint of a cleft. How does that compare with BYU 9024? Here’s a photo to help you decide:
BYU 9024, large cervical vertebra in left dorsolateral view, inverted (i.e. with dorsal towards us and anterior to the right). Note the shallow cleft between metapophyses at bottom left.
And here’s an anaglyph, to help you appreciate the 3D structure. (Don’t have any red-cyan glasses? GET SOME!)
BYU 9024, oriented similarly to the previous photograph.
The morphology around the crown of the neural spine is difficult to interpret, partly just because the fossil itself is a bit smashed up and partly because the bone, the (minimal) restoration and the matrix are such similar colours. But here’s my best attempt to draw out what’s happening, zoomed in from last non-anaglyph photo:
As you start at the prezygapophyses and work backwards, the SPRLs fade out some way before you reach the crown, and disappear at or before what appears to be an ossified midline ligament scar projecting anteriorly from very near the top of the vertebra. Posterior to that are two small, tab-like metapophyses that appear almost like separate osteological features.
Now this is a very strange arrangement. Nothing like it occurs in any of the cervicals of Diplodocus, where all the way from C3 back to the last cervical, the SPRLs run continuously all the way up from the prezygs to the metapophyses:
Hatcher (1901:plate V). Diplodocus carnegii holotype CM 84, cervical vertebra 2-15 in anterior view.
What we’d love to do of course is compare this morphology with a similar plate of the AMNH Barosaurus cervicals in anterior view, but no such plate exists and no such photos can be taken due to the ongoing entombment of the vertebrae. So we’re reduced to feeding on scraps. McIntosh (2005:47) says:
The neural spine of cervical 8 is flat across the top, and that of cervical 9 shows the first trace of a divided spine (Fig. 2.2A). This division increases gradually in sequential vertebrae, being moderately developed in cervicals 12 and 13, and as a deep V-shape in cervicals 15 and 16.
Sadly, McIntosh illustrates only cervicals 8 and 13 in anterior view: Fig 2.2A does not illustrate C9, as the text implies. And neither of the illustrated vertebrae much resembles what we see in BYU 9024.
So while in 2016 we interpreted BYU 9024 is having “the first trace of a divided spine”, we do hold open the possibility that what we’re seeing is a vertebra in which the spine bifurcation is a little more developed than we’d realised, but with strange morphology that does not correspond closely to any well-preserved vertebra we’ve seen of any sauropod. (Most Barosaurus cervicals are either crushed and damaged; the well preserved ones outside of the AMNH walkway tomb are from a more anterior part of the neck where there is no bifurcation of the spine.)
There is one more possibility. Here is a truly lovely (privately owned) Barosaurus cervical in the prep lab at the North American Museum of Ancient Life (NAMAL):
Uncrushed Barosaurus cervical vertebra, serial position uncertain, in the NAMAL prep lab.
In this blessedly undistorted vertebra, we can see that the summit of the neural spine is flared, with laterally projecting laminae that are likely homologous with metapophyses. (The vertebra is symmetrical in this respect.) Might it be possible that the tab-like metapophyses of BYU 9024 were like this in life, but have been folded upwards post-mortem?
All of this leaves the serial position of the vertebra far from certain. But what we can do is compare it with the lengths of all the known AMNH Barosaurus vertebrae. Columns 1 and 2 in the table below show the serial position and total length of the AMNH cervicals. Column 3 shows the factor by which the 1370 mm length of BYU 9024 exceeds the relevant cervical, and column 4 shows the corresponding estimate for total neck length, based on 8.5 m (Wedel 2007:206–207) for AMNH Barosaurus.
| Cv# | Length (mm) | BYU 9224 ratio | BYU 9024 neck length |
| 8 | 618 | 2.217 | 18.84 |
| 9 | 685 | 2.000 | 17.00 |
| 10 | 737 | 1.859 | 15.80 |
| 11 | 775 | 1.768 | 15.03 |
| 12 | 813 | 1.685 | 14.32 |
| 13 | 850 | 1.612 | 13.70 |
| 14 | 865 | 1.584 | 13.46 |
| 15 | 840 | 1.631 | 13.86 |
| 16 | 750 | 1.827 | 15.53 |
So to finally answer Andrea’s question from waaay back at the start of this post, the smallest possible interpretation of the BYU 9024 animal gives it a neck 1.584 times as long as that of the AMNH individual, which comes out around 13.5 m (and implies a total length of maybe 43 m).
But I don’t at all think that’s right: I am confident that the serial position of BYU 9024 is some way anterior to C14, likely no further back than C11 — which gives us a neck at least 15 m long (and a total length of maybe 48 m and a mass of maybe 12 × 1.768^3 = 66 tonnes).
References
- Hatcher, Jonathan B. 1901. Diplodocus (Marsh): its osteology, taxonomy and probable habits, with a restoration of the skeleton. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 1:1-63 and plates I-XIII.
- McIntosh, John S. 2005. The genus Barosaurus Marsh (Sauropoda, Diplodocidae). pp. 38-77 in: Virginia Tidwell and Ken Carpenter (eds.), Thunder Lizards: the Sauropodomorph Dinosaurs. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana. 495 pp.
- Wedel, Mathew J. 2007. Postcranial pneumaticity in dinosaurs and the origin of the avian lung. Ph.D dissertation, Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA. Advisors: Kevin Padian and Bill Clemens. 290 pages.
Last time, we reviewed what’s known about Jensen’s three giant sauropods based on published papers (and one abstract). This time, I want to talk a bit about what Matt and I have discovered, and intend to publish when we get around to it.
The Three Baro Jacket
It all followed on from our work on Barosaurus (which for now remains available only as a preprint, becalmed as it is in the peer-review doldrums — mostly my fault). Because of that, we were on the alert for Barosaurus material when we were travelling around Utah in Spring of 2016, and one of the first things we locked onto at the Brigham Young University’s Museum of Paleontology (BYU) was this:
We’ve been informally calling this “Three Baro Jacket”, or “3BJ” for short. But if we’re being formal, it’s specimen BYU 20815, being field jacket 3GR from BYU Locality 601 (The Jensen/Jensen quarry at Jensen, Utah), excavated in 1966. It also has an accession number, JJ/66 (which I didn’t realise was different from the specimen number).
Here it is being winched out of the ground at the Jensen/Jensen quarry, back in 1966 (photo courtesy of Brooks Britt):
This jacket contains — as our name for it suggests — three Barosaurus cervicals. The easiest way to see them is in 3D, using this red-cyan anaglyph, which shows the structure of the block much more informatively than the flat photo above:
(Do you have red-cyan anaglyph glasses? If not get some. They are dirt cheap, and will show you a whole world of morphology. For example, Amazon will send you ten pairs for $3.26, so you can keep two at home and two at work, and give half a dozen to your friends.)
For those stuck in the 2D world, these interpretive drawings should help to pick out the vertebrae from the matrix: they show individually the three vertebrae that we arbitrarily designated as A, B and C in that order.
Characters of Barosaurus cervicals
We spent some time looking pretty closely at these vertebra to figure out what they were — after all, the jacket wasn’t presented to us as “Here are some Barosaurus cervicals”. As we did so, we kept comparing the 3BJ vertebrae with photos we’d taken of the YPM and AMNH Barosaurus cervicals, and published illustrations. And as we did this, we discovered a whole set of distinctive characteristics of Barosaurus cervicals. We will properly describe and illustrate these characters another time, but to briefly summarise:
- 1. Centra very long relative to vertebral height (measured at the posterior articular surface). This one will come as no surprise.
- 2. Neural spine low and fairly smooth in profile.
- 3. Postzygapophyses set forward slightly from posterior margin of centrum — as opposed to set well forward in brachiosaurs, or overhanging the posterior margin in apatosaurs.
- 4. Parapophysis set much further forward than diapophysis, so that the cervical rib loop projects anteroventrally from the diapophysis.
- 5. Cervical rib loop very thin anteroventrally (and lateromedially).
- 6. Distinct hollow “thumb groove” between prezygapophyseal facet and pre-epipophysis.
- 7. “U”-shaped notch in dorsal view where prezygapophyseal rami meet.
- 8. Prezygapophyseal rami have two “faces” at right angles: one facing dorsomedially (bearing the prezgapophyseal facet), one facing dorsolaterally.
- 9. Prezyagpophyseal rami very broad.
- 10. Process projecting posteriorly from diapophysis.
- 11. Prezyadiapophyseal lamina sweeps out smoothly to diaphophysis in dorsal view.
(These characters are all illustrated in our 2016 SVPCA talk: check the slides if you want to get a better handle on what we’re describing here. The reason I listed them in the slightly odd order above is so you can easily match them up with the slides.)
Now these vertebrae are well worthy of proper study and description in their own right, and we do plan to give them the attention they deserve. But for today’s story, they have done their part.
What is BYU 9024?
Now, here’s the thing. Literally a couple of yards away from the Three Baro Jacket in BYU collections sits the single longest vertebra of anything ever discovered: our old friend BYU 9024 (what Jensen called BYU 5003), which was originally assigned to Ultrasaurus (Jensen 1985), then reassigned to Supersaurus (Jensen 1987).
Mike compares Jensen’s sculpture of the big Supersaurus cervical BYU 9024 with the actual fossil.
And the more we looked at Barosaurus cervicals, then looked at BYU 9024, then looked back at Barosaurus, the more convinced we became that BYU 9024 is itself a Barosaurus cervical.
You would not immediately think this to look at the bone, as it’s pretty smashed up, and very difficult to interpret from photos, but this anaglyph will help:
As we discussed before, the posterior end looks much taller dorsoventrally than it should, because the postzygapophysis is folded upwards and the ventrolateral processes folded down.
Here’s what we see in BYU 9024 in terms of the characters we picked out from the 3BJ vertebrae. First, in left lateral view, with the characters highlighted in green:
- 1. Centra very long relative to vertebral height (measured at the posterior articular surface).
- 2. Neural spine low and fairly smooth in profile.
- 3. Postzygapophyses set forward slightly from posterior margin of centrum.
- 4. Parapophysis set much further forward than diapophysis, so that the cervical rib loop projects anteroventrally from the diapophysis.
- 10. Process projecting posteriorly from diapophysis.
Now in anterodorsal view, with dorsal to the left:
- 7. “U”-shaped notch in dorsal view where prezygapophyseal rami meet.
- 8. Prezygapophyseal rami have two “faces” at right angles: one facing dorsomedially (bearing the prezgapophyseal facet), one facing dorsolaterally.
- 9. Prezyagpophyseal rami very broad.
(It’s not easy to tell from this photo, but the broken-off area of flattish bone highlighted in the circle is part of the dorsolaterally-facing aspect of the prezygapophyseal ramus, where is it merging into the prezygadiapophyseal lamina.)
Three of the characters we saw in 3BJ we couldn’t determine in BYU 9024, due to breakage:
- 5. Cervical rib loop very thin anteroventrally (and lateromedially).
- 6. Distinct hollow “thumb groove” between prezygapophyseal facet and pre-epipophysis.
- 11. Prezyadiapophyseal lamina sweeps out smoothly to diaphophysis in dorsal view.
But the morphology that’s preserved is certainly compatible with all of these. There are also a couple more characters in this vertebra that indicate that it’s Barosaurus, which we were not able to isolate in any of the 3BJ vertebrae:
- A pair of posteroventrally directed accessory laminae radiating from the part of the centrum surface medial to the diapophysis. (These may be homologous with PCDLs but they seem to come out from under the PODL.)
- It lacks paired foramina on the ventral surface separated by a midline ridge, as seen in Apatosaurus and WDC Supersaurus. (Thanks to David Lovelace from drawing our attention to that one in a comment on the last post!)
No one or two of these characters is a slam-dunk in isolation. But when you put them all together, they leave us pretty much 100% satisfied that BYU 9024 is a Barosaurus cervical.
How big was the BYU 9024 animal?
Before we say anything at all about this, please first hear our standard disclaimer: any size estimate based on a single bone is necessarily going to be wildly speculative, and could easily be a long way out in either direction.
That said, here’s the thinking behind our best guess.
First, what is the serial position of BYU 9024? We’d like to determine this by comparing with the cervical series of AMNH 6341, which is pretty well preserved — but unfortunately it has never been adequately illustrated and is now impossible to photograph as it is entombed below a walkway in the AMNH public gallery. Here’s the best published illustration, from McIntosh (2005:figure 2.1):
We judge it most similar to C9 or maybe C10, based largely on neural spine bifurcation and general proportions when corrected for distortion.
In AMNH, C9 is 685 mm long and C10 is 737 mm long (McIntosh 2005:table 2.1). Since BYU 9024 is 1370 mm in length, it is exactly twice as long as the C9 and 1.86 times as long as the C10.
I think I speak for all right-thinking people when I say holy crap.
If our identification of BYU 9024 as a C9 of Barosaurus is correct, then we are talking about an animal twice as large in linear dimension as the AMNH specimen whose cast looms over the rotunda (and the one at the Natural History Museum of Utah, which by eye is about the same size). Since the neck of the AMNH specimen is 8.5 m long (Wedel 2007:206–207), that would mean that the neck alone of BYU 9024 would have been 17 m long: longer than most complete sauropods and substantially taller than the mounted Giraffatitan skeleton in Berlin. The length of the whole animal is harder to predict, even if we assume isometry, but if Paul’s (2010:189) length estimate of 27 m for regular Barosaurus is correct, we’re probably looking at a total length exceeding 50 m.
This animal would, other things being equal, be eight times as massive (2 × 2 × 2) as the AMNH Barosaurus. There aren’t a lot of Barosaurus mass estimates out there, but Wedel (2005:217–221) did a lot of careful work to arrive at about 12 tonnes for the Diplodocus carnegii holotype CM 84, which is about the same size as the AMNH Barosaurus. If that’s right, then the BYU 9024 animal might have massed about 8 × 12 = 96 tonnes, which puts it right up there among the heaviest known sauropods: probably the heaviest represented by extant fossils, as the other strong contenders for that title are Maraapunisaurus and Bruhathkayosaurus, both known only from illustrations of now-destroyed specimens.
[UPDATE, the next day: see the next post for more on the serial position of the vertebra and the size of the animal.]
We presented most of this reasoning in our 2016 SVPCA talk, whose abstract and slides are online. (Sadly, there is no recording of the actual talk.)
Tune in for the post after that as we (finally!) reach the part promised by the title of this series, and consider where Jensen’s Big Three genera stand today.
References
- Jensen, James A. 1985. Three new sauropod dinosaurs from the Upper Jurassic of Colorado. Great Basin Naturalist 45(4):697–709.
- Jensen, James A. 1987. New brachiosaur material from the Late Jurassic of Utah and Colorado. Great Basin Naturalist 47(4):592–608.
- McIntosh, John S. 2005. The genus Barosaurus Marsh (Sauropoda, Diplodocidae). pp. 38-77 in: Virginia Tidwell and Ken Carpenter (eds.), Thunder Lizards: the Sauropodomorph Dinosaurs. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana. 495 pp.
- Paul, Gregory S. 2010. Dinosaurs: a Field Guide. A. & C. Black Publishers ltd. London, UK. 320 pp.
- Wedel, Mathew J. 2005. Postcranial skeletal pneumaticity in sauropods and its implications for mass estimates. pp. 201-228 in Wilson, J. A., and Curry-Rogers, K. (eds.), The Sauropods: Evolution and Paleobiology. University of California Press, Berkeley
- Wedel, Mathew J. 2007. Postcranial pneumaticity in dinosaurs and the origin of the avian lung. Ph.D dissertation, Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA. Advisors: Kevin Padian and Bill Clemens. 290 pages.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
