How our week at the Carnegie Museum went
March 17, 2019
In a word, amazingly. After 6 days (counting public galleries last Sunday), 4300 photos, 55 videos, dozens of pages of notes, and hundreds of measurements, we’re tired, happy, and buzzing with new observations and ideas.
We caught up with some old friends. Here Mike is showing an entirely normal and healthy level of excitement about meeting CM 584, a specimen of Camarasaurus from Sheep Creek, Wyoming. You may recognize this view of these dorsals from Figure 9 in our 2013 PeerJ paper.
We spent an inordinate amount of time in the public galleries, checking out the mounted skeletons of Apatosaurus and Diplodocus (and Gilmore’s baby Cam, and the two tyrannosaurs, and, and…).
I had planned a trip to the Carnegie primarily to have another look at the Haplocanthosaurus holotypes, CM 572 and CM 879. I was also happy for the chance to photograph and measure these vertebrae, CM 36034, which I think have never been formally described or referred to Haplocanthosaurus. As far as I know, other than a brief mention in McIntosh (1981) they have not been published on at all. I’m planning on changing that in the near future, as part of the larger Haplocanthosaurus project that now bestrides my career like a colossus.
The real colossus of the trip was CM 555, which we’ve already blogged about a couple of times. Just laying out all of the vertebrae and logging serial changes was hugely useful.
Incidentally, in previous posts and some upcoming videos, we’ve referred to this specimen as Brontosaurus excelsus, because McIntosh (1981) said that it might belong to Apatosaurus excelsus. I was so busy measuring and photographing stuff that it wasn’t until Friday that I realized that McIntosh made that call because CM 555 is from the same locality as CM 563, now UWGM 15556, which was long thought to be Apatosaurus excelsus but which is now (i.e., Tschopp et al. 2015) referred to Brontosaurus parvus. So CM 555 is almost certainly B. parvus, not B. excelsus, and in comparing the specimen to Gilmore’s (1936) plates of CM 563, Mike and I thought they were a very good match.
Finding the tray of CM 555 cervical ribs was a huge moment. It added a ton of work to our to-do lists. First we had to match the ribs to their vertebrae. Most of them had field numbers, but some didn’t. Quite a few were broken and needed to be repaired – that’s what I’m doing in the above photo. Then they all had to be measured and photographed.
It’s amazing how useful it was to be able to reassociate the vertebrae with their ribs. We only did the full reassembly for c6, in part because it was the most complete and perfect of all of the vertebrae, and in part because we simply ran out of time. As Mike observed in his recent post, it was stunning how the apatosaurine identity of the specimen snapped into focus as soon as we could see a whole cervical vertebra put back together with all of its bits.
We also measured and photographed the limb bones, including the bite marks on the radius (above, in two pieces) and ulna (below, one piece). Those will of course go into the description.
And there WILL BE a description. We measured and photographed every element, shot video of many of them, and took pages and pages of notes. Describing even an incomplete sauropod skeleton is a big job, so don’t expect that paper this year, but it will be along in due course. CM 555 may not be the most complete Brontosaurus skeleton in the world, but our ambition is to make it the best-documented.
In the meantime, we hopefully left things better documented than they had been. All of the separate bits of the CM 555 vertebrae – the centra, arches, and cervicals ribs – now have the cervical numbers written on in archival ink (with permission from collections manager Amy Henrici, of course), so the next person to look at them can match them up with less faffing about.
We have people to thank. We had lunch almost every day at Sushi Fuku at 120 Oakland Avenue, just a couple of blocks down Forbes Avenue from the museum. We got to know the manager, Jeremy Gest, and his staff, who were unfailingly friendly and helpful, and who kept us running on top-notch food. So we kept going back. If you find yourself in Pittsburgh, check ’em out. Make time for a sandwich at Primanti Bros., too.
We owe a huge thanks to Calder Dudgeon, who took us up to the skylight catwalk to get the dorsal-view photos of the mounted skeletons (see this post), and especially to Dan Pickering, who moved pallets in collections using the forklift, and moved the lift around the mounted skeletons on Tuesday. Despite about a million ad hoc requests, he never lost patience with us, and in fact he found lots of little ways to help us get our observations and data faster and with less hassle.
Our biggest thanks go to collections manager Amy Henrici, who made the whole week just run smoothly for us. Whatever we needed, she’d find. If we needed something moved, or if we needed to get someplace, she’d figure out how to do it. She was always interested, always cheerful, always helpful. I usually can’t sustain that level of positivity for a whole day, much less a week. So thank you, Amy, sincerely. You have a world-class collection. We’re glad it’s in such good hands.
What’s next? We’ll be posting about stuff we saw and learned in the Carnegie Museum for a long time, probably. And we have manuscripts to get cranking on, some of which were already gestating and just needed the Carnegie visit to push to completion. As always, watch this space.
References
- McIntosh JS. 1981. Annotated catalogue of the dinosaurs (Reptilia, Archosauria) in the collections of Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Bulletin of Carnegie Museum of Natural History 18:1-67
- (2015) A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) PeerJ3:e857 https://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.857
I found myself needing a checklist so that I could make sure I’d updated all the various web-pages that needed tweaking after the Haestasaurus paper came out. Then I thought others might find it useful for when they have new papers. So here it is.
- Update my online publications list.
- Update my University of Bristol IR page.
- Create a new page about paper in the SV-POW! sidebar.
- Add the full-resolution figures to the sidebar page.
- Write a blog-post on SV-POW!
- Update my ORCID page.
- Update my LinkedIn page.
- Mendeley, if you do it (I don’t).
- ResearchGate, if you do it (I don’t).
- Academia.edu, if you do it (I don’t).
- Keep an eye on the new taxon’s Wikipedia page (once it exists).
- Add the paper to the Paleobiology Database (or ask someone to do it for you if you’re not authorised). [Credit: Jon Tennant]
- Tweet about it! [Credit: Matt Hodgkinson], ideally not just a single tweet but a thread that summarises why the paper is interesting.
- Update Google Scholar, if it doesn’t pick up on the publication on its own [Credit: Christopher Taylor]
- Post on Facebook [Credit: Andy Farke]
- Send PDF to the institution that hosts the material [Credit: Andy Farke]
- Email colleagues who might be interested [Credit: Andy Farke]
- Email everyone who you mentioned in the acknowledgements or cited a personal communication from.
- Write short popular language account for your institution if applicable [Credit: Andy Farke]
- Submit any silhouettes to PhyloPic [Credit: Mike Keesey]
Have I forgotten any?
I think I have now completed all these tasks for the Haestasaurus paper. And a right pain it was, entering the same new paper in SV-POW!, my own list, the Bristol IR, the ORCID page and LinkedIn.
The IR was definitely by far the clumsiest — it took ages, and many different screens, before I was done. I kind of expected that (it turns out that PURE, which is what Bristol’s IR uses, is supplied by Elsevier, so supply your own punchline). But what really disappointed me was the clumsiness of having to enter all the details by hand yet again when I got to ORCID. Why couldn’t I just enter the DOI and let it fill in the rest?
You would think that ORCID, of all people, would appreciate the value of referring to things by unique IDs!
Photography and illustration talk, Part 6: Taking notes
February 19, 2014
The giant Oklahoma Apatosaurus: OMNH 1670 redux
April 30, 2012
In the recent post on OMNH 1670, a dorsal vertebra of a giant Apatosaurus from the Oklahoma panhandle, I half-promised to post the only published figure of this vertebra, from Stovall (1938: fig. 3.3). So here it is:
And in the second comment on that post, I promised a sketch from one of my notebooks, showing how much of the vertebra is reconstructed. Here’s a scan of the relevant page from my notebook. Reconstructed areas of the vert are shaded (confusingly, using strokes going in opposite directions on the spine and centrum, and the dark shaded areas on the front of the transverse processes are pneumatic cavities), and measurements are given in mm.
Next item: is this really a fifth dorsal vertebra?
Apatosaurus louisae CM 3018 D4 and D5, in anterior (top), left lateral, and posterior views, from Gilmore (1936: plate 25).
Here are D4 and D5 of A. louisae CM 3018. They sort of bracket OMNH 1670 in terms of morphology. D4 has a broader spine, and D5 has a narrower one. The spine of D5 lacks the slight racquet-shaped expansion seen in OMNH 1670, but the overall proportions of the spine are more similar. On the other hand, the transverse processes of D4 taper a bit in anterior and posterior view, as in OMNH 1670, and unlike the transverse processes of D5 with their more parallel dorsal and ventral margins. But honestly, neither of these verts is a very good match (and the ones on either side, D3 and D6, are even worse).
Apatosaurus parvus UWGM 15556 (formerly A. excelsus CM 563) D4 (left) and D3 (right) in anterior (top), right lateral, and posterior views, from Gilmore (1936: plate 32).
Here are D3 and D4 of A. parvus UWGM 15556. D3 is clearly a poor match as well–it is really striking how much the vertebral morphology changes through the anterior dorsals in most sauropods, and Apatosaurus is no exception. D3 looks like a dorsal in lateral view, but in anterior or posterior view it could almost pass for a posterior cervical. If I was going to use the term “cervicodorsal”, indicating one of the vertebrae from the neck/trunk transition, I would apply it as far back as D3, but not to D4. That thing is all dorsal.
And it’s a very interesting dorsal from the perspective of identifying OMNH 1670. It has fairly short, tapering transverse processes. The neural spine is a bit shorter and broader, but it has a similar racquet-shaped distal expansion. I’m particularly intrigued by the pneumatic fossae inscribed into the anterior surface of the neural spine–in Gilmore’s plate they make a broken V shapen, like so \ / (or maybe devil eyes). Now, OMNH 1670 doesn’t have devil eyes on its spine, but it does have a couple of somewhat similar pneumatic fossae cut into the spine just below the distal racquet–perhaps a serially modified iteration of the same pair of fossae as in the A. parvus D4. It’s a right sod that D5 from this animal has its spine blown off–but it still has its transverse processes, and they are short and tapering as in OMNH 1670.
Apatosaurus sp. FMNH P25112, dorsal vertebrae 1-10 and sacrals 1 and 2, Riggs (1903: plate 46)
Here are all the dorsals and the first couple sacrals of FMNH P25112, which was originally described as A. excelsus but in the specimen-level analysis of Upchurch et al. 2005) comes out as the sister taxon to the A. ajax/A. parvus/A. excelsus clade. Note the striking similarity of the D5 here with D4 of the A. parvus specimen in Gilmore’s plate (until the careful phylogenetic work up Upchurch et al. 2005, that A. parvus specimen, once CM 563 and now UWGM 15556, was considered to represent A. excelsus as well). But also notice the striking similarity of D6 to OMNH 1670. It’s not quite a dead ringer–the transverse processes are longer and have weird bent-down “wingtips” (XB-70 Valkyrie, anyone?)–but it’s pretty darned close, especially in the shape of the neural spine.
So what does this all mean? First, that trying to specify the exact serial position of an isolated vertebra is nigh on to impossible, unless it’s something that is one-of-a-kind like an axis. Second, after doing all these comparos I think it’s unlikely that OMNH 1670 is a D4–those are a bit too squat across the board–but it could plausibly be either a D5 or a D6. Third, I’m really happy that it doesn’t seem to match any particular specimen better than all the rest. What I don’t want to happen is for someone to see that this vertebra looks especially like specimen X and therefore decide that it must represent species Y. As I said in the comments of the previous post, what this Oklahoma Apatosaurus material needs is for someone to spend some quality time seeing, measuring, and photographing all of it and then doing a phylogenetic analysis. That sounds like an ambitious master’s thesis or the core of a dissertation, and I hope an OU grad student takes it on someday.
If you were intrigued by my suggestion that the big Oklahoma Apatosaurus rivalled Supersaurus in size, and wanted to see a technical comparison of the two, I am happy to report that Scott Hartman has done the work for you. Here’s one of his beautiful Apatosaurus skeletal reconstructions, scaled to the size of OMNH 1670, next to his Supersaurus silhouette. This is just a small teaser–go check out his post on the subject for a larger version and some interesting (and funny) thoughts on how the two animals compare.
References
- Gilmore, C.W. 1936. Osteology of Apatosaurus with special reference to specimens in the Carnegie Museum. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 11:175-300.
- Riggs, E.S. 1903. Structure and relationships of opisthocoelian dinosaurs, part I: Apatosaurus Marsh. Field Columbian Museum Publications, Geological Series 2(4): 165–196.
- Stovall, J.W. 1938. The Morrison of Oklahoma and its dinosaurs. Journal of Geology 46:583-600.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 