Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

Here’s a pretty cool image: Plate 7 from Lull (1919), showing the partial skeleton of Barosaurus YPM 429 (above), compared to the much more complete skeleton of Diplodocus CM84/94 (below).

I’ve been pretty familiar with that Barosaurus skeleton diagram since I was about 9 years old, because it’s in Donald Glut’s New Dinosaur Dictionary, which I’ve written about here before. In particular, I like that Lull was scrupulous about drawing in the lateral pneumatic cavities in the caudal vertebrae. It’s pretty common in Diplodocus for the tail to be pneumatized out to somewhere between caudal 15 and 19, and the same is true in Barosaurus. I’m not just relying on the figure–Lull was also good about saying explicitly what was going on with the pneumatization in the centrum of each vertebra.

I returned to this image as an adult doing research on sauropod pneumaticity, and I read big swaths of Lull (1919), but never the bit about the sacrum. Why would I? The sacrum of YPM 429 is pretty scrappy, and I was mostly interested in the big honkin’ cervicals, and in learning how to distinguish bones of Barosaurus and Diplodocus. I always assumed that the sacrum of Barosaurus was pneumatized right the way through.

Only, er, it ain’t. As I just discovered.

Lull (1919: p. 22):

See that second sentence? “The central fragment is extremely massive, with no adaptation for lightening the weight appreciable in the portion preserved.” That’s old-timey talk for, “the chunk of centrum has no pneumatic openings or cavities”. Which is kind of a big deal, because:

…a gap of one or more apneumatic vertebrae with pneumatic vertebrae on either side constitutes a pneumatic hiatus. Why that’s a big deal is explained in this post.

If I had read this in the early 2000s, I would have flipped out. I did flip out when I discovered what seemed to be a pneumatic hiatus at the base of the tail in Haplocanthosaurus. Just that possibility sent me scurrying off to the Carnegie Museum to investigate, and precipitated both a dissertation chapter, later published as Wedel (2009), and an enduring fascination with Haplocanthosaurus. If I’d been reading Lull instead of Hatcher, my air sac paper would have been about Barosaurus, probably, and I wouldn’t have known enough about Haplo to get interested in the other specimens, which would have been a real shame.

A pneumatic hiatus in Barosaurus would have been big news in 2009. In 2021, it’s still nice, but not groundbreaking. The groundbreaking pneumatic hiatuses in Barosaurus were described in two different juvenile skeletons by Melstrom et al. (2016) and Hanik et al. (2017). Those were both mid-thoracic hiatuses, which probably separated the pneumatization domains of the cervical air sacs anteriorly and the abdominal air sacs posteriorly. A mid-sacral hiatus in YPM 429 is probably within the domain of the abdominal air sac, just like the hiatus in sacral 5 of CM 879 that I described in my 2009 paper. It’s still exciting, in that it shows that there were abdominal air sacs, and they were separate from the lungs and cervical air sacs, but this example in YPM 429 is now third in line in terms of priority, just within this one genus. Which is why I’m telling the world with a blog post, instead of hopping on a plane (or, er, planning a very long road trip) to New Haven. I’ll check on YPM 429 the next time I’m out there, but the specifics will keep for now.

References

• Hanik, Gina M., Matthew C. Lamanna and John A. Whitlock. 2017. A juvenile specimen of Barosaurus Marsh, 1890 (Sauropoda: Diplodocidae) from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation of Dinosaur National Monument, Utah, USA. Annals of Carnegie Museum 84(3):253–263.
• Lull, R.S. 1919. The sauropod dinosaur Barosaurus Marsh. Memoirs of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 6:1-42.
• Melstrom, Keegan M., Michael D. D’Emic, Daniel Chure and Jeffrey A. Wilson. 2016. A juvenile sauropod dinosaur from the Late Jurassic of Utah, USA, presents further evidence of an avian style air-sac system. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 36(4):e1111898. doi:10.1080/02724634.2016.1111898
• Wedel, M.J. 2009. Evidence for bird-like air sacs in saurischian dinosaurs. Journal of Experimental Zoology 311A:611-628.