I spent last week bombing around Utah and western Colorado with Dave Hone, who was over from England to visit those states for the first time in his life. We did some fieldwork out at Brachiosaur Gulch and visited quite a few museums and quarries around the Dinosaur Diamond, in a sort of mini-recapitulation of my 2016 Sauropocalypse with Mike. It was a fun and rewarding trip and there will hopefully be more posts on it forthcoming, but for now I’m going to play against type and keep this as short and focused as I can.

The Prehistoric Museum in Price had added a fair number of new exhibits since Mike and I visited back in 2016, including this nice display on pneumaticity and respiration in birds and other dinos. I was quite taken with it because I’ve seen some nice examples of cut and polished sauropod vertebrae (like this one and this one), but I can’t remember ever having seen the same thing done to a theropod vertebra.

Near the end of Dave’s visit we hit the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake, and I spotted this cast of an Allosaurus dorsal vertebra in the gift shop. I thought it looked awfully familiar, and sure enough, it’s a slightly restored version of MWC 5818, which you may remember from this post. It’s an anterior dorsal of Allosaurus with the front of the centrum eroded away to show the internal chambers. The specimen is now available as a cast from Gaston Design, which is how it came to be in the NHMU gift shop.

I have a lot more I want to blog about, but I’m just digging out from having been out of town for most of the past two months. Further bulletins when I get the time and energy, I reckon.

Last night a thought occurred to me, and I wrote to Matt:

If birds had gone extinct 66 Mya along with all the other dinosaurs, would it ever have occurred to us that they had flow-through lungs? Is there — can there be, outside of amazing soft-tissue preservation — any way for bone fossils to tell us about this?

(Yes, we have evidence for air-sacs in the pneumatization of vertebrae and other bones, but I doubt that would have led us to the idea of the flow-through lung. I’m not even convinced it would have led us to the idea of air-sacs, if we didn’t have extant birds as a model.)

Matt wrote back and gave me permission to write up his reply into an SV-POW! post, which you are now, obviously, reading. Here’s what he said.

No, we’d have no idea about the flow-through lungs from fossils.

In fact, it’s particularly bad for birds. Big saurischian dinosaurs had lots of postcranial skeletal pneumaticity (PSP), and some extant birds have a lot of PSP, but most Mesozoic birds have limited to zero diagnostic PSP. A few have some external foramina on the vertebrae that might be pneumatic, but might just be lateral foramina for the equatorial arteries. It doesn’t help that most Mesozoic birds are smashed flat and often have other elements overlapping the vertebrae — most often the proximal portions of their own ribs.

So ironically, even if we somehow came up with the stacked notions that (1) PSP implied air sacs, and (2) air sacs implied flow-through lungs, we’d be much more likely to infer flow-through lungs in Diplodocus and Tyrannosaurus than in Archaeopteryx or most other Mesozoic birds.

But wait, it gets worse! The work by Colleen Farmer, Emma Schachner, and colleagues that demonstrated unidirectional flow in the lungs of crocs, monitor lizards, and iguanas would presumably still get done, but those animals have flow-through lungs without PSP and without particularly elevated metabolisms (although monitors are trying hard). Without the example of birds showing us how that primitive flow-through system can be further refined and supercharged to power tachymetabolism, we’d still learn of flow-through lungs, but we’d have no reason to connect them to PSP or any particular metabolic strategy.

I’ve probably mentioned this before, but it really irks me that we assume that birds are the pinnacle of lung evolution. Why? Birds survived the K/Pg extinction because they were small and could hide and eat seeds and grubs for a while, not because they had better lungs than everything else (otherwise mammals, lizards, etc. would have done even worse). To me it would be a heck of a coincidence if the one group of ornithodirans that survived — for reasons unrelated to lung function — just happened to have the most efficient lungs. It’s always been tantalizing to me that extant birds start out with 12 embryonic air sacs, which through development usually merge into the usual 9 (unpaired clavicular, and paired cervical, anterior thoracic, posterior thoracic, and abdominal sacs). This seems like an embryonic footprint of a greater diversity — and possibly even a greater complexity — of respiratory anatomy in the ancestral ornithodiran, saurischian, or theropod (or all of the above).

I was going to write a bit more about my recent paper The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal (seriously, go and read it, you’ll like it, it’s fun). But then something more urgent came up. And here it is!

This is the work of our old friend Mark Witton, so we’ll let him explain it:

More new at for ! Tyrannosaurus takes on a giant Alamosaurus. Alamosaurus laughs. Sauropods really do win this time.

Full resolution version available at:
patreon.com/posts/79152256

Some quick backstory: lots of sauropods have long, overlapping cervical ribs, like the ones shown here in Sauroposeidon (diagram from this old post):

These long cervical ribs are ossified tendons of ventral neck muscles, presumably longus colli ventralis. We know they’re ossified tendons because of their bone histology (Klein et al. 2012), and we suspect that they’re longus colli ventralis because those tendons look the same in birds, just less ossified, as in this rhea (same specimens as these even older posts: 1, 2):

Diplodocoids have apomorphically short cervical ribs, which never extend very far past the end of their respective centra and sometimes don’t overlap at all. Still, we assume the long ventral neck muscles were there, just without long ossified tendons. Which brings me to Apatosaurus, which has cervical ribs that are anteroposteriorly short but famously massive, extending very below and/or to the sides of the cervical centra — for a truly breathtaking example see this post. Here are C3 through C7 in CM 3018, the holotype of Apatosaurus lousiae (Gilmore 1936: plate 24):

At least for me, it’s hard to resist the temptation to mentally scoot those vertebrae together into articulation, and imagine that the very swoopy-looking and maybe even down-turned cervical ribs allowed the ventral tendon bundles to wrap around the bottom of each cervical rib protuberance, something like this:

But it’s just not so, because like all 2D images, Gilmore’s plate distorts 3D reality. If you get to see the mounted skeleton in person, it’s clear that the cervical ribs are all more or less in line, and none of them are pointed at the big protuberances, which stick way out ventrolaterally.

Here I’ve drawn in the likely trajectories of the longus colli ventralis tendons. My little red pathways don’t precisely match the cervical ribs as mounted, but there’s a lot of distortion and restoration going on. For example, comparing with Gilmore’s plate we can see that the cervical ribs of C5, which point downward compared to all the others, only do that because someone forced them to — the whole anterior portion of the rib, where the shaft would actually join to the capitulum and tuberculum, is reconstructed. Even if I’m a little off, it’s clear that the cervical ribs shafts point backward, they’re all more or less in two parallel lines, and none of them point down and out toward the ventrolateral processes. The photo contains a mountain of useful morphological information that you’d never get from the lateral views.

My takeaways from all this:

  1. If a person has only seen 2D images of a specimen, and especially if those 2D images have only been orthogonal views with no obliques, their little island of knowledge is surrounded by at least a sizeable lake of ignorance, if not a small ocean.
  2. That doesn’t mean that seeing specimens in person is the only antidote — 3D models and 3D prints are extremely useful, and for specimens that are difficult to manipulate because of their size or fragility, they may be more useful than seeing or handling the specimen, at least for some questions.
  3. For Apatosaurus specifically, those ventrolateral processes cry out for explanation. They’re fairly solid knobs of bone that stick way out past the ossified tendons of the ventral-most neck muscles. That’s a super-weird — and super-expensive — place to invest a bunch of bone if you’re not using it for something fairly important, especially in a lineage that had just spent the last 80-100 million years making their necks as light as possible.
  4. Pursuant to that last point, we’re now in — ugh-ouch-shame — our 8th year of BrontoSMASH!!, with still just the one conference presentation to show for it (Taylor et al. 2015). Prolly time we got moving on that again.

References

Over on Mastodon (sign up, it’s great!), Jim Kirkland posted a baby Utahraptor caudal vertebrae for #FossilFriday. Here it is:

And after a bit of virtual prep work:

My first reaction was just “That’s pretty!“. My second, which I admit should have been my first, was “Wait a sec — how the heck do those things articulate?

The issue is that both the prezygs and the postzygs overhang the centrum by so much. If we imagine three of these babies consecutively, there are basically two options.

First, the centra articulate closely, with what we might feel intuitively is a reasonable cartilage gap; and the zygs cross over:

Does something like this ever happen? Not in sauropods, for sure, but it could be correct — if the zyg facets are some way short of the tips of their processes, so that the most distal parts of each process are pre-epipophyses and epipophyses rather than prezygs and postzygs per se.

The other interpretation is this, with the zygs overlapping near the end as in sensible dinosaurs, and much more spaced out centra:

If this is right, then (in this respect) baby Utahraptor tails resembled camel necks in having big intervertebral spaces, which in life were filled with big cartilage plugs.

 

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SPOILER SPACE

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Have a think about this before reading on.

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SPOILER SPACE

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OK, here is the horrible truth.

Dromaeosaur tails do overlap their zyg processes as in the first mock-up above: but they do much, much worse than this!

Here is the truly perverted figure 37 of Ostrom’s classic 1969 monograph on Deinonychus — the publication that catalysed the whole Dinosaur Renaissance:

As you can see, the zygapophyseal processes are grotesquely elongated, and overlap in long stiffening bundles with those of successive vertebrae (part C of the figure). The actual zyg facets are small, and close to the origins of these processes (see parts A and B of the figure). And the chevrons are also hideously protracted beyond their natural length to form stiffening bundles beneath the tail that complement those above the tail.

To add insult to injury, the chevrons even face in the wrong darned direction, extending anteriorly along the tail rather than posteriorly as in all decent animals. Yes: in Ostrom’s illustrations, we’re seeing the vertebrae in right lateral view, i.e. anterior is to the right.

All of this confirms that I was so, so right two decades ago to focus so completely on proper dinosaurs instead of these nasty mutant ones. Ugh.

Vertebrae of Haplocanthosaurus (A-C) and a giraffe (D-F) illustrating three ways of orienting a vertebra: articular surfaces vertical — or at least the caudal articular surface vertical (A and D), floor of the neural canal horizontal (B and E), and similarity in articulation (C and F). See the paper for details! Taylor and Wedel (2002: fig. 6).

This is a lovely cosmic alignment: right after the 15th anniversary of this blog, Mike and I have our 11th coauthored publication (not counting abstracts and preprints) out today.

Taylor, Michael P., and Wedel, Mathew J. 2022. What do we mean by the directions “cranial” and “caudal” on a vertebra? Journal of Paleontological Techniques 25:1-24.

This one started back in 2018, with Mike’s post, What does it mean for a vertebra to be “horizontal”? That post and subsequent posts on the same topic (one, two, three) provoked interesting discussions in the comment threads, and convinced us that there was something here worth grappling with. We gave a presentation on the topic at the 1st Palaeontological Virtual Congress that December, which we made available as a preprint, which led to us writing the paper in the open, which led to another preprint (of the paper this time, not the talk).

Orienting vertebrae with the long axis of the centrum held horizontally seems simple enough, but choosing landmarks can be surprisingly complex. Taylor and Wedel (2022 fig. 5).

This project represented some interesting watersheds for us. It was not our first time turning a series of blog posts into a paper — see our 2013 paper on neural spine bifurcation for that — but it was our first time writing a joint paper in the open (Mike had started writing the Archbishop description in the open a few months earlier). It was also the last, or at least the most recent, manuscript that we released as a preprint, although we’ve released some conference presentations as preprints since then. I’m much less interested in preprints than I used to be, for reasons explained in this post, and I think Mike sees them as rather pointless if you’re writing the paper in the open anyway, which is his standard approach these days (Mike, feel free to correct me here or in the comments if I’m mischaracterizing your position).

So, we got it submitted, we got reviews, and then…we sat on them for a while. We have both struggled in the last few years with Getting Things Done, or at least Getting Things Finished (Mike’s account, my own), and this paper suffered from that. Part of the problem is that Mike and have far too many projects going at any one time. At last count, we have about 20 joint projects in various stages of gestation, and about 11 more that we’ve admitted we’re never going to get to (our To Don’t list), and that doesn’t count our collaborations with others (like the dozen or so papers I have planned with Jessie Atterholt). We simply can’t keep so many plates spinning, and we’re both working hard at pruning our project list and saying ‘no’ to new things — or, if we do think of new projects, we try to hand them off to others as quickly and cleanly as possible.

Two different ways of looking at a Haplocanthosaurus tail vertebra. Read on for a couple of recent real-life examples. Taylor and Wedel (2022: fig. 2).

Anyway, Mike got rolling on the revisions a few months ago, and it was accepted for publication sometime in late spring or early summer, I think. Normally it would have been published in days, but the Journal of Paleontological Techniques was moving between websites and servers, and that took a while. But Mike and I were in no tearing rush, and the paper is out today, so all is well.

One of the bits of the paper that I’m most proud of is the description of cheap and easy methods for determining the orientation of the neural canal. For neural canals that are open, either because they were fully prepped or never full of matrix to begin with, there’s the rolled-up-piece-of-paper method, which I believe first appeared on the blog back when I was posting photos of the tail vertebrae of the Brachiosaurus altithorax holotype. For neural canals that aren’t open, Mike came up with the Blu-tack-and-toothpick method, as shown in Figure 12 in the new paper:

A 3d print of NHMUK PV R2095, the holotype of Xenoposeidon, illustrating the toothpick method of determining neural canal orientation. Taylor and Wedel (2022: fig. 12).

I know both methods work because I recently had occasion to use them, studying the Haplocanthosaurus holotypes (see this post). For CM 572, the neural canal of the first caudal vertebra is full of matrix, so I used a variant of the toothpick method. I didn’t actually have Blu-tack or toothpicks, so I cut thin pieces of plastic from the edge of an SVP scale bar and stuck them in bits of kneadable eraser. It worked just fine:

The neural canal of caudal 2 was prepped, so I could use the rolled-up-piece-of-paper method:

(Incidentally, Mike and I refer to our low-tech orientation-visualizers as “neural-canal-inators”, in honor of Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz from Phineas and Ferb.)

In the above photos, notice how terribly thin the base of the neural arch is, antero-posteriorly. Both of these vertebrae are in pretty good shape, without much breakage or missing material, and their morphology is broadly consistent with that of other proximal caudals of Haplocanthosaurus, so we can’t write this off as distortion. As weird as it looks, this is just what Haplo proximal caudals were like. And with the neural canals held horizontally, the first two caudals end up oriented like so:

Now, as we pointed out in the paper, the titular question is not about determining the posture of the vertebrae in life, it’s about defining the directions ‘cranial’ and ‘caudal’ for isolated vertebrae — Mike asked the question back when for the holotype (single) dorsal vertebra of Xenoposeidon. But an interesting spin-off for me has been getting confronted with the weirdness of vertebrae whose articular surfaces are nowhere near orthogonal with their neural canals. I tilted those CM 572 Haplo caudals so that their neural canals were horizontal partly because that’s the preferred orientation that Mike and I landed on in the course of this work, but also partly because to me, that’s a more arresting image than the preceding ones with the articular faces held vertically. I’m both freaked out and fascinated, and that seems like a promising combination — there are mysteries here that cry out to be solved.

As usual, we have loads of people to thank. In addition to all those listed in the Acknowledgments of the new paper, I’m grateful to Matt Lamanna and Amy Henrici of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History for letting me play with study the Haplo specimens in their care. Mike and I also owe a huge thanks to the editorial team at the Journal of Paleontological Techniques. We reached out to them a few days ago to ask if it might be possible to get our in-press paper done and out in time for SV-POW!’s anniversary weekend, and they pitched in to make it happen.

What’s next? We weighed the evidence and formulated what the best solution we could think of. Now it’s up to the world to decide if that was a useful contribution. The comment thread is open — let’s find out.

One of the benefits of being me is that my friends often make me cool dino-themed stuff for my birthday (f’rinstance). This year, it was this dinosaur dig cake from my friend Jenny Adams. Yes, it’s a vulgar, overstudied theropod,* but I take the requisite amount of joy from how thoroughly blown apart its skeleton is. Plus, the skull and cervicals are pneumatic (in vivo, if not in choco), so it’s a least plausibly interesting (i.e., not an ornithopod), and it looks cool (i.e., not Camarasaurus).

*I’m morally obligated to thank Paul Barrett for this wonderful phrase, which I use pretty much every chance I get.

Should you want to replicate this glycemic index Chicxulub, here’s the stratigraphic breakdown, starting from the bedrock (bedchoc?):

  • base layer is a regular chocolate cake,
  • but with added chocolate chips,
  • topped with vanilla frosting, to hold down:
  • a whole package of Oreos crumbled into faux dirt
  • surrounding the vanilla-flavored white chocolate dinosaur bones

Jenny made the dino bones using a set of (new, clean) plastic sand molds, like these:

You can find a zillion like ’em online by searching for ‘dinosaur sand toys’ or ‘dinosaur sand mold’.

Anyway, I can report that the excavation has been most enjoyable, but with about half the ‘quarry’ left to explore, the number of fossils recovered intact continues to hover near zero — we’ve been grinding them up to use as dietary supplements. Good thing it’s just a theropod!

I’ve been in contact recently with Matt Lamanna, Associate Curator in the Section of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History — which is obviously the best job in the world. Among a batch of photos that he sent me recently, I seized on this gem:

Tyrannosaurus rex, Diplodocus carnegii, Apatosaurus louisae and multiple mostly juvenile individuals of Homo sapiens. Photograph taken between 1941 and 1965. Courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

There’s so much to appreciate in this picture: the hunchbacked, tail-dragging Tyrannosaurus; the camarasaur-style skull on the Apatosaurus; the hard-to-pin-down archaic air of Diplodocus.

But the thing I love about it is the 1950s kids. (Or, to be fair, maybe the 1940s kids or early 1960s kids, but you get the point.) They way they’ve all been asked to look up at the tyrannosaur skull, and are obediently doing it. How earnest they all appear. How they’re all dressed as tiny adults. How self-consciously some of them have posed themselves — the thoughtful kid one in from the left, his foot up on the plinth and his chin resting on his hand; the cool kid to his right, arms crossed, interested but careful not to seem too impressed.

Where are these kids now? Assuming it was taken in 1953, the midpoint of the possible range, and assuming they’re about 12 years old in this photo, they were born around 1941, which would make them 81 now. Statistically, somewhere around half of them are still alive. I wonder how many of them remember this day, and the strange blend of awe, fascination, and self-consciousness.

This is a time-capsule, friends. Enjoy it.

Last Thursday I gave a public lecture for the No Man’s Land Historical Society in the Oklahoma Panhandle, titled “Oklahoma’s Jurassic Giants: the Dinosaurs of Black Mesa”. It’s now on YouTube, on the No Man’s Land Museum’s channel.

There’s a point I want to make here, that I also made in the talk: we can’t predict the value of natural history collections. The first sauropod vertebrae that Rich Cifelli and Kent Sanders and I CT scanned back in the spring of 1998 belonged to what would become Sauroposeidon, but most of the ones we scanned after that were Morrison specimens collected by J. Willis Stovall’s crews from the Oklahoma Panhandle between 1934 and 1941. Those scans formed the core of the pneumaticity research that fleshed out the Sauroposeidon papers (Wedel et al. 2000a, b), and was more fully developed in my Master’s thesis and the papers that came out of that (Wedel 2003a, b).

OMNH 1094, a mid-cervical vertebra of Brontosaurus in right lateral view. If you’ve seen one of my talks or my first few papers, you’ve seen this vert. I just realized that I have almost all the photos I need to do a proper multi-view; stand by for a future post on that.

So the foundation of my career was built in large part from collections that had been made 60 years earlier, decades before CT was invented. I’ll also note here that Xenoposeidon — Mike’s fourth paper (Taylor and Naish 2007), but the one which really launched his career as a morphologist — is based on a specimen collected in the 1890s. Natural history collections are not only resources for making comparisons, but also the engines of future discovery, and building and maintaining them is one of the most significant contributions to science that we can make.

I thank a bunch of folks at the end of the talk, but I especially want to thank Brian Engh for the use of his art, and Anne Weil for inviting me to collaborate on the sauropod material from the Homestead Quarry. Looking forward to more adventures!

References

Morphological variation in paramedullary airways; yellow = spinal cord, green = diverticula. The spectrum of variation is discretized into four groups: i, branches of intertransverse diverticula contact spinal cord at intervertebral joints; ii, branches of intertransverse diverticula extend partially into the vertebral canal, but remain discontinuous; iii, paramedullary diverticula form sets of tubes that are continuous through vertebral canals of at least two consecutive vertebrae; iv, continuous paramedullary diverticula anastomose with supravertebral diverticula. Each variant is depicted diagrammatically (A, dorsal view; B, E, H, & K, transverse view) and shown in two CT scans; images in each column correspond to the same morphology. Morphology i: C, cormorant; D, scrub jay. Morphology ii: F, bushtit; G, common murre. Morphology iii: I, red-tailed hawk; J, black-crowned night heron. Morphology iv: L, M, pelican. (Atterholt and Wedel 2022: figure 5)

New paper out:

Atterholt, Jessie, and Wedel, Mathew J. 2022. A computed tomography-based survey of paramedullary diverticula in extant Aves. The Anatomical Record, 1– 22. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.24923

Quick aside, which will soon be of historical interest only: so far, only the accepted-but-unformatted manuscript is available, with the final, fully-formatted ‘version of record’ due along at some point in the future. We’re not sure when that will be — could be next week, could be months from now — which is why I’m following my standard procedure and yapping about the new paper now. This has paid off in the past, when papers that were only available in accepted ms form were read and cited before the final version was published. UPDATE on April 9: the formatted version of record is out now, as an open-access article with a CC-BY license, and I swapped it for the ‘accepted ms’ version in the links above and at the end of this post.

This paper has had a weirdly drawn-out gestation. Jessie and I hatched the idea of it way back in 2017, when we were teaching in the summer anatomy course together. I learned that Jessie had a big war chest of CTs of dead birds, and I’d been obsessed with supramedullary diverticula in birds and sauropods for some time already (e.g., an SVPCA talk: Wedel et al. 2014). There were detailed published descriptions of the supramedullary diverticula in a handful of species — namely chickens, turkeys, and pigeons — but no broad survey of those diverticula across living birds. Jessie had the CT scans to do that big survey, which we got rolling on right away. She presented our preliminary results at SVPCA in 2018 (Atterholt and Wedel 2018), and by rights the paper should have been along shortly thereafter. More on that in a sec.

One thing that may seem odd: we use the term ‘paramedullary diverticula’ instead of the more familiar and established ‘supramedullary diverticula’. That’s because these diverticula are not always dorsal to the spinal cord; sometimes they’re lateral, sometimes they’re ventral, and sometimes they completely surround the spinal cord, like an inflated cuff. So we decided that the term ‘paramedullary’, or ‘next to the spinal cord’, was more accurate than ‘supramedullary’, or ‘above the spinal cord’, for describing this class of diverticula.

Observed variation in the shape, arrangement, and orientation of paramedullary diverticula relative to the spinal cord; yellow = spinal cord, green = diverticula. A, paired diverticula dorsal to spinal cord in an ostrich. B, paired diverticula lateral to spinal cord in a bushtit. C, paired diverticula ventral to spinal cord in a violet turaco. D, three diverticula dorsal to spinal cord in an ostrich. E, four diverticula dorsal to spinal cord in an eclectus parrot. F, single, c-shaped diverticulum dorsal to spinal cord in an ostrich. G, diverticula completely surrounding spinal cord and pneumatizing vertebra in a violet turaco. H, no paramedullary diverticula present in a Pacific loon. I, diverticula completely surrounding spinal cord in a pelican. (Atterholt and Wedel 2022: figure 6)

I will have more to say about the science in other posts, and you can get the scientific backstory in this post and this one and the abstracts cited above and linked below. The rest of this post is mostly about me, so if you stick around, buckle up for some advanced navel-gazing.

There’s no one reason why this paper didn’t come out sooner. In short, I hit a wall. We went through a curriculum change at work, and suddenly the annual schedule that I’d relied on for a decade was completely upended. I had some unexpected challenges in my personal life. But the biggest problem was that my attitude toward research and writing had changed, for the worse.

When I was fresh out of grad school I had this kinda snotty attitude that my research was MINE, and wherever I was teaching was just, like, a paycheck, man, but they don’t own me, or my research. And as my teaching and committee responsibilities ramped up I still felt like research and writing was something I did for myself, and that my mission was to steal however many hours I could away from the “day-job work” to get done the things that I really wanted to do. Like a guerilla insurgency. In retrospect, it was a pretty good attitude for getting stuff done.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking about research as something that belonged to me, something that I did for myself, and started thinking about it as part of my job. (This also maybe is not so flattering in what it reveals about how I think, or at least thought, about my job.) Instead of using my research time as a source of energy and a wellspring of satisfaction and positivity, I starting thinking of it only as a sink. And it happened so insidiously that I didn’t even realize it. My productivity plummeted, and I didn’t understand why. I was restless and depressed, and I didn’t understand that either. At the level of my superficial thoughts I still wanted to get research done, but my subconscious was turned off to it, so I just spun my wheels.

Then the pandemic hit. I’d always been a pretty optimistic, upbeat person, but I found myself just staring off into space franticizing about all the horrible things going on in the world, or staying up too late doom-scrolling the news. I slept too little, and poorly, and by the end of 2020 I felt worn down to a nub.

Osteological evidence of paramedullary diverticula. A, pocked texturing inside the vertebral canal of a pelican (LACM 86262). B, pneumatic foramen on the roof of the vertebral canal of an albatross (Phoebastria nigripes, LACM 115139). C, pneumatic foramina in the floor of the vertebral canal of an ostrich (Struthio camelus, LACM 116205). D, deep pneumatic fossae in the roof of the vertebral canal of an Eastern moa (Emeus sp., LACM unnumbered). (Atterholt and Wedel 2022: figure 7)

Then a series of positive things happened:

  • I received a long, heartfelt email from Jessie (fittingly!), asking after me and laying out a plan for getting the paper done and out. It was the kick I needed to look inside and start picking myself apart, to figure out what the heck was going on. Much of this post is cribbed from my reply to her.
  • I got a little break from lecturing in the spring of 2021, and that gave me the space to get a couple of things finished and submitted — the pneumatic variation paper with Mike in January (Taylor and Wedel 2021), and the Haplocanthosaurus neural canal paper, which was submitted even earlier in January, although it came out much later (Wedel et al. 2021; more on that publication delay in a future post).
  • Finally, I had young, energetic coauthors who were moving projects forward that required modest levels of effort from me, but which paid off with highly visible publications that I’m proud to be an author on, including the saltasaur pneumaticity paper (Aureliano et al. 2021) and the ‘Sauro-Throat’ paper (Woodruff et al. 2022).

It’s impossible to overstate how energizing it was to get new things done and out, and how much it helped to have collaborators who were putting wins on the board even when I was otherwise occupied. One of those collaborators was Jessie, who just kept pushing this thing forward — and, sometimes, pushing me forward — until it was done. So the paper you can read today is a testament not only to her acumen as a morphologist, but also to her tenacity as a scholar, and as a friend.

The part of the paper I’m happiest about is the “Conclusions and Directions for Future Research”, which points the way toward a LOT of further studies that need to be done, both on extant birds and on fossil archosaurs, ranging from bone histology to functional morphology to macroevolution. As we wrote in the concluding sentence of the paper, “We hope that this study serves as a foundation and an enticement for further studies of this most unusual anatomical system, in both extinct and extant archosaurs.”

I can’t wait to see what comes next.

References