Sauro-throat, Part 3: what does Dolly’s disease tell us about sauropods?

February 17, 2022

Naturally I was grateful when Cary invited me to be part of the team working on Dolly, the diplodocid with lesions in its neck vertebrae (Woodruff et al. 2022; see previous posts on Dolly here and here). I was also intellectually excited, not only to see air-filled bones with obvious pathologies, but also for what those pathologies could tell us about Dolly and other sauropods. That’s the part of our new paper I want to unpack in this post.

We have a lot of evidence that air-filled bones in birds are a good model for air-filled bones in extinct dinosaurs. And we have several lines of evidence (not just air-filled bones; see Schachner et al. 2009, 2011, 2020) that the respiratory systems of many dinosaurs functioned broadly like those of living birds. But we have less direct evidence than we’d like, so every additional bit of information is welcome.

Diving into Diverticula

In birds, the air-filled bones in the neck and body are connected to the respiratory system by air-filled tubes. These tubes sometimes get called air sacs, in the sense that they are sacs filled with air, but we also refer to them pneumatic diverticula, to distinguish them from the respiratory air sacs in the torsos of birds that ventilate the lungs. Imagine blowing up some rubber gloves and sticking them inside a bird* and you’ll have a pretty good mental model of the system — the inflated ‘palm’ area of each glove is like one of the respiratory air sacs, the air-filled glove fingers are the diverticula, and the rubber material of the glove is the pneumatic epithelium that lines the air sacs and the diverticula alike. 

* Please don’t actually try that.

The cartoon above presents an unrealistically simplified picture of the respiratory system in dinosaurs and birds. For one thing, I omitted the windpipe or trachea — that blue tube going up the neck represents the diverticula that run alongside, and often inside, the neck vertebrae, parallel to the trachea but separated from it by whole sheets of muscle. Also, the cartoon only shows diverticula of the air sacs, but diverticula can also originate from the lungs themselves (see O’Connor 2006: 1211 and Schachner et al. 2020: 16-19). Here’s the actual respiratory system of a pigeon, with the trachea and lungs in pink and the air sacs and their diverticula in blue (Muller 1908 fig. 11):

I think it’s pretty natural to look at that illustration and wonder where the heck the guts go, since it certainly looks like the air sacs are occupying the entire volume of the torso. The answer is that the air sacs enclose the viscera “as do the shells of a nut”, in the memorable formulation of Wetherbee (1951: p. 243), describing the air sacs of the English sparrow.


Fig. 4. Reconstruction of the distribution of pneumatic diverticula in diplodocids and dicraeosaurids. A. Schematic drawing of midcervical vertebra of Diplodocus in left lateral aspect (A1), in dorsal aspect with single neural spine (A2) and in dorsal aspect with bifurcate neural spine (A3). The partitioning of pneumatic diverticula at the lateral surface of the vertebral corpus is hypothetical, based on the strongly divided pneumatic fossae. Schwarz et al. (2007: fig. 4A).

Furthermore, the pneumatic diverticula around the vertebrae in birds are complex, and we are fairly certain that they were also complex in sauropods, because they left so many distinct traces. The most detailed reconstructions of the cervical diverticula in sauropods that I know of are those of Daniela Schwarz and colleagues (2007), as shown above. For what it’s worth, I think those reconstructions are not just reasonable but perhaps conservative; I think there’s a good chance that the diverticular network around the vertebrae was even more complex and extensive. 

The rubber-glove model also lets us see that the diverticula are cul-de-sacs. We know that diverticula can anastomose, or merge, to form networks, and there is a possibility that if diverticula from different air sacs anastomosed, different pressures in those air sacs might allow some air to circulate through the diverticular network. Maybe — the anterior and posterior air sacs fill and empty at the same time, so there might not be a pressure differential to exploit. If air circulates in the diverticula at all in birds, it probably happens in the dorsal vertebrae, where diverticula from different parts of the respiratory system have the best opportunity to anastomose. But the far ends of the diverticular network are always dead ends, and we assume that air diffuses in and out of those terminal diverticula fairly slowly. We’re stuck with assumptions because no-one’s ever checked, experimentally, to determine the rate of diffusion or circulation of air in the diverticula. But it’s hard to imagine much circulation in the terminal diverticula, with no air reservoir or pump at the far end.

Reconstruction of soft−tissues in the neck of Diplodocus. A. Transverse cross−sections through cervical vertebra with bifurcate neural spine in the diapophysis region (A1) and in caudal third of vertebra (A2). B. Transverse cross−sections through cervical vertebra with single neural spine in diapophysis region (B1) and in caudal third of vertebra (B2), dashed outlines representing possible craniocervical extensor muscle analogous to m. biventer cervicis of extant birds or m. transversospinalis capitis of extant crocodylians. Schwarz et al. (2007: fig. 7A-B).

Here’s another great illustration from Schwarz et al. (2007), showing cross-sections of the neck of Diplodocus with hypothetical soft tissues restored. Bone is black, muscle is pink, and the pneumatic diverticula are blue. As this diagram makes clear, the air spaces in the bones are themselves extensions of the diverticula (that much is true regardless of how extensive we make the reconstructed diverticula outside the vertebrae). Instead of smooshing an inflated rubber glove into a duck, imagine smooshing one into a vertebra of a duck — or a Diplodocus — so that all of the empty spaces are occupied by some blobby bit of inflated-glove finger. All of air spaces in the bone would be lined by rubber-glove material, which in this metaphor is the same pneumatic epithelium that lines both the respiratory air sacs and their pneumatic diverticula, outside the bones or inside them.

I get to see this firsthand in the gross anatomy lab in our unit on head and neck anatomy. As we open up the skulls of the cadavers, the air-filled epithelial balloons that fill the sinuses sometimes pull away from, or completely out of, their bony recesses. (I’ll bet I could demonstrate the same thing with the sinuses of a pig or sheep head — I should give that a shot and post the resulting photos or videos here.) The point is, the pneumatic epithelium is in intimate contact with the bone, lining every pneumatic fossa, foramen, and internal chamber; this will be really important later on.

Incidentally, one question I get a lot is whether the diverticula, inside or outside the bones, contributed to gas exchange in sauropods. The answer is, probably not. We know from dissections and histological work on birds that the respiratory air sacs, their diverticula, and the diverticular spaces inside the skeleton are all relatively avascular, meaning that the tissues get enough blood to stay alive, but aren’t specialized for gas exchange. Furthermore, physiological experiments on living birds have shown that about 95% of the gas exchange happens in the lungs, and almost all of the remaining 5% happens in the paired abdominal air sacs (Magnussen et al. 1976), probably because they are so large and so intimately in contact with the guts (Wetherbee’s nutshell metaphor), which are well-supplied with blood. We also know from bone histology that the air-filled bones of extinct dinosaurs are essentially identical to those of modern birds (Lambertz et al. 2018), so there’s no evidence that they functioned any differently.

A simplified diagram of the sauropod respiratory system. What I’ve labeled “air tubes” here are the pneumatic diverticula. Air holes in the vertebrae are also known as pneumatic foramina. The shapes of the lungs and air sacs are speculative, but the minimum extent of the pneumatic diverticula is not–although it could be an underestimate (e.g., diverticula might have gone even further down the tail, and just not left any diagnostic traces on those vertebrae).

A final piece before we get back to Dolly: we know from lots of anecdotal observations, and some actual experiments, that air-filled bones have to stay connected to the outside to form in the first place, and to stay healthy afterward. This is true of both human sinuses and postcranial pneumatic bones in birds, so it’s reasonable to assume that it’s a general feature of all air-filled bones (see Witmer 1997 for lots of relevant citations and discussion). This is a pretty handy thing to know, because if we find an air-filled vertebra way out in the tail, we know pneumatic diverticula of the respiratory system got at least that far. ‘At least’ because pneumatic diverticula can make diagnostic traces on bones, but they don’t always do so. That means that the diverticular network can easily be more extensive than its skeletal traces, but not less so — see Wedel and Taylor (2013) for more on that.

To sum up, we suspect the following things about pneumatic diverticula around the vertebrae of sauropods, including Dolly:

  1. The diverticula were complex, based on the traces they left on the bones, and similarly complex diverticula in birds.
  2. The diverticula were patent, or open, maintaining an open connection to the outside by way of the respiratory air sacs, lungs, and trachea, because that’s how air-filled bones work in living birds and mammals.
  3. Despite being complex and ultimately open to the outside in one direction, the diverticula were cul-de-sacs, with little or no active circulation of air — especially in the neck.

With that in mind, what does the distribution of infected bone in Dolly tell us about sauropods?

Infections and inferences

Here’s another illustration of the respiratory system of the pigeon, this time a dorsal or top-down view, from Muller (1908: fig. 12):

Okay, that was a bit of a bait-and-switch: I promised you Dolly and gave you another pigeon. But that’s only to help you understand this similar cartoon I drew, which represents Dolly’s respiratory system and neck vertebrae, also seen from the top down:

Like the earlier cartoon, this is pretty simplified. For instance, I got lazy and didn’t draw all of the neck vertebrae. In life, Dolly probably had 15 or 16 neck vertebrae, like other diplodocids, and we know that the three with lesions are C5-C7 because they were found articulated. Here I drew just enough vertebrae to make my points, and I left off the head and all the other extraneous bits. Also, I’ve drawn the diverticula that run up the neck originating from cervical air sacs, as in pigeons (Muller 1908), but there is evidence that in ostriches those diverticula may originate from the lungs themselves (Schachner et al. 2020). Whether the diverticula come from the lungs or the air sacs is probably not an answerable question for sauropods, and for my purposes here, it doesn’t matter, only that the diverticula are connected back to the core respiratory system.

Three things struck us about the distribution of the infected bone in Dolly’s neck:

  1. The lesions are all in vertebrae that are a long way up the neck, far from the lungs and respiratory air sacs in the torso.
  2. The lesions are clustered in serially-adjacent vertebrae, instead of being scattered up and down the neck randomly.
  3. The lesions are present bilaterally, on both left and right sides of the affected vertebrae.

Well, as opposed to what? We can imagine a scenario in which the lesions were scattered randomly, not just up and down the neck, but also on left and right sides, like so:

If the infection had been carried in the blood, we might expect such a random pattern. In that case, it would be an extreme coincidence if a blood-borne infection, which could go anywhere in the body, only manifested in the air spaces on the sides of three consecutive vertebrae. The clustering of the Dolly’s lesions, in the air spaces on both sides in three adjacent vertebrae, far up the neck, points to a different cause.

Recall that diverticula are lined by epithelium, and that in air-filled bones, the epithelium is right up against the bone tissue. The infection in Dolly almost certainly started out as an infection in the diverticulum, which was so severe that it spread to the underlying bone. In exactly the same way that the air spaces in the bones are the skeletal footprints of the diverticula, the lesions in Dolly’s vertebrae are the skeletal footprints of infected epithelium lining the diverticula, like so:

The infection may have gotten so severe, far up Dolly’s neck, precisely because there was little airflow so far from the lungs and air sacs. Airborne bacteria or fungal spores could have floated into the diverticula by diffusion, come to rest against the epithelium in warm, dark, humid conditions, and gone wild. It’s also possible that a huge swath of Dolly’s respiratory system was infected, but the infection only got severe enough to spread to the underlying bone in cervical vertebrae 5-7, in which case the actual infection might have looked something like this:

Just like a diverticulum can contact a bone without producing a distinct trace, the pneumatic epithelium could be infected without producing a bony lesion. Thought experiment: how many times have you had a sinus infection, and how many people do you know who have had sinus infections? And how many of those sinus infections were severe enough, and lasted long enough, to produce bony lesions like we see in Dolly? Probably very few — such things do happen in humans, and the medical literature has plenty of cases (and if this has happened to your or a loved one, you have my full sympathy) — but on a population level, the fraction of respiratory infections that produce bony lesions is miniscule. Similarly, it’s very likely that much more of Dolly’s respiratory system was infected than we can tell from the skeleton.

A cervical vertebra of an ostrich with some of the pneumatic diverticula traced on.

The presence of infected bone on both left and right sides of C5-C7 in Dolly is also telling. If the diverticula on the left and right sides of the neck were separate, the symmetrical pattern of infection would be another extreme coincidence. But in birds there are opportunities for diverticula from the left and right sides of the neck to meet and anastomose, especially the supravertebral diverticula on the neural arch (shown above), and the supramedullary diverticula inside the neural canal. Based on pneumatic traces on the vertebrae we infer that the same diverticula were present in sauropods, as shown up above in the Diplodocus figures from Schwarz et al. (2007), and those left-and-right communications probably allowed the infection to develop more or less symmetrically. Or to put it another way, the symmetrical infections are additional evidence that the diverticula on the left and right sides of the neck were connected across the midline, and birds show that there are several ways that could have happened.

CT scans of cervical 7 of MOR 7029. Photograph and scan model of the vertebra ((A,B) respectively). The colored lines in (B) correspond to the scan slices (and scan interpretative drawings below). White arrows point to the external feature, while black arrows denote the hyperintense bone and irregular voids. (C) Comparison of the abnormal tissue composition of MOR 7029 (left), compared to that of a ‘normal’ diplodocine (right). Text and white arrows indicate the various features different shared/differentiated between the two. For the interpretative drawings, white = ‘normal’ bone, grey = hyperintense bone, black = irregular voids. Woodruff et al. (2022: fig. 2).

Another possibility is that a good chunk of the internal structure Dolly’s vertebrae was infected, and the lesions that we see on the surface are just the groady tips of big, disgusting icebergs of infected bone. In fact, that’s pretty much what the CT scans show. So possibly the infection started on one side of each vertebra and basically burrowed through to reach the other side. That would probably take weeks or months, whereas the infection could have spread across the midline through diverticula in hours or days, so I think the latter scenario is still the most plausible explanation for the presence of the lesions on both sides of the affected vertebrae.

In summary, I don’t think Dolly tells us anything surprising that we didn’t suspect before. Rather, the pattern of infection in Dolly makes perfect sense if the diverticula of sauropods were essentially bird-like, and that pattern is difficult to explain any other way.

Finding skeletal traces of a respiratory infection in Dolly was still a crazy lucky break, and that’s something I’ll discuss more in the next post in this series.

References

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in diplodocids, Dolly, paleopathology, pigeon, pneumaticity, stinkin' theropods
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How birds breathe, in 184 words

February 3, 2022

Windpipe and lungs in pink, air sacs in teal. Steps 1 and 3 happen at the same time — one breath of air is moving through the lungs and into the air sacs in back (1) at the same time as an earlier breath of air is moving out of the lungs and into the air sacs up front (3). Steps 2 and 4 happen at the same time as well — the air sacs in back are blowing air through the lungs (2) while the air sacs in front are blowing air out the windpipe (4). Each breath of air is inside the bird for two inhalations and exhalations.

Our lungs are made up of millions of tiny bags. Breath in, fill the bags with fresh air, breathe out, empty the bags of spent air. But bird lungs are very different. They’re made up of millions of tiny tubes, like bundles of drinking straws, and those tubes are connected to big, empty air sacs, like balloons that spread throughout the body. When birds breathe in, some of the air goes through the lungs, and some skips the lungs and goes into the air sacs. Then when the bird breathes out, the air in the air sacs gets pushed through the tubes in the lungs. So birds get oxygen-rich air blown through their lungs both when they inhale and when they exhale. The lungs and air sacs of birds also send mini air sacs into the skeleton, and these create air-filled spaces inside the bones, akin to our sinuses. These air spaces in the skeleton are the footprint of the respiratory system. A lot of extinct dinosaurs have the same pattern of air spaces in their skeletons, so we think they breathed like birds.

— Jessie Atterholt and Matt Wedel

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in ... in X words, avian respiration, Breathing, pigeon, stinkin' theropods, Things I should have posted ten years ago
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Bird neural canals are weird, part 3: the glycogen body

January 17, 2019

I planned to post this last spring but I never got around to it. I think I have a mental block about discussing the glycogen body. Partly because I’ve been burned by it before, partly because no-one knows what it does and that’s unsatsifying, partly because I didn’t want to plow through all the new literature on it (despite which, the function remains unknown).

Then I decided, screw it, I’ll let the slides speak for themselves, and the actual text of the post can just be navel-gazing and whingeing. Which you are “enjoying” right now.

So, there’s the glycogen body. It balloons out between the dorsal halves of the spinal cord, it’s made of glial cells (neuron support cells) that are packed with glycogen, and nobody knows why it’s there. On the graph of easy-to-find and frustrating-to-study it is really pushing the envelope.

Update: the role of the glycogen body in the ‘second brain’ myth is covered in the next post.

Previous entries in the “Bird neural canals are weird” series:

Here are some stubbornly-not-updated references for the images I used in the slides:

  • Huber, J.F. 1936. Nerve roots and nuclear groups in the spinal cord of the pigeon. Journal of Comparative Neurology 65(1): 43-91.
  • Streeter, G.L. 1904. The structure of the spinal cord of the ostrich. American Journal of Anatomy 3(1):1-27.
  • Watterson, R.L. 1949. Development of the glycogen body of the chick spinal cord. I. Normal morphogenesis, vasculogenesis and anatomical relationships. Journal of Morphology 85(2): 337-389.
Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in chicken, nervous system, neural canal, ostrich, pigeon, stinkin' theropods
8 Comments »

The Atterholt and Wedel (2018) SVPCA abstract and talk are now available on PeerJ Preprints

September 14, 2018

Here’s the story of my fascination with supramedullary airways over the last 20 years, and how Jessie Atterholt and I ended up working on them together, culminating with her talk at SVPCA last week. (Just here for the preprint link? Here you go.)

Müller (1908: fig. 12). Upper respiratory tract, trachea, and lungs in pink, air sacs and diverticula in blue. DSPM = diverticulum supramedullare.

Way back when I was working on my Master’s thesis at the University of Oklahoma and getting into pneumaticity for the first time, Kent Sanders found Müller (1908) and gave me a photocopy. This would have been the spring or summer of 1998, because we used some of Müller’s illustrations in our poster for SVP that year (Wedel and Sanders 1998). Müller’s description of pneumatic diverticula in the pigeon formed part of my intellectual bedrock, and I’ve referenced it a lot in my pneumaticity papers (complete list here).

One of the systems that Müller described is the diverticulum supramedullare, a.k.a. supramedullary diverticula, or, informally, supramedullary airways (SMAs). Traditionally these are defined as pneumatic diverticula that enter the neural canal and lie dorsal (supra) to the spinal cord (medulla), although O’Connor (2006) noted that in some cases the diverticula could completely envelop the spinal cord in a tube of air. I yapped about SMAs a bit in this post, and they’re flagged in almost every ostrich CT or dissection photo I’ve ever published, here on the blog or in a paper.

CT sections of a Giraffatitan cervical, with connections between the neural canal and pneumatic chambers in the spine highlighted in blue. Modified from Schwarz & Fritsch (2004: fig. 4).

Fast forward to 2006, when Daniela Schwarz and Guido Fritsch documented pneumatic foramina in the roof of the neural canal in cervical vertebrae of Giraffatitan. As far as I know, this was the first published demonstration of SMAs in a non-bird, or in any extinct animal. Lemme repeat that: Daniela Schwarz found these first!

OMNH 60718: too ugly for radio. This is an unfused neural arch in ventral view. Anterior is to the left. Neurocentral joint surfaces are drawn over with ladders; pneumatic foramina lie between them.

Shortly thereafter I independently found evidence of SMAs in a sauropod, in the form of multiple pneumatic foramina in the roof of the neural canal in an unfused neural arch of a basal titanosauriform (probably a brachiosaurid) from the Cloverly Formation of Montana. It’s a pretty roadkilled specimen and I was busy with other things so I didn’t get around to writing it up, but I didn’t forget about it, either (I rarely forget about stuff like this).

Then in 2013 I went to the Perot Museum in Dallas to see the giant Alamosaurus cervical series, and I also visited the off-site research facility where juvenile Alamosaurus from Big Bend is housed. When Ron Tykoski let me into the collections room, I was literally walking through the door for the first time when I exclaimed, “Holy crap!” I had spotted an unfused neural arch of a juvenile Alamosaurus on a shelf across the room, with complex pneumatic sculpting all over the roof of the neural canal.

Title slide for the 2014 SVPCA presentation.

The Big Bend and Cloverly specimens were the basis for my talk on SMAs at SVPCA in 2014, coauthored with Anthony Fiorillo, Des Maxwell, and Ron Tykoski. As prep for that talk, I visited the ornithology collections at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, photographed a lot of bird vertebrae with foramina inside their neural canals, and shot this pelican video. That was four years ago – why no paper yet? It’s because I wanted one more piece of smoking-gun evidence: a CT scan of a bird that would show a direct communication between the SMAs and the air spaces inside a vertebra, through one or more foramina in the roof, wall, or floor of the neural canal.

A spectrum of pneumatic traces in the neural canals of birds, including complexes of large or small foramina, isolated foramina, and sculpting without foramina.

In 2017, Jessie Atterholt taught in our summer anatomy course at WesternU as an adjunct (her full-time employment was at the Webb Schools in Claremont, home of the Alf Museum). Jessie and I had been acquainted for a few years, but we’d never had the opportunity to really talk science. As we chatted between dissections, I learned that she had a huge warchest of CT scans of whole birds from her dissertation work at Berkeley (we’d missed each other by a few years). My antennae twitched: one nice thing about SMAs is that, being bounded by bone, they can’t collapse after death, unlike more peripheral diverticula. And air is jet black on CT scans, so SMAs are easy to spot even on comparatively low-res scans. All you need is one or two black pixels. I proposed a collaboration: we could use her CT scans to survey the presence and distribution of SMAs in as many birds as possible.

Vertebral diverticula in two sagittally-exploded cervical vertebrae of a turkey. Anterior is to the left, #5 is the SMA. Cover (1953: fig. 2). Yes, I know this is gross – if anyone has a cleaner scan, I’m interested.

You might think that such a survey would have been done ages ago, but it’s not the case. A few authors have mentioned supramedullary airways, and O’Connor (2006) gave a good description of some of the variation in SMAs in extant birds as a whole. But the only detailed accounts to illustrate the morphology and extent of the SMAs in a single species are Müller (1908) on the common pigeon and Cover (1953) on the domestic turkey. I’d seen what I suspected were traces of SMAs in the vertebrae of many, mostly large-bodied birds, and I’d seen them in CTs of ostriches and hummingbirds, and in ostriches and turkeys in dissection. But Jessie was offering the chance to see both the SMAs and their osteological traces in dozens of species from across the avian tree.

SMAs in a micro-CT of a female Anna’s hummingbird, Calypte anna. Scale bars are in mm.

Real life intervened: we were both so busy teaching last fall that we didn’t get rolling until just before the holidays. But the project gradually built up steam over the course of 2018. One story that will require more unpacking later: everything I’ve written on this blog about neural canals, Haplocanthosaurus, or CT scanning in 2018 is something serendipitously spun out of the SMA survey with Jessie. Expect a lot more Atterholt and Wedel joints in the near future – and one Atterholt et al. (minus Wedel) even sooner, that is going to be big news. Watch this space.

It didn’t hurt that in the meantime Jessie got a tenure-track job teaching human anatomy at WesternU, to run the same course she’d taught in as an adjunct last year, and started here at the beginning of June. By that time we had an abstract on our findings ready to go for this year’s SVP meeting. Alas, it was not to be: we were out in the field this summer when we learned that our abstract had been rejected. (I have no idea why; we’ve increased the taxonomic sampling of SMAs in extant birds by a factor of six or so, most of our important findings are in the abstract, and we mentioned the relevance to fossils. But whatever.)

We were bummed for a day, and then Jessie decided that she’d submit the abstract to SVPCA, only slightly chopped for length, and go to Manchester to present if it was accepted – which it was. Unfortunately I’d already made other plans for the fall, so I missed the fun. Fortunately the SVPCA talks were livestreamed, so last Friday at 1:30 in the morning I got to watch Jessie give the talk. I wish the talks had been recorded, because she knocked it out of the park.

Title slide for the 2018 SVPCA presentation.

And now everything we’re in a position to share is freely available at PeerJ. The SVPCA abstract is up as a PeerJ preprint (Atterholt and Wedel 2018), the longer, rejected SVP abstract is up as a supplementary file (because it has a crucial paragraph of results we had to cut to make the length requirement for SVPCA, and because why not), and our slideshow is up now, too. I say ‘our’ slideshow but it’s really Jessie’s – she built it and delivered it with minimal input from me, while I held down the sauropod side of our expanding empire of neural canal projects. She has the paper mostly written, too.

Oh, and we did get the smoking-gun images I wanted, of SMAs communicating with pneumatic spaces in the vertebrae via foramina in the neural canal. Often these foramina go up into the neural arch and spine, but in some cases – notably in pelicans and the occasional ratite – they go down into the centrum. So I now have no excuse for not getting back to the sauropod SMA paper (among many other things).

We’re making this all available because not only are we not afraid of getting scooped, we’re trying to get the word out. SMAs are phylogenetically widespread in birds and we know they were present in sauropods as well, so we should see some evidence of them in theropods and pterosaurs (because reasons). I made such a nuisance of myself at the recent Flugsaurier meeting, talking to everyone who would listen about SMAs, that Dave Hone went and found some pneumatic foramina in the neural canals of Pteranodon vertebrae during the conference – I suspect just to shut me up. That’ll be some kind of Hone-Atterholt-Wedel-and-some-others joint before long, too.

Anyway, point is, SMAs are cool, and you now have everything you need to go find them in more critters. Jessie and I are happy to collaborate if you’re interested – if nothing else, we have the background, lit review, and phylogenetic sampling down tight – but we don’t own SMAs, and we’ll be nothing but thrilled when your own reports start rolling in. Unexplored anatomical territory beckons, people. Let’s do this.

References

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in Alamosaurus, brachiosaurids, cervical, dorsal, Giraffatitan, hummingbird, just freakin' wall-to-wall turkeys everywhere man, pelican, People we like, pigeon, pneumaticity, rhea, some kind of bird, stinkin' mammals, stinkin' theropods, supramedullary diverticula, titanosaur
6 Comments »

Amazing free comparative anatomy resource. Also, sharks (also for free).

February 29, 2016

Liem et al 2001 PPTs - intro slide

Functional Anatomy of the Vertebrates: An Evolutionary Perspective, by Liem et al. (2001), is by some distance my favorite comparative vertebrate anatomy text. When I was a n00b at Berkeley, Marvalee Wake assigned it to me as preparatory reading for my qualifying exams.

This scared me to death back then. Now I love it.

This scared me to death back then. Now I love it – sharkitecture!

The best textbooks, like Knut Schmidt-Nielsen’s Animal Physiology (which deserves a post or even series of its own sometime), have a clarity of writing and illustration that makes the fundamentals of life seem not only comprehensible, but almost inevitable – without losing sight of the fact that nature is complex and we don’t know everything yet. FAotV has both qualities, in spades.

Where vertebrae come from.

Where vertebrae come from. Liem et al. (2001: fig. 8.4).

I’m writing about this now because Willy Bemis, second author on FAotV, has just made ALL of the book’s illustrations available for free on his website, in a series of 22 PowerPoint files that correspond to the 22 chapters of the book. All told they add up to about 155 Mb, which is trivial – even the $5 jump drives in the checkout lanes at department stores have five to ten times as much space.

Aiiiieeee - a theropod! Aim for its head!

Aiiiieeee – a theropod! Aim for its head! Liem et al. (2001: fig. 8.17).

Of course, to get the full benefit you should also pick up a copy of the book. I see used copies going for under $40 in a lot of places online. Mine will have pride of place on my bookshelf until I enter the taphonomic lottery. And I’ll be raiding these PPTs for images from now until then, too.

Countercurrent gas exchange in fish gills - a very cool system.

Countercurrent gas exchange in fish gills – a very cool system. Liem et al. (2001: fig. 18.6).

So do the right thing, and go download this stuff, and use it. Be sure to credit Liem et al. (2001) for the images, and thank Willy Bemis for making them all available. It’s a huge gift to the field. Here’s that link again.

Liem et al 2001 PPTs - shark jaw and forelimb musculature

Dangit, if only there was a free online source for illustrations of shark anatomy… Liem et al (2001: fig. 10.12).

But wait – that’s not all! Starting on June 28, Dr. Bemis will be one of six faculty members from Cornell and the University of Queensland teaching a 4-week massively open online course (MOOC) on sharks. Freakin’ sharks, man!

“What did you do this summer? Hang out and play Nintendo?”

“Yep. Oh, and I also took a course on freakin’ sharks from some awesome shark experts. You?”

As the “massively open” part implies, the course is free, although you have the option of spending $49 to get a certificate of completion (assuming you finish satisfactorily). Go here to register or get more info.

Reference

  • Liem, K.F., Bemis, W.E., Walker, W.F., and Grande, L. 2001. Functional Anatomy of the Vertebrates. (3rd ed.). Thomson/Brooks Cole, Belmont, CA.
Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in Education, freakin sharks, free stuff, pigeon, Science communication, stinkin' every thing that's not a sauropod, stinkin' theropods, timely
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