We interrupt your regularly scheduled Concrete Diplodocus update to bring you important Sauropods Stomping On Theropods news
February 24, 2023
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 #paleoart at #Patreon for #FossilFriday! Tyrannosaurus takes on a giant Alamosaurus. Alamosaurus laughs. Sauropods really do win this time.
#dinosaurs #sauropodswin #tyrannosaurs
Full resolution version available at:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/79152256
Obscure vertebral anatomy term of the day: bouton
October 25, 2022
Long-time readers will recall that I’m fascinated by neurocentral joints, and not merely that they exist (although they are pretty cool), but that in some vertebrae they migrate dorsally or ventrally from their typical position (see this and this).
A few years ago I learned that there is a term for the expanded bit of neural arch pedicle that contributes to the centrum in vertebrae with ventrally-migrated neurocentral joints: the bouton, which is French for ‘button’. Here’s an example in the unfused C7 of a subadult sheep. Somebody gifted me a handful of these things a few years ago, and I’ve been meaning to blog about them forever. Many thanks, mysterious benefactor. (I mean, only mysterious to me, because my memory is crap; I’m sure you know who you are, and if you ever read this, feel free to remind me. And thanks for the dead animal parts!)
Guess what? You have these things, too! Or at least you did; if you’re old enough to be reading this, your boutons fused with the rest of the separate bits of your vertebrae a long time ago, between the ages of 2 and 5 (according to Bagnall et al. 1977). Here’s a diagram from Schaefer et al. (2009: p.99) showing the separate centrum and neural arch elements in a thoracic vertebra of a human toddler. So, hey, cool, we all had boutons, just like sheep. And just like some sauropods. (You didn’t think I was going to do a whole OVATOD post without sauropods, did you?)
Here’s our old friend BIBE 45885, an unfused caudal neural arch (or perhaps neural ring) of Alamosaurus, which I’ve been freaking out over for five years now. Those fat bits of neural arch that very nearly close off the neural canal ventrally? Boutons, baby! Big, beautiful boutons. In this photo it looks like the paired boutons meet on the midline, but in fact they merely overlap from this point of view — there is a narrow (<1mm) squiggly gap between them. Given how narrow that gap is, I suspect the two boutons probably would have fused to each other before either of them fused to the centrum, if this particular animal hadn’t died first.
Here’s an unfused dorsal centrum of Giraffatitan, MB.R. 3823, which I yapped about in this post. This vertebra is the spiritual opposite of the Alamosaurus caudal shown above: instead of the neural canal being nearly enclosed by bits of the neural arch wrapping around ventrally, the neural canal is nearly enclosed dorsally by bits of the centrum sticking up on either side and wrapping around dorsally. As with the boutons of the Alamosaurus caudal, the two expanded bits of centrum stuff in this Giraffatitan dorsal approach each other very closely but don’t quite meet; you can fit a piece of paper between them, but not a heck of a lot more. In essence, those “two expanded bits of centrum stuff” are centrum boutons that project up into what I suppose we’ll keep calling a ‘neural arch’ even though it’s neither very neural nor an arch. Or perhaps anti-boutons? With apologies to Gould and Vrba (1982), here we have another missing term in the science of form.
Why do we, and sheep, and prolly lots of other mammals, and some sauropods, have boutons? Presumably to strengthen the neurocentral joints by expanding the joint surface area. I don’t know if anyone has ever tested that — if you do, please let me know in the comments.
Many thanks to Thierra Nalley, who may be the only person I know besides Mike who spends more time thinking about vertebrae than I do, for introducing me to the term ’bouton’ a few years ago. If for some reason you want to corrupt your sensibilities reading about primate vertebrae, you could do a lot worse than checking out Thierra’s papers.
I don’t expect we’ll have a ton of OVATOD posts, in part because there aren’t a heck of a lot of vertebra parts that we haven’t already blogged about. But who knows, maybe Mike will write about prepostepipophyses or something. Stay tuned!
References
- Bagnall, K.M., Harris, P.F., and Jones, P.R.M. 1977. A radiographic study of the human fetal spine. 2. The sequence of development of ossification centers in the vertebral column. Journal of Anatomy 124(3): 791–802.
- Gould, S.J. and Vrba, E.S. 1982. Exaptation—a missing term in the science of form. Paleobiology 8(1): 4-15.
- Schaefer, M., Black, S., and Scheuer, L. 2009. Juvenile Osteology: A Laboratory and Field Manual. Academic Press, Burlington, MA, 369pp.
P.S. Can we all pitch in and make ’bouton’ the new ‘aglet‘? Please? Please?
Equatorial Minnesota on Alamosaurus
February 21, 2021
Figure 3. BIBE 45854, articulated series of nine mid and posterior cervical vertebrae of a large, osteologically mature Alamosaurus sanjuanensis. Series is estimated to represent the sixth to fourteenth cervical vertebrae. A, composite photo-mosaic of the cervical series in right lateral view; identification of each vertebra indicated by C6 to C14, respectively. B, line drawing based on the photo-mosaic in A. C, line drawing in B with labels shown and vertebral fossae indicated by solid grey fill; cross-hatching represents broken bone surfaces and reconstructive material. Abbreviations: C, cervical vertebra; cdf, centrodiapophyseal fossa; clf, centrum lateral fossa; pocdf, postzygapophyseal centrodiapophyseal fossa; prcdf, prezygapophyseal centrodiapophyseal fossa; prcdf1, dorsal prezygapophyseal centrodiapophyseal fossa; prcdf2, ventral prezygapophyseal centrodiapophyseal fossa; sdf, spinodiapophyseal fossa; spof, spinopostzygapophyseal fossa; sprf, spinoprezygapophyseal fossa. (Tykoski and Fiorillo 2016)
Have you been reading Justin Tweet’s series, “Your Friends the Titanosaurs“, at his awesomely-named blog, Equatorial Minnesota? If not, get on it. He’s been running the series since June, 2018, so this notice is only somewhat grotesquely overdue. The latest installment, on Alamosaurus from Texas and Mexico, is phenomenal. I have never seen another summary or review that pulled together so much of the relevant literature and explained it all so well. Seriously, that blog post deserves to be a review paper; it could be submitted pretty much as-is, although it would be even better with his two other Alamosaurus posts integrated (this one, and this one). It’s great work, is what I’m saying, and it needs to be acknowledged.
In particular, I was struck by the note by Anonymous in 1941 on the discovery of a cervical vertebra 1.2 meters long. I’d never heard of that ref, and I’ve never seen that vert, but at 120cm it would be in the top 7 longest cervical vertebrae on the planet (see the latest version of the list in this post), narrowly beating out the 118-cm cervical of Puertasaurus. In fairness, the preserved cervical of Puertasaurus is probably a posterior one, and more anterior cervicals might have been longer. Then again, in the big Alamosaurus neck the longest verts are pretty darned posterior, so…we need more Puertasaurus.
EDIT a few hours later: Thanks to the kind offices of Justin Tweet, I’ve now seen Anonymous (1941), and the exact wording is, “A single vertebra, or neck joint bone, is three feet across, only two inches less than four feet long, and in its present fossilized state weighs 600 pounds.” ‘Two inches less than four feet long’ is 46 inches or a hair under 117cm, which puts the supposed giant cervical just behind Puertasaurus after all, but still firmly in the top 10. And depending on how one interprets the passage in Anonymous (1941), it might not have been any bigger than BIBE 45854–see this comment for details.
Big cervical showdown. From the top left: BYU 9024, originally referred to Supersaurus but more likely representing a giant Barosaurus (137cm); the single available cervical of Puertasaurus (118cm); a world-record giraffe neck (2.4m); Alamosaurus referred cervical series BIBE 45854, longest centra are ~81cm; Sauroposeidon holotype OMNH 53062, longest centrum is 125cm. This image makes it very clear that whatever Sauroposeidon was doing, it was a way different thing from Alamosaurus.
Crucially, the longest vertebrae in the BIBE 45854 series are about 80 or 81 cm long, which means that a 1.2-meter cervical would be half again as large. That is a pretty staggering thought, and that individual of Alamosaurus–assuming it was the same taxon as BIBE 45854, and not some other, longer-necked critter–would definitely be a contender for the largest sauropod of all time.
Illustrations here are of the big Alamosaurus cervical series from Big Bend, which was comprehensively described by Ron Tykoski and Tony Fiorillo in 2016, and which we have covered in these previous posts:
- How big was Alamosaurus?
- Going to see the big mounted Alamosaurus next week
- BIBE 45854, the giant Alamosaurus cervical series from Big Bend, Texas
References
- Anonymous. 1941. Find dinosaur neck bone nearly four feet long. The Science News-Letter 39(1):6–7.
- Tykoski, R.S. and Fiorillo, A.R. 2016. An articulated cervical series of Alamosaurus sanjuanensis Gilmore, 1922 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) from Texas: new perspective on the relationships of North America’s last giant sauropod. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 15(5):339-364.
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
- Atterholt, J., and Wedel, M. 2018. A CT-based survey of supramedullary diverticula in extant birds. 66th Symposium on Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy, Programme and Abstracts, p. 30 / PeerJ Preprints 6:e27201v1
- Cover, M.S. 1953. Gross and microscopic anatomy of the respiratory system of the turkey. III. The air sacs. American Journal of Veterinary Research 14:239-245.
- Müller, B. 1908. The air-sacs of the pigeon. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 50:365-420.
- O’Connor, P.M. 2006. Postcranial pneumaticity: an evaluation of soft-tissue influences on the postcranial skeleton and the reconstruction of pulmonary anatomy in archosaurs. Journal of Morphology 267:1199-1226.
- Schwarz D, and Fritsch G. 2006. Pneumatic structures in the cervical vertebrae of the Late Jurassic Tendaguru sauropods Brachiosaurus brancai and Dicraeosaurus. Eclogae Geologicae Helvetiae 99:65–78.
- Wedel, M.J., and Sanders, R.K. 1998. Using computerized tomography to investigate sauropod cervical morphology. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 18, Supplement to Issue 3: 87A.
Back in 2009, I posted on a big cervical series discovered in Big Bend National Park. Then in 2013 I posted again about how I was going to the Perot Museum in Dallas to see that cervical series, which by then was fully prepped and on display but awaiting a full description. Ron Tykoski and Tony Fiorillo (2016) published that description a couple of years ago, and after almost five years it’s probably time I posted an update.
I did visit the Perot Museum in 2013 and Ron and Tony kindly let me hop the fence and get up close and personal with their baby. I got a lot of nice photos and measurements of the big specimen. It’s an impressive thing. Compared to the other big sauropod cervicals I’ve gotten to play with, these vertebrae aren’t all that long – the two longest centra are about 80cm, compared to ~120cm for Sauroposeidon, Puertasaurus, and Patagotitan, and 137cm for Supersaurus (more details here) – but they are massive. According to the table of measurements (yay!) in Tykoski and Fiorillo (2016), which accord well with the measurements I took when I was there, the last vert is 117.5cm tall from the bottom of the cervical rib to the top of the neural spine, 98.4cm wide across the diapophyses, and has a cotyle measuring 29cm tall by 42cm wide. Here it is with me for scale:
I guarantee you, standing next to that thing and imagining it being inside the neck of a living animal is a breathtaking experience.
I failed in my mission in one way. In a comment on my 2013 post, I said, “I’ll try to get some good lateral views of the mount with as little perspective as possible.” But it can’t be done – the geometry of the room and the size of the skeleton don’t allow it, as Ron noted in the very next comment. There is one place in the exhibit hall where you can get the whole skeleton into the frame, and that’s a sort of right anterolateral oblique view. Here’s my best attempt:
So, this is an awesome specimen and you should go see it. As you can see from the photos, the vertebrae are right on the other side of the signage, with no glass between you and them, so you can see a lot. The rest of the exhibits are top notch as well. Definitely worth a visit if you find yourself within striking distance of Dallas.
Reference
Tykoski, R.S. and Fiorillo, A.R. 2016. An articulated cervical series of Alamosaurus sanjuanensis Gilmore, 1922 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) from Texas: new perspective on the relationships of North America’s last giant sauropod. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 15(5):339-364.
Some further thoughts on Patagotitan
August 10, 2017
A bunch of stuff, loosely organized by theme.
Media
First up, I need to thank Brian Switek, who invited me to comment on Patagotitan for his piece at Smithsonian. I think he did a great job on that, arguably the best of any of the first-day major media outlet pieces. And it didn’t go unnoticed – his article was referenced at both the Washington Post and NPR (and possibly other outlets, those are the two I know of right now). I don’t think my quotes got around because they’re particularly eloquent, BTW, but rather because reporters tend to like point-counterpoint, and I was apparently the most visible counterpoint. They probably would have done the same if I’d been talking complete nonsense (which, to be fair, some people may think I was).
Paleobiology vs Records
The most commonly reproduced quote of mine is this one, originally from Brian’s piece:
I think it would be more accurate to say that Argentinosaurus, Puertasaurus and Patagotitan are so similar in size that it is impossible for now to say which one was the largest.
That may seem at odds with the, “Well, actually…[pushes glasses up nose]…Argentinosaurus was still biggest” tack I’ve taken both in my post yesterday and on Facebook. So let me elaborate a little.
There is a minor, boring point, which is that when I gave Brian that quote, I’d seen the Patagotitan paper, but not the Electronic Supplementary Materials (ESM), so I knew that Patagotitan was about the same size as the other two (and had known for a while), but I hadn’t had a chance to actually run the numbers.
The much more interesting point is that the size differences between Argentinosaurus, Puertasaurus, and Patagotitan are astonishingly small. The difference between a 2.5m femur and a 2.4m one is negligible, ditto for vertebrae with centra 59cm and 60cm in diameter. OMNH 1331, the biggest centrum bit from the giant Oklahoma apatosaur, had an intact max diameter of 49cm, making it 26% larger in linear terms than the next-largest apatosaur. The centra of these giant South American titanosaurs are more than 20% bigger yet than OMNH 1331, just in linear terms. That’s crazy.
It’s also crazy that these three in particular – Argentinosaurus, Puertasaurus, and Patagotitan – are so similar in size. Dinosaur developmental programs were ‘messy’ compared to those of mammals, both in having weird timings for things like onset of reproduction, and in varying a lot among closely related taxa. Furthermore, sauropod population dynamics should have been highly skewed toward juveniles and subadults. So is the near-equality in size among Argentinosaurus, Puertasaurus, and Patagotitan just a coincidence, or does it mean that something weird was going on? There’s really no third option. I mean, even if some kind of internal (biomechanical or physiological) or external (ecological, food or predation) constraint forced those three to the same adult body size, it’s weird then that we’re finding only or at least mostly near-max-size adults. (If the available specimens of these three aren’t near-max-size, then any hypothesis that they’re forced to the same size by constraints is out the window, and we’re back to coincidence.)
BUT
With all that said, the title of “world’s largest dinosaur” is not handed out for effort expended, number of specimens collected, skeletal completeness, ontogenetic speculation, or anything other than “the dinosaur with the largest measured elements”. And that is currently Argentinosaurus. So although for any kind of paleobiological consideration we can currently consider Argentinosaurus, Puertasaurus, and Patagotitan to all be about the same size – and Alamosaurus, Paralititan, Notocolossus, and probably others I’ve forgotten should be in this conversation – anyone wanting to dethrone Argentinosaurus needs to actually show up with bigger elements.
So, if you’re interested in paleobiology, it’s fascinating and frankly kind of unnerving that so many of these giant titanosaurs were within a hand-span of each other in terms of size. Patagotitan is one more on the pile – and, as I said yesterday, exciting because it’s so complete.
But if you want to know who holds the crown, it’s still Argentinosaurus.
Humeri
In a comment on the last post, Andrea Cau made an excellent point that I am just going to copy here entire:
Even Paralititan stromeri humerus is apparently larger than Patagotitan humerus (169 cm vs 167.5 cm). I know humerus length alone is bad proxy of body size, but at least this shows that even in that bone Patagotitan is just another big titanosaur among a well known gang of titans, not a supersized one.
That made me want to start a list of the longest sauropod humeri. Here goes – if I missed anyone or put down a figure incorrectly, I’m sure you’ll let me know in the comments.
- Giraffatitan: 213cm
- Brachiosaurus: 203cm
- Ruyangosaurus: 190cm (estimated from 135cm partial)
- Turiasaurus: 179cm
- Notocolossus: 176cm
- Paralititan: 169cm
- Patagotitan: 167.5cm
- Dreadnoughtus: 160cm
- Futlognkosaurus: 156cm
Admittedly the Patagotitan humerus is from a paratype and not from the largest individual, but that is true for some others on the list, including Giraffatitan. And we have no humeri from Argentinosaurus, Puertasaurus, and some other giants.
Dorsal Vertebrae
A couple of further thoughts on how the dorsal vertebrae of Patagotitan compare to those of Argentinosaurus. First, now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I have a hard time seeing how the dorsal polygon method used by Carballido et al. in the Patagotitan paper has any biological meaning. In their example figure, the polygon around the Puertasaurus vertebra is mostly full of bone, and the one around Patagotitan has a lot of empty space. It’s easy to imagine an alternative metric, like “area of the minimum polygon actually filled by bone”, that would lead to a different ‘winner’. But that wouldn’t mean much, either.
Something that probably does have a real and important biomechanical meaning is the surface area of the articular face of the centrum, because that’s the area of bone that has to bear the compressive load, which is directly related to the animal’s mass. The biggest Patagotitan centrum is that of MPEF-PV 3400/5, which is at least a local maximum since has smaller centra both ahead and behind. The posterior face measures 59cm wide by 42.5cm tall. Abstracted as an ellipse, which may not be perfectly accurate, those measurements give a surface area of (pi)(29.5)(21.25)=1970 cm^2. For Argentinosaurus, the largest complete centrum has a posterior face measuring 60cm wide by 47cm tall (Bonaparte and Coria 1993: p. 5), giving an elliptical surface area of (pi)(30)(23.5)=2210 cm^2. (I’d use hi-res images of the centra to measure the actual surface areas if I could, but AFAIK those images either don’t exist or at least have not yet been made public, for either taxon.) So although the Argentinosaurus dorsal seems like it is only a bit bigger in linear terms, it’s 12% larger in surface area, and that might actually be a meaningful difference.
Cervical Vertebrae
One thing I haven’t commented on yet – Patagotitan is the newest member of the “world’s longest vertebrae” club. The longest Patagotitan cervical, MPEF-PV 3400/3, is listed in the ESM as having a centrum length of 120cm, but it’s also listed as incomplete. In the skeletal recon in the paper, the centrum is colored in as present, but the neural spine is missing. So is the centrum complete in terms of length? I don’t think it’s clear right now.
Anyway, here’s the current rundown of the longest cervical centra of sauropods (and therefore, the longest vertebrae among animals):
- BYU 9024, possibly referable to Supersaurus or Barosaurus: 137cm
- Price River 2 titanosauriform: 129cm
- OMNH 53062, Sauroposeidon holotype: 125cm
- KLR1508-77-2, Ruyangosaurus giganteus referred specimen: 124cm
- MPEF-PV 3400/3, Patagotitan holotype: 120cm (+?)
- MPM 10002, Puertasaurus holotype: 118cm
You may be surprised to see the Price River 2 cervical in there. It was reported in an SVP abstract a few years ago (I’ll dig up that ref and update this post), and Mike and I saw it last year on the Sauropocalypse. We measured the centrum at 129cm, making it just a bit longer than the longest centrum of Sauroposeidon, and therefore the second-longest vertebra of anything ever.
Aside – I’m probably getting a reputation as a big ole meanie when it comes to debunking “world’s largest dinosaur” claims. If I’m willing to take the lead in kicking my own dinosaur down the ladder, don’t expect me to be kind to yours. I follow where the numbers lead.
Now, here’s an interesting thing – now that Sauroposeidon is coming out as a basal titanosaur, rather than a brachiosaur, it might not have been a skinny freak. The 120cm cervical of Patagotitan makes the 125cm cervical of Sauroposeidon and the 129cm cervical from Price River 2 look even more tantalizing. Maybe it’s super-giant sauropods all the way down.
Here’s a dorsal vertebra of Camarasaurus in anterior view (from Ostrom & McIntosh 1966, modified by Wilson & Sereno 1998). It is one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen in a sauropod. It makes my skin crawl.
Here’s why: the centrum and the thing we habitually call the ‘neural arch’ aren’t fully fused, and as this modified version makes clear, the ‘neural arch’ is neither neural nor an arch. Instead of being bounded ventrally by the centrum and dorsally and laterally by the neural arch, the neural canal lies entirely below the synchondrosis between the not-really-an-arch and the centrum.
Why?! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT, CAMARASAURUS? This is not ‘Nam. This is basic vertebral architecture. There are rules.
Look at c6 of Apatosaurus CM 555 here, behaving as all good vertebrae ought to. Neural arch be archin’, as the kids say.
And if you are seeking solace in the thought that maybe the artist just drew that Cam dorsal incorrectly, forget it. I’ve been to Yale and examined the original specimen. I’ve seen things, man!
Camarasaurus isn’t the only pervert around here. Check this out:
Unfused neural arch of a caudal vertebra of a juvenile Alamosaurus from Big Bend. And I mean, this is a neural arch. This may be the most neural of all neural arches, in that it contains the entire neural canal. It’s more of a neural…ring, I guess. That’s right, this Alamosaurus caudal is batting for the opposite team from the Cam dorsal above. And it’s a team that neither you nor I play on, because we have well-behaved normal-ass vertebrae with neural arches that actually arch, and then stop, like God and Richard Owen intended.
Scientifically, my question about these vertebrae is: well, that is, I mean to say, what!? I think they have damaged me in some fundamental way.
If you have anything more intelligent to add (or even less intelligent – consider the gauntlet thrown down!), the comment thread is open.
References
- Ostrom, John H., and John S. McIntosh. 1966. Marsh’s Dinosaurs. Yale University Press, New Haven and London. 388 pages including 65 absurdly beautiful plates.
- Wilson, J. A. and Paul C. Sereno. 1998. Early evolution and higher-level phylogeny of sauropod dinosaurs. Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, Memoir 5: 1-68.
So, this happened today
March 28, 2013
Going to see the big mounted Alamosaurus next week
March 20, 2013
Next week I’m going to visit the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, Texas, to see their big Alamosaurus (these photos were kindly provided by Ron Tykoski of the Perot Museum, with permission to post). See that sweet string of cervical vertebrae in front of the mounted skeleton? A photo of those same vertebrae when they were still in the ground was featured in the post “How big was Alamosaurus?” three and a half years ago. Happily now they are out of the ground, prepped, and on display, and Tony Fiorillo and Ron Tykoski are working on getting them and some other new Alamosaurus material described.
Here’s another view of that mount. You may be wondering, first, how legit is it, and second, how big is it? Happily, I have answers for you. In email messages with permission to cite, Ron Tykoski wrote,
The Alamosaurus skeletal mount by RCI in the photos is based upon scaling the Smithsonian and UT Austin material to match the size of our cervicals here in Dallas. There were enough overlapping parts between the pieces at the three institutions to get the proportions pretty nicely supported.
I ran across your SV-POW thread on ‘How big was Alamosaurus?’ back when you first posted it in ‘09. You ought to be pleased to know that you came remarkably close to the eventual size of the skeleton we wound up with. The full skeleton RCI generated (again, based off scaling to the Dallas verts) is 84ft long, about 16ft at the shoulder (I dropped a tape measure from the 1st dorsal neural spine to the floor during skeleton construction and got 480cm-490cm), and a neck + head of about 25ft. The overall length and neck length were provided by RCI after fabrication and assembly. That shoulder height is a bit suspect though based on the positioning of the pectoral girdle in the mount, relative to the ribcage and vert column. I think the head currently is posed about 25ft or so off the floor, but I can’t verify that (I didn’t get into the scissor-lift to check that at the time). This skeleton actually played a role in determining the size of the hall in which it is installed. We decided early in the planning phase for the building that this skeleton would be the centerpiece for the hall. As a result, the ceilings for this floor had to be made extra-high, and the mid-room support pillars designed out to accommodate the skeleton and still clear all the HVAC, sprinkler heads, and other necessities.
That’s all pretty fantastic–both that we have enough of Alamosaurus to do a pretty rigorous full skeletal mount, and that the beast was legitimately pretty darned big. Ron goes on:
One correction to the story on SV-POW, the Dallas cervical series consists of only 9 verts, not 10. There may have been frags or something that made folks think there was a 10th at the anterior end of the series when first found, but I’ve never seen evidence of it in our collection. This may be supported by the fact that the verts were given letter designations in the field (that we still use), and are identified as verts B through J, from anterior to posterior.
I later learned from Tony Fiorillo that the vertebrae were labelled B through J in the field in case anything anterior to B turned up, but nothing did, so the ‘A’ placeholder went unused. That reminds me of the search in the mid-1800s for the hypothetical planet Vulcan (not the one you’re thinking of) between Mercury and the Sun, which I bring up for no reasons other than that hypothetical planets are cool, and if you’re exploring, it’s worth keeping an open mind about what might yet turn up.
There’s more to say about the size of Alamosaurus–we haven’t even covered the big material described by Fowler and Sullivan (2011) yet–but I’m not going to say a whole lot right now, since I’m going to see the Big Bend material in Dallas in just a few days. Watch this space.
Reference
Opisthocoelicaudia is Just Plain Wrong
February 24, 2013
I was cruising the monographs the other night, looking for new ideas, when the humerus of Opisthocoelicaudia stopped me dead in my tracks. I think you’ll agree it is an arresting sight:
Opisthocoelicaudia right humerus in medial, anterior, lateral, and posterior views, from Borsuk-Bialynicka (1977: figure 7)
I’d seen it before, but somehow I had never grokked its grotesque fatness. I mean, damn, Opisthocoelicaudia, you really let yourself go. Especially compared to the slenderness and grace of this juvenile Alamosaurus humerus:
Alamosaurus left humerus in anterior and posterior views, from Lehman and Coulson (2002: figure 7).
Now, I realize that part of the slenderness of this Alamosaurus humerus might be because it’s a juvenile–other alamosaur humeri are a bit more robust–but it’s still a striking contrast. I couldn’t help but superimpose them, scaled to the same midshaft width:
I flipped the Alamosaurus humerus left-to-right to match that astonishing lump of Opisthocoelicaudia. The result reminds me of one of Abrell and Thompson’s Actual Facts:
If you put Woodrow Wilson inside William Howard Taft, he would have stuck out by a good 18 inches.
None of that probably signifies anything more than that I am easily amused. And also, Opisthocoelicaudia is Just Plain Wrong. You hear me, Opisthocoelicaudia? Don’t make me make you cry mayonnaise!
References
- Borsuk-Bialynicka, M. 1977. A new camarasaurid sauropod Opisthocoelicaudia skarzynskii, gen. n., sp. n. from the Upper Cretaceous of Mongolia. Palaeontologia Polonica 37: 5-64.
- Lehman, Thomas M. and Alan B. Coulson. 2002. A juvenile specimen of the sauropod dinosaur Alamosaurus sanjuanensis from the Upper Cretaceous of Big Bend National Park, Texas. Journal of Paleontology 76(1): 156-172.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 