Here comes Santaposeidon!



Ever since we started working on Sauroposeidon, Rich Cifelli and I dreamed of seeing the reconstructed neck on display. That vision has come to fruition.

The Oklahoma Museum of Natural History opened a totally new building in 2000. Coincidentally, the opening ceremony for the new digs was held the same week that the paper naming Sauroposeidon came out in JVP. The exhibits in the new building were pretty cool right out of the gate, but the exhibit people have not been idle, and if you haven’t been there in a year or three you will find many things that you have not seen before.

My favorite upgrade is the new orientation gallery, which introduces museum visitors to the functions of the museum and the kinds of work that go on in the research wing, including most of the traditional -ologies. The reconstructed neck and head of Sauroposeidon hang from the ceiling, spanning most of the length of the gallery and extending out into the museum’s great hall.

The beast was reconstructed by Research Casting International. I got to visit their workshop in Ontario, Canada, a little over a year ago to see how things were coming along. The people there were extremely serious about getting things right (how refreshing!). We spent quite a while talking about how Sauroposeidon was different from Giraffatitan (RCI remounted the Humbolt dinos) and sketching out what the missing bits might have looked like, especially the skull.

Of course we don’t have any skull material from Sauroposeidon, but we do have skulls and partial skulls from several other basal titanosauriforms. Together with one of the people working on the Sauroposeidon project, I filled up a couple of pieces of paper with sketches showing what a slender mid-Cretaceous brachiosaur might have looked like. In particular, and in keeping with the gracility of the cervical vertebrae, we narrowed the skull a bit to get rid of the dreaded Giraffatitan Toilet-Bowl Head.

The completed neck and head were already mounted in the OMNH when I visited last Christmas, but the gallery wasn’t open yet so all I got–and all I could pass on to you–was this teaser. The new orientation gallery opened in the middle of this spring, so Sauroposeidon has been hanging out there for a while. This is just the first chance I’ve gotten to go see my baby.

What a fine present. Merry Christmas from the SV-POW!sketeers!

Update from Mike

Here is my Christmas card to you all.

Happy Christmas from Mike Taylor and brachiosauridae incertae sedis BMNH R5937, "The Archbishop", coalesced dorsal vertebrae 8-9 (in right lateral view, like you need me to tell you that). Image in part copyright (C) the Natural History Museum, but it's the season of goodwill so they probably won't sue you even if you send copies to all your friends.

Your cervical ribs are (probably) non-existent

It’s a strange thing, but no-one seems to bother properly figuring their sauropods’ cervical ribs — that is, the long, thin, posteriorly directed ribs of the neck vertebrae.  I’ll be bucking that trend when the Archbishop paper comes out, but to get your mouth watering ahead of time, here is the head of the cervical rib that I have arbitrarily designated X1, the largest of those preserved in the Archbishop:

Brachiosauridae incertae sedis NHM R5937, "The Archbishop", cervical rib X1. Preserved portion is 32 cm long.

The top image shows the rib in anterior view, with dorsal pointing to the left; the middle row shows the rib with anterior pointing upwards, in (from left to right), lateral, dorsal, medial and ventral views; the bottom row shows posterior view, again with dorsal to the left.  Click through the image to see the full glory of the high-resolution version.  Remember folks: you only get this sort of high-resolution image published in PLoS journals!

As I mentioned, sauropod cervical ribs have been pretty comprehensively ignored in the literature.  I can’t offhand think of a single paper about them (unless you count Martin et al.’s (1998) proposal that they functioned in ventral compression-bracing of sauropods’ necks, and let’s not even start on that), and I am really struggling to think of paper that figure them.  Even the usually super-reliable Osborn and Mook (1921) dropped the ball here, with a single illustration (out of 127 figures) and single short paragraph of text (out of 141 pages).  Here it is:

Cervical rib of Camarasaurus supremus AMNH 5761-a/R-X-A-5, from Osborn and Mook (1921:fig. 36) and accompanying text

Janensch (1950) did discuss the cervical ribs of Giraffatitan in some detail, but his figures are not very informative.  If anyone knows of better treatments of sauropod cervical ribs in the literature, then please mention it in the comments!

Because of this poor coverage in the published record, it’s hard for me to compare the Archbishop cervical ribs with those of other taxa.  For example, the medial view of X1 (in the middle of the “cross” in the image above) shows that the internal face of the cervical rib loop, where the cervical rib reaches up to articulate with the diapophysis of its vertebra, has two parallel struts of bone extending vertically with a narrow groove between them.  Is that unusual?  I have no idea.

(I do have photos of some other Tendaguru cervical ribs, referred to Giraffatitan – although if I’m right that the Archbishop is not Giraffatitan, so that there are multiple brachiosaurs in the Tendaguru Formation, then who knows whether that referral is correct?)

Finally, we come to the matter of your cervical ribs.  I would have liked to do this post as one in the Your Noun Is Adjective series, but the brutal truth is, you don’t even have any cervical ribs — unless you are one of the lucky 0.2% that, according to the Wikipedia article, have a supernumary rib which is frankly just an additional dorsal rib (uh, thoracic rib I guess) that’s growing out of your last cervical vertebra by mistake.  (Wikipedia’s horrible humanist bias is apparent here, in that the article doesn’t even mention the fact that plenty of other animals have cervical ribs and love them.)

Anyway, here’s how human cervical ribs look, stolen from Do You Really Need Back Surgery? A Surgeon’s Guide to Neck and Back Pain and How to Choose Your Treatment:

Cervical ribs in humans

References

• Janensch, Werner.  1950.  Die Wirbelsaule von Brachiosaurus brancai.  Palaeontographica (Suppl. 7) 3:27-93.
• Martin, John, Valérie Martin-Rolland, and Eberhard (Dino) Frey.  1998.  Not cranes or masts, but beams: the biomechanics of sauropod necks.  Oryctos 1:113-120.
• Osborn, Henry Fairfield, and Charles C. Mook.  1921.  Camarasaurus, Amphicoelias and other sauropods of Cope.  Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, n.s. 3:247-387, and plates LX-LXXXV.

CT-Scanning the Archbishop

Last week, for the first time ever, I spent the entire working week on palaeo.  I took a week away from my job, and spent it staying in London, working on the Archbishop at the Natural History Museum.  (For those of you who have not been paying attention, the Archbishop is the informal name of the specimen NHM R5937, a brachiosaurid sauropod from the same Tendaguru area that produced Giraffatitan brancai, and which has been generally assumed to represent that species.)

Brachiosauridae incertae sedis NHM R5937, "The Archbishop", Cervical U in right lateral view. Photo copyright the NHM since it's their specimen.

My main goal was to take final publication-quality photographs that I can use in the description (which I have committed to try really, really hard to get submitted by the end of 2009).  There’s quite a bit of material (more than for Xenoposeidon, anyway!) — six cervicals in various states of preservation/preparation, cervical ribs, two complete dorsals, two more dorsal centra and a dorsal spine, some scap scraps, a partial ?pubis, a long-bone fragment and “Lump Z“, whatever that is.  What you see above is my best lateral-view photograph of what I’ve designated “Cervical U”.  One of these days, I’m going to do a post on how to photograph large fossils — something it’s taken me five years to get the hang of — but for today, I want to tell you about an exciting adventure with Cervical U.

Because my other big goal on this trip was to get it CT-scanned.  Thanks to the generosity of John Hutchinson of the Royal Veterinary College, and to the help of the NHM people in arranging a loan, everything was set up for my host Vince Bickers and me to ferry the specimen up to the RVC, scan it and return it.

But first it had to be packed:

The Archbishop, Cervical U, packed and ready for transportation. Behind, Lorna Steel and Sandra Chapman of the NHM, who did the work.

Lorna and Sandra spent a long time looking for a crate big enough to pack the bone in, but came up empty — there was one that was long enough but not wide enough, one that was tall enough but not long enough, and so on.  In the end we sat the bone, on its very solid plaster base, on a plastic pallet, and wrapped it in pillows, bubble-wrap and that blue stuff whose name I don’t know.

As it happened, the scan had to be delayed for a day due to lack of personnel at RVC, but Vince and I took the vertebra up on the Thursday anyway; he had to return to work on the Friday, but I took public transport to RVC for the big day.  Before we went into the scanning room, John showed me his freezer room:

Just a couple of the freezers at RVC

I found it amusing that they have enough Segments Of Awesome that they have to label the various elephant-part freezers differently.  And further down the aisle:

John Hutchinson proudly shows off his dead baby rhino.

Then it was off to the scanning facility, where we found that we had to unpack the vertebra: it was small enough to go through the machine, but there was no way the pallet was going through.  Once we’d unpacked it and removed it, it fit pretty nicely:

The Archbishop's Cervical U all lined up and ready to go through the scanner, courtesy of John and radiographer Victoria Watts.

Because the scanner spits out X-rays in all directions, it’s controlled from a separate room, behind lead-impregnated glass:

Inside the control room

We ran three scans before we got the settings right — we needed more voltage to get through the bone and matrix than we’d first realised, and a filter was causing unhelpful moire patterns.  The third scan was definitely the best, and the one I expect to be working with.

[Boring technical side-note: I plan to use 3D Slicer for visualisation thanks to Andy Farke's series of tutorials. But, frustratingly, I wasn't able to load the DICOM files from the scan into that program: it crashes when trying to load them (segmentation fault) even though it works fine on the ankylosaur skull that Andy walked us through in the tutorials.  I fixed this by gluing the 300-odd files together into a single stack file that 3D Slicer was able to read.  For the benefit of anyone else who needs to do this, the command (on a Ubuntu Linux box) was: medcon  -f  *.dcm  -c  dicom  -stack3d  -n  -qc]

Here is an example slice, showing part of the condyle in posterior view:

CT slice through the condyle of The Archbishop's Cervical U, in posterior view. Dorsal is to the left.

The grey blobs at the bottom of the image are the plaster jacket that supports the vertebra; the white is bone, and the light grey inside it is matrix that fills the pneumatic spaces.  I’m showing the condyle here because its cavities are clearly visible: further back in the vertebra, they are harder to pick out, perhaps in part because of the iron bars scattering the X-rays.  It’s notable that this vertebra is less pneumatic than would be expected for a brachiosaurid — by eye, it looks like like the condyle is only 20-30% air, and this slice is not unrepresentative.  Most neosauropods would be at least twice this pneumatic, so we may have an Archbishop autapomorphy here.

I’ve not yet persuaded 3D Slicer to build a 3D model for me, but I’m pleased to say that before I left RVC, John mocked up a quick-and-dirty render of the bone using only density threshholding, and I can at least show you that.

The Archbishop, Cervical U, CT scan 3d model in left ventrolateral view

Here we see the bone from the left side, previously obscured by solid plaster.  From a single static image, it’s not easy to make out details, but we can at least see that there is a solid ventral floor to the centrum … and that those two crossed iron bars obscure much that we would like to see.  You will get more of an idea from the rotating video that this is screencapped from.

Looking at this and comparing it with the right-lateral photo at the top of the post, it’s apparent that the density threshhold was set too high when making this model: all the bone along the lower right margin of the middle part of the centrum is good, but it’s been omitted from the model.  In other words, the vertebra is more complete than this proof-of-concept model suggests.  Hopefully I will shortly be able to show you a better model.

Things to Make and Do, part 3b: Wallaby feet

I’m following up immediately on my last post because I am having so much fun with my wallaby carcass.  As you’ll recall, I was lucky enough to score a subadult male wallaby from a local farm park.  Today, we’re going to look at its feet.

Wallabies are macropods; together with their close relatives the kangaroos and Wallaroos, they make up the genus Macropus, literally “bigfoot”.  So wallabies got there long before cryptic North American anthropoids.  And indeed their feet are big.  Here are those feet, in dorsal view, from before I started doing unspeakable things to my specimen:

Bennett's wallaby, hind feet in dorsal view

From here they look pretty weird, but it’s only when we go round the back that we really see how odd they are.  Same feet in ventral view:

Bennett's wallaby, hind feet in ventral view

There are (at least) three things to notice here: first just that the feet are very long; second, the thick, scaly pad that runs all the way up to the heel; and third, the bizarre arrangement of toes.  At first glance, it seems that there is one main toe and a smaller one each side, but if you look more closely you’ll see that the medial “toe” is really two tiny toes closely appressed, so that they function as a single toe.  This condition is known as syndactyly, Darren tells me.  Also from Darren: it’s digit I that is missing in macropods, so the tiny-toe pair are digits II and III, the main toe is IV and the lateral one is V.

(By the way, seeing my patio in these photos reminds me of something I forgot to mention in the previous post: it’s surprisingly difficult to wash wallaby blood off paving slabs.  Remember that, kids, it’ll be on the test.)

Regular readers will remember from last time that I planned to prepare the skull and left fore- and hindlimbs by simmering and dissection, and let nature deal with the rest of the elements.  You’ve already seen the skull, so here goes with that foot.

After an initial simmer, I was able to skin the left pes, so here it is at that stage, in medial view:

Bennett's Wallaby, left pes in medial view, skinned and simmered

From this angle, you can clearly see the absurdly thin second metatarsal (MT II) that supports the innermost of those two tiny digits.  MT III is just as long and thin, but is fused proximally to the much larger MT IV, as we shall see below.  The simmering has resulted in the more distal phalanges breaking away from their more proximal brethren, and being pulled downwards and beneath them.  This is most apparent with the tiny digits, whose supporting phalanges are clearly visible poking out above the claws.  So the large lump of what looks like cartilage at top right is actually phalanx IV-I, with IV-II and IV-III (the ungual) beneath it.  Also note the significant amount of resilient tissue below the metatarsals.  I’ve cut most of it away, but you can get a good idea from the bits that are still attached distally.

Here is the metatarsus in ventral view after I had removed the phalanges:

Bennett's Wallaby, metatarsus in ventral view, skinned and simmered

Here you can clearly see the syndactyly (in those two closely appressed thin metatarsals II and III at the top of the picture) and the very sculpted distal ends of the  larger metatarsals IV and V.

Now let’s skip straight to to the completed stripped-down pes, now in dorsal view:

Bennett's wallaby, left pes in dorsal view, disarticulated and cleaned skeleton; ungual sheaths removed from bony cores.

It’s interesting that the phalangeal formula is so uniform: 0-3-3-3-3.  That is, all four digits have two normal phalanges and an ungual.  But the differences in proportions between them are quite something.

This is our first look at the tarsals — those seven bones on the left of the picture, before we get to the metatarsals.  The three big ones fit together very nicely.  At the back you see the calcaneum, where the achilles tendon attaches; next is the astragalus, which sits on top of the calcaneum and where the distal end of the tibia articulates. Next up is a bone whose name I don’t know, being pretty darned ignorant of ankles — might it be the cuboid?  Anyway, even after cleaning and cartilage-removal , this articulates very nicely indeed with both the calcaneum and MT IV.

Medial to these (i.e. below them in the picture) are four much smaller tarsal bones whose identity I can’t even guess at.  It’s not clear to me how they articulate with the big tarsals — they were all pretty solidly embedded in cartilage and gloop and I fear that they’re not going to fit neatly whatever I do.  Hints will be welcome.

One big surprise was the small bones between the metatarsals and their corresponding phalanges: one each at the ends of MT II and MT III, and two each at the ends of MT IV and MT V.  Because the proximal phalanges articulate so nicely with their metatarsals, it’s clear that these small bones were not positioned between them in life, but rather floated above them — rather as your kneecap, or patella, floats above your femur-tibia joint.  They are sesamoids.  Does anyone know whether this sesamoid formula of 0-1-1-2-2 is common?  Seems a bit weird to me.

Finally, I leave you with the entire left hindlimb: foot as in the previous picture, surmounted by the tibia and fibula, then by the femur, all in anterior view.  Just to the left of the femur-tibia joint is a small bone which I assume is the patella.

Bennett's wallaby, disarticulated left hind limb in dorsal view

Special bonus wallaby limb: over there on the right is the left forelimb.  As you can see, I’ve done the easy part (scapula, humerus, ulna and radius) but I still have to dissect out the bones from the wrist and hand — a picky, tedious job that to be frank I am not looking forward to.  The feet are much more exciting than the hands.

That’s all for today.  On Sunday evening I am off to London to spend a whole week in the company of the Archbishop.  The plan is to spend Monday to Wednesday taking final publication-quality photos (I finally have a proper tripod) and digging out field photos and suchlike from the museum archives, then take Cervical U to be CT-scanned at the Royal Veterinary College, courtesy of theropod hindlimb mechanics guru John Hutchinson.  Friday is emergency backup in case something crops up to delay the scanning, and also gives me a chance to retake any photos that didn’t come out as required.  The plan is that this visit should give me everything I need (pictures, measurements, observations, historical documents) to finish up the long-overdue Archbishop description.  Fingers crossed.

I leave you with a puzzle.  This is the jacket that I have designated “Lump Z”:

Brachiosauridae indet. BMNH R5937, "The Archbishop". Unidentified elements "Lump Z". Image copyright the NHM, since it's their material.

Can anyone offer a guess as to what this is, and which way up it should be?  It’s a jacket that was opened years ago — before I was involved with the specimen — but never fully prepared.  Matt and I have discussed it a little, but I don’t want to prejudice anyone with our guesswork, so I leave the floor open.  What is it?

SV-POW! Dollars are at stake!



Things to Make and Do, part 3: Butchering a Wallaby

This is part 3 of an emerging and occasional SV-POW! series: part 1 was the pig skull, and part 2 was the lizard feet (though not advertised as such because I couldn’t resist the sauropod pun).

Bennett's wallaby, right lateral view

Today, we’re going to be taking a wallaby apart.  Specifically, a Bennett’s wallaby, the larger of the two subspecies of the red-necked wallaby Macropus rufogriseus.  I was delighted (though of course also saddened) to get a call on Saturday afternoon from the very same mini-zoo that had given me Charlie the monitor — Dick Whittington Farm Park in Longhope, Gloucestershire.  They have a small group of seven wallabies sharing a paddock with goats, and one had died — most likely from being butted by one of the goats, although there were no external signs of injury.

This is going to be the largest animal I’ve prepared the skeleton out of — I measured it at 123 cm from snout to tail and 10.5 kg total weight, which compares with 75 cm and 12 kg for the badger, 100 cm and 5.2 kg for the fox and 111 cm and 3.4 kg for the monitor.  Yes, the badger was heavier, but the awkward shape of the wallaby makes it all-round “bigger” and harder to deal with.  Both the badger and the fox would, just, fit into large plastic toy-boxes which I buried and will exhume after a suitable time has passed, but that wasn’t going to work for the wallaby.  I needed to take that baby apart:

Bennett's wallaby, right ventrolateral view into guts

I was pleasantly surprised at what good condition the guts were in (compared with the horrible state of Charlie innards) — nice and fresh.  If I’d had time, I’d have attempted to learn something from a proper dissection, but as I was pushed for time (trying to get this done in my lunch break) I had to push on.  I discarded the guts and started to carve up the remainder.

Bennett's wallaby in posteroventral view. right leg removed; Homo sapiens for scale

The knife is a Norwegian fisherman’s knife — very sharp, and short enough to be easy to wield.  It’s perfect for dismembering a carcass this size, even though previously I’ve only used it for slicing sushi rolls.  It was a Christmas present from my employer, Index Data, a few years ago.

My plan was to carefully divide the animal into seven portions (head, torso, tail and four legs), remove as much skin and muscle as I could without risking damage to the bone, and to process the parts separately.

Bennett's wallaby, in kit form, mostly dorsal view but with the head and torso in left lateral. WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT

After some thought, I decided to prepare the skull and the left fore- and hind-limb by boiling, and to bury the rest in the box.  Here are the relevant divisions:

Bennet's wallaby not looking at all healthy. Top: torso, tail and right fore- and hindlimbs, awaiting burial. Bottom left: head, left fore- and hindlimbs, awaiting cooking. Bottom right: bag full of discarded soft-tissue

Then I put the pot through an hour’s simmering, peeled the skin off the skull and feet, and removed what meat I could; then I simmered a second time and removed more meat.  By this stage, I was able to remove the three most anterior cervicals, which had been attached to the back of the skull — but they are still so covered with attached flesh that they’re not much use yet.  Here’s how the simmered material is looking:

Bennett's wallaby: skull, anterior cervical vertebrae and left hind-limb long bones

And here is the skull as it looks now, after a little more flesh-picking (but not nearly enough):

Bennett's wallaby, partially prepared skull in right lateral view

I think that it (and the other boiled bones pictures above) would benefit from a third simmer-and-pick session before I put them out somewhere for invertebrates to deal with.  While that’s going on, I’ll prep out the foot and the forelimb, which have also been boiled twice but phalanges are a right nasty piece of work.

And then I have to decide what to do with my big yellow box that has the rest of the bits in.  Plan A is still burying, but it is kind of tempting to simmer these parts, too, and get the whole thing completed much more quickly.

On the other hand, now is not a good time for such an effort: I will be away from home all week on a mission of utmost importance, and of great relevance to this blog.  Details to follow!

Finally, I leave you with your weekly sauropod-vertebra goodness!

Giraffatitan brancai paralectotype HMN SI, cervical vertebrae 2 and 3 in right lateral view, attempting to do DinoMorph

What I did on my holidays

I made brachiosaur sand-sculptures.

Brachiosaurid in hypothetical sleep posture, left anteroventrolateral view. Juvenile Homo sapiens (Daniel Taylor) for scale.

(And yes, it’s that Daniel Taylor, the author of Taylor 2005 — a copy of which apparently hangs on the wall of the Padian Lab.)

But wait!  Is the brachiosaur truly asleep, as it seems, or is it actually the victim of a mighty hunter?

Brachiosaurid in hypothetical death pose, left posteroventrolateral view. Mighty hunter (Michael P. Taylor) for scale. Note bemused bystander in middle distance.

No, it turns out it was just asleep after all; and I joined it.

Brachiosaurid in hypothetical sleep pose after all, left posteroventrolateral view. Brachiosaur's new best friend for scale.

… and finally: your obligatory sauropod-vertebra shot:

Cast of Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis holotype CCG V 20401, in right lateral view. Need I draw your attention to the truly absurd neck? This cast is owned by the Homogea Museum in Trzic, Slovenia, and was on loan in the car-park of the Geological Museum in Copenhagen.

References

• Taylor, Daniel J.  2005.  Sauropods of the Mesozoic Era.  Journal of Dinosaurs 1(1):1-2.

What a 23% longer torso looks like

Just checking: no-one’s bored of brachiosaurs yet, are they?

Thought not.  Right, then, here we go!

Greg Paul’s (1988) study of the two “Brachiosaurus” species — the paper that proposed the subgenus Giraffatitan for the African species — noted that the trunk is proportionally longer in Brachiosaurus than in Giraffatitan due to the greater length of its dorsal centra. Paul (p. 7) stated that the difference is “25%-30%” on the basis of his figure 2.

Having seen the dorsal vertebrae of the type specimens of both species, my gut reaction was that the difference was nowhere near this great, so I recalculated it for myself (Taylor 2009:table 3).  Dorsal column length is the sum of the “functional length” of the centra of the dorsal vertebrae, where functional length is the length of the centrum not counting the condyle (which of course is nestled in the preceding vertebra’s cotyle when the column is articulated).  For Brachiosaurus, Riggs (1904) did not give this measurement, but did give total heights, and using these for scale I was able to measure the functional lengths from his plate LXXII.  For Giraffatitan, Janensch’s (1950:44) superbly comprehensive table supplied measurements for D4 and D8; for D11 and D12 I was able to determine the length by measuring from Janensch’s (1950:fig. 62) figure, knowing the height from his table; and for D5-D7, D9 and D10, I interpolated linearly between the measurements that I had.  Summing the functional lengths of D6-D12, I got 226 cm for Brachiosaurus and 183 cm for Giraffatitan.  So Brachiosaurus is 226/183 = 1.23 times as long as Giraffatitan — in other words, 23% longer, which is pretty much what Greg Paul said.  So I learned something there.

(Yes, brachiosaurs probably had 12 dorsals.)

So: is a 23% longer torso a big deal?  Back when I was trying to answer that question for myself, I figured it would help to take an image of a familiar animal and stretch it — so here is a horse, stolen from here and stretched:

Horse (top); and evil mutant horse with 23% longer torso (bottom).

To me, that second picture is wrong enough to hurt my eyes a little; your mileage may vary, but I suspect those among you who love horses will feel ill when you look at it.  This image was one of the reasons — one of many — that I concluded that generic separation was unavoidable.

But here’s an odd thing: tonight, for this blog post, I did the same thing to a human body, expecting it to seem even more horrible in light of how familiar we are with our own bodies.  Here it is:

Flayed Homo sapiens in orthograde anatomical position, from Vesalius (1543) "Tertia Musculorum Tabula". Modified from Wilson (2006:fig. 1). Left, as drawn; right, with torso elongated by 23%.

To my surprise, the elongated human doesn’t look appallingly wrong to me.  It doesn’t look right, of course, but it seems within the realms of, for example, what might appear as a representation of a human body in the early issues of Fantastic Four.  I am not sure what to make of that fact.  I don’t believe I have a more finely tuned sense of horse anatomy than human anatomy: it might be that I am more used to badly drawn humans than badly drawn horses; or that there is more variation in human proportions than in horse proportions; or maybe weirdness just looks less weird when it’s upright than when it’s horizontal.  I’ll be interested to hear in the comments whether the Long Horse or the Long Human looks most wrong to readers.

(By the way, I casually talk about the type specimens of both “Brachiosaurus” species: while the situation is simple in the case of Brachiosaurus altithorax, whose holotype is FMNH P25107, things are more complex in the case of Giraffatitan brancai.  Janensch nominated “Skelett S” as the holotype of his new species “Brachiosaurus” brancai, but that turned out to be a chimera, composed of the two skeletons which he subsequently designated SI and SII — but Janensch never designated one of these as the type, and so far as I’ve been able to determine, neither has anyone else done so.  SI is represented by cranial elements and the first seven cervicals, but that’s all; SII is a much larger animal and is represented by most of the skeleton, and has been informally treated as though it were the type specimen most of the while, so I formally proposed HMN SII as the lectotype of the species (Taylor 2009:788) — just a bit of housekeeping.)

Here’s our old friend, the 8th cervical vertebra of HMN II, in a rare posterodorsal aspect, showing just how thin and, well, lamina-like the spinopostzygapophyseal laminae are.  All that space in between them?  Filled with diverticula, mostly.  Amazing.

Giraffatitan brancai lectotype HMN SII, 8th cervical vertebra, in posterodorsal view

Meanwhile some good news:

Remember the good news and bad news about the all-dinosaurs special volume of The Anatomical Record?  Well, since we posted that, the entire issue has been made open access!  Fantastic stuff there: details from D. Schachne of the Wiley-Blackwell Communications Team.  It’s not clear why the articles were all paywalled when originally posted, but all’s well that ends well.

And finally …

There’s been a gratifying amount of discussion in the comments on recent articles.  It can be hard to keep track of, but it helped a lot when I found an RSS feed for comments, which is what I now use.  For anyone else who wants it, it’s at http://svpow.wordpress.com/comments/feed/

References

• Janensch, Werner.  1950.  Die Wirbelsaule von Brachiosaurus brancai.  Palaeontographica (Suppl. 7) 3: 27-93.
  Paul, Gregory S.  1988.  The brachiosaur giants of the Morrison and Tendaguru with a description of a new subgenus, Giraffatitan, and a comparison of the world’s largest dinosaurs.  Hunteria 2 (3): 1-14.
  Taylor, Michael P.  2009.  A re-evaluation of Brachiosaurus altithorax Riggs 1903 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) and its generic separation from Giraffatitan brancai (Janensch 1914).  Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29(3):787-806.
  Vesalius, A.  1543.  Andreae Vesalii Bruxellensis, Scholae medicorum Patauinae professoris, de Humani corporis fabrica Libri septem [facsimile]. Ex Officina Ioannis Oporini, Basel, 659 pp.
  Wilson, Jeffrey A.  2006.  Anatomical nomenclature of fossil vertebrates: standardized terms or “lingua franca”?  Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 26(3): 511-518.
• Janensch, Werner.  1950.  Die Wirbelsaule von Brachiosaurus brancai.  Palaeontographica (Suppl. 7) 3: 27-93.
• Paul, Gregory S.  1988.  The brachiosaur giants of the Morrison and Tendaguru with a description of a new subgenus, Giraffatitan, and a comparison of the world’s largest dinosaurs.  Hunteria 2 (3): 1-14.
• Taylor, Michael P.  2009.  A re-evaluation of Brachiosaurus altithorax Riggs 1903 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) and its generic separation from Giraffatitan brancai (Janensch 1914).  Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29(3):787-806.
• Vesalius, A.  1543.  Andreae Vesalii Bruxellensis, Scholae medicorum Patauinae professoris, de Humani corporis fabrica Libri septem [facsimile]. Ex Officina Ioannis Oporini, Basel, 659 pp.
• Wilson, Jeffrey A.  2006.  Anatomical nomenclature of fossil vertebrates: standardized terms or “lingua franca”?  Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 26(3): 511-518.

Right, that’s it — time for the revolution

UPDATE (from Matt): I also bring good news … and bad news.

The good news is that the entire dinosaur issue of Anatomical Record is open access after all. So this post is mainly of historical interest now, and you should get on over to the page for this issue and download all the free dinosaurian goodness.

The bad news is that the representatives from Wiley never told anyone any of this when inquiries were made two weeks ago–if they had, this particular teacup could have stayed storm-free–and that they apparently still want institutions to pay $575 for a single Open Access issue of the journal. Whether those moves are predatory or just clueless, they are not earning Wiley any friends.

—————-

I bring good news … and bad news.

Good news! Tom Holtz reported in a message to the Dinosaur Mailing List that there is new issue of The Anatomical Record out that is concerned entirely with dinosaurs!  The online table of contents shows that there’s lots of good stuff.

Bad news! It’s not open access.

Good news! You can buy access to the articles.

Bad news! The price of the articles is NOT STATED.  That’s right, folks: you have to register with Wiley InterScience before they will EVEN TELL YOU THE PRICE!  Way to go, Wiley!  THAT’s the way to make sure important research is widely disseminated!

Good news! B tH wrote to ask the publisher for a price, and got a reply, which he shared in another Dinosaur Mailing List message:

Bad news! This is the reply (which I can’t format better, thanks to totally unnecessary limitations in WordPress):

Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:48:21 -0700 (PDT)

From: B tH <soylentgreenistrex@yahoo.com>

To: dinosaur@usc.edu

Subject: re: special all-dino issue

I wrote to ask them how much ordering this singl issue was – they wanted to know if I was ordering for an institution or myself. This is the price they quoted me to buy and read it at night with a flashlight under the blankey – and I am totally serious:

$575.00 US

That’s right, five HUNDRED and seventy-five buckeroos.   I assured them they were quite mad, and have to face the fact I won’t get to see it.   Waaah.

Good news! B tH realised that Wiley had quoted him the institutional rate and wrote to clarify.  The exchange is documented in yet another Dinosaur Mailing List message.

Bad news! This is the exchange:

Sent: Monday, August 31, 2009 6:07 PM

To: cs-journals@wiley.com

Subject: RE: wanting to purchase an issue of the magazine [pfCase:1078353,

pfTicket:10108736]

Um, I think you’ve made an error.

Five-Hundred and Seventy-Five dollars for an issue of a magazine?  ??

==============

From: <cs-journals@wiley.com>

Dear __________

The Anatomical Record, Volume 292, Issue 9

Thank you for your email.

As we do not have Individual rates for this title, hence the Institutional single issue rate was quoted instead.

Please provide us with a billing and shipping address if you require a proforma invoice for this order and I will happy to assist you.

Kind Regards,

Jacqueline Choong

Customer Services Advisor

Journal Customer Services for John Wiley & Sons

Good news! The revolution is coming, and things like this can only bring it on.  And Wiley’s InterScience department are a bunch of mindless jerks who will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.

Yes, Wiley’s behaviour here is totally absurd and absolutely unethical.  No, Wiley didn’t themselves write the articles that they want to charge FIVE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE FREAKIN’ DOLLARS for.  Neither did they pay the authors to do so.  Do you know how it comes to be that Wiley are the owners of these articles, and thus in a position to extort for access?  Happily, the reason is right here in the Instructions to Authors:

MISCELLANEOUS

[...]

Upon acceptance of an article for publication, the author will be asked to sign a Copyright Transfer Agreement transferring rights to the publisher, who reserves copyright.

Yes, it’s as simple as that.  Like all of us do most times we submit a manuscript, the authors just signed away the ownership of their work.  Just like that.  Work that was funded, if at all, by public funds, just handed over to a grossly exploitative for-profit commercial enterprise that — quite clearly, from the exchanges above — has no interest whatsoever in the advancement or dissemination of science.

Folks, we have got to stop doing this.  I can (just) stomach handing copyright of my work over to professional societies such as the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (required for the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology) or the Palaeontological Association (required for Palaeontology) [although frankly there is absolutely no good reason for these journals to make that requirement].  But I will NOT give my work to these parasitic commercial publishers, and I strongly urge you not to, either.  We should all of us be supporting open-access journals where possible; and failing that, at least those published by non-profit organisations.  I am not going to be propping up Elsevier, Wiley and the rest with any of my stuff.

Deep in our heart, we all — Wiley included — know that non-open academic publishing is dead, even if the corpse is still blundering around trying to eat our brains.  This sort of extortion (I mean the FIVE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE FREAKIN’ DOLLARS kind) is death throes.  It’s probably going to get messier before the stakes are finally driven through the hearts of the bloodsuckers.  But take heart: morning is coming, and they will all turn to dust.

And finally …

More Good news! I give you NHM 46869, the holotype of Chondrosteosaurus gigas Owen 1876, a badly eroded cervical centrum from some kind of sauropod, in right lateral view:

NHM 46869, holotype of Chondrosteosaurus gigas, a cervical centrum, in right lateral view.

This is the mate of NHM 46870, a specimen that we have already given way too much coverage, and which has sometimes been considered the cotype along with 46869.  Unlike its mate, it has not been sliced down the middle, and is — for what it’s worth — “complete” (i.e. not actually complete at all).

References

• Owen, Richard.  1876.  Monograph of the fossil Reptilia of the Wealden and Purbeck formations.  Supplement 7.  Crocodilia (Poikilopleuron), Dinosauria (Chondrosteosaurus),  Palaeontographical Society of London [Monographs], 29:15-93.

This is the reply:

Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:48:21 -0700 (PDT)

From: B tH <soylentgreenistrex@yahoo.com>

To: dinosaur@usc.edu

Subject: re: special all-dino issue

I wrote to ask them how much ordering this singl issue was – they wanted to know if I was ordering for an institution or myself. This is the price they quoted me to buy and read it at night with a flashlight under the blankey – and I am totally serious:

$575.00 US

That’s right, five HUNDRED and seventy-five buckeroos.   I assured them they were quite mad, and have to face the fact I won’t get to see it.   Waaah.

Good news!  B tH realised that Wiley had quoted him the institutional rate and wrote to clarify.  The exchange is documented in yet another Dinosaur Mailing List message.

Bad news!  This is the exchange:

Sent: Monday, August 31, 2009 6:07 PM

To: cs-journals@wiley.com

Subject: RE: wanting to purchase an issue of the magazine [pfCase:1078353,

pfTicket:10108736]

Um, I think you’ve made an error.

Five-Hundred and Seventy-Five dollars for an issue of a magazine?  ??

==============

==============

From: <cs-journals@wiley.com>

Dear __________

The Anatomical Record, Volume 292, Issue 9

Thank you for your email.

As we do not have Individual rates for this title, hence the Institutional single issue rate was quoted instead.

Please provide us with a billing and shipping address if you require a proforma invoice for this order and I will happy to assist you.

Kind Regards,

Jacqueline Choong

Customer Services Advisor

Journal Customer Services for John Wiley & Sons

Good news!  The revolution is coming, and things like this can only bring it on.  And Wiley’s InterScience department are a bunch of mindless jerks who will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.

Yes, Wiley’s behaviour here is totally absurd and absolutely unethical.  No, Wiley didn’t themselves write the articles that they want to charge FIVE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE FREAKIN’ DOLLARS for.  Neither did they pay the authors to do so.  Do you know how it comes to be that Wiley are the owners of these articles, and thus in a position to extort for access?  Happily, the reason is right here in the Instructions to Authors:

MISCELLANEOUS

[...]

Upon acceptance of an article for publication, the author will be asked to sign a Copyright Transfer Agreement transferring rights to the publisher, who reserves copyright.

###

Things to Make and Do, part 1: Pig Skull (off-topic)

I know, I know: a pig skull is not a vertebra, and it’s not from a sauropod. On the other hand, it is a cool zoological object, and every home should have one. I’m going to show you, in glorious technicolour, how I made a pig skull in under 24 hours at a cost of £3 and some silver, using only implements I had lying around.

First, here is the finished article, just so you know where we’re headed:

Pig skull, cleaned and complete

To get there was a four-step process, which I was comfortably able to do in an afternoon and early evening.  It all started as we were driving the boys back from swimming on the Saturday morning, and I stopped in a butcher’s shop in Cinderford to ask whether they had any complete heads.  I got a hit straight away: they had a 20 lb pig’s head which they costed at 25p per pound for a total of £5.  I ummed and ahed a bit, not because of the price but just because the thing was so darned big; while I was hesitating, the butcher said that, all right, he’d cut off the huge slabs of neck-fat and get the price down to £3.  Great: apart from anything else, that made the head portable.  So the deal was done, and I brought the only-slightly-mutilated head back home.  Here it is on our patio:

Pig's head, pretty much whole and complete

Now for the preparation, you need:

• A sharp knife
• A big cooking pot
• A teaspoon
• A Japanese-style chopstick (see below)
• A toothbrush that you don’t plan on ever using again
• An understanding spouse

About the chopstick: you want it to have a fairly pointed end so that you can go poking it in cracks and crevices, so a Chinese-style broad-tipped chopstick won’t do at all.  If you don’t have a Japanese-style chopstick, simply visit a sushi restaurant and take the sticks home with you at the end of the meal.

Got your tools?  OK, off we go!

Stage 1: defleshing

First, cut off all the excess soft-tissue that surrounds the skull.  One reason is just to get rid of it up front so you don’t have to cook it off, but the main reason for me was just to get the head small enough to go in the pot — pig’s heads are big things.  You do need a good knife for this, strong and sharp, and a strong stomach.  At first it felt pretty icky to be slicing bits off a head, but before long I was sawing away merrily at the lips and I guess all told it took about twenty minutes to reach this stage:

Pig head, defleshed

In case it’s not completely clear, that is the head slightly to right of centre — you can see its teeth if you look carefully.  To the left is the huge pile of fat that I’d sliced off the head.  I could not believe what fat heads pigs have.  The amount of actual meat is tiny in comparison: you can see it over on the right.  Most of this was little fragments, with the only two half-decent chunks being from the cheeks.  I guess they were about two ounces of meat each (50 g), based on the similarity in size to a vanilla McDonalds hamburger.

Stage 2: boiling

At this point, I threw away the fat, put the head in the pan, filled the pan with freshly boiled water until it covered the head, added some washing-up liquid (“dish soap” for you Americans) and left it to simmer for two hours.  While that was happening, I fried the meat from Stage 1 and ate it as part of my lunch.  Danny (my eldest son) had some; the other two didn’t fancy it.

After two hours, I poured away the hot water, filled the pan with cold water to cool the head, then took it out and started pulling off all the soft tissue.  Two hours in the pot had made a big difference, and big slabs of gristle came away neatly from bone.  Once I was done, the head looked like this:

Pig's head, boiled and stripped

Notice the big pile of meat to the right — that’s what came off at this stage.  By now the shape of the skull is apparent, but there is still plenty of soft-tissue left.  In particular, the big jaw muscles inside the zygomatic arches were impossible to get out at this stage, thanks to a combination of strength and slipperiness.  At this stage, the lower jaw could, just, be moved, whereas before it was solid with rigor mortis.

If I were making a movie about zombie pigs, this is the stage I’d film them at.

I took this photo before removing the eyeballs (this is where you need the teaspoon).  Turns out that eyeballs are a lot tougher than I’d realised; so are the optic nerves.

Stage 3: reboiling

At this point I didn’t know how many boilings would be needed, but it turns out that the next one was the last.  Into the pot it went again, with fresh hot water and washing-up liquid, for another two-hour simmer.  When it came out, I drained and cooled it as before, and picked off as much of the remaining flesh as I could.  Now the jaw muscles came away easily, and I was able to pull out the cartilage plug in the nose.

Pig's head, reboiled and stripped

Again, there was a surprising amount of meat from this stage, but the skull was basically free of its fleshy encumbrance by this point.  I rather wish now that I’d kept the fat from stage 1 and the meat from stages 2 and 3 so I could have piled it all up together and photographed it together with the skull.

By now, the mandible was cleanly separated from the cranium, and it was easy to rub away the remains of the cartilage covering the joint.

Stage 4: cleaning

By now, only small and tough bits of meat remained.  Plenty of them could be scraped away using the Japanese chopstick: this was particularly useful for digging around in between the teeth.  By far the hardest part of the cleaning, though, was getting rid of the brain and the cranial nerves.  The problem is of course that you don’t want to crack the braincase open, and the brain is far too big to come out of the foramen magnum.  Apparently the only way to do this is to swirl your chopstick around inside the braincase, then try to scrape the brain out bit by bit.  This I did using several methods: I poked the cranial nerves back inside the braincase with my trusty sushi stick, smushed everything up, tried to hook bits out, ran water through the skull from nose to braincase and generally shook that baby around, getting little bits of brain out.  This took a while and was, truthfully, not the most delightful time of my life.

But it was well worth it, because by the time I’d done, the skull looked like it does in the photo at the top of this post.  And here is a more scientific composite, showing the cranium in five cardinal views:

Pig cranium in dorsal view (top row); posterior, right lateral and anterior views (middle row); and ventral (bottom row).

This image, together with versions on white and grey backgrounds, is also available over on my website, next door to the turkey cervical.

Folks, a pig skull is a serious piece of kit.  What I have here is the foundations of my very own museum of comparative osteology.  Everyone ought to make one.

So am I done?  Not quite — there is still …

Stage 5: final cleaning

There are a few bits and pieces of meat that I couldn’t get at, either because they were too firmly attached, tucked away in narrow crevices, or inside the braincase where I couldn’t see what I was doing.  So it’s time to let invertebrates do their bit.  The skull is currently out in the garden, under a bucket weighed down with bricks so a fox doesn’t wander off with it.  Hopefully in a few weeks, insects will have dealt with the remaining soft-tissue.  Then I can re-bleach the skull in dilute hydrogen peroxide to deal with the likely discoloration, and glue the loose teeth into the defleshed sockets, and then I really am done.

I leave you with a photograph of my two eldest sons, Matthew (9) and Daniel (10), with the partly prepared specimen.

Left to right: Matthew, Piggy the Piggy from Piggyland, Daniel.

.

Obligatory sauropod-vertebra picture

Sacrum of Camarasaurus supremus, AMNH 5761, in left posterolateral view.

Sauropods were tacos, not corn dogs

This is a taco.

This is a corn dog.

Vertebra outlined in green. Click for unmarked original.

Here’s a cross-section of a human. In the terms of fast food, people are corndogs. Most of us even have an outer ring of yellow adipose ‘breading’.

Vertebra oulined in red. Click for unmarked original.

Here’s a cross-section of a cow. In an example of function following form, cows are, and often become, corndogs.

Note that in both the human and the cow the spaces between the neural spine and transverse processes are completely filled with back muscles, which in fact bulge out beyond the tips of the neural spine, as we also saw here. This despite the common paleoart convention of presenting dinosaurs as thin layers of skin conforming perfectly to the underlying skeleton. Just Say No to shrink-wrapped sauropods!

Here is Figure 17 from Holland (1910), one of the most badass scientific smackdowns ever published, in which Holland wiped the floor with Hay, Tornier, and the idea of sprawling sauropods. On the left are torso skeletons of three lizards and a croc; on the right is an anterior dorsal with articulated ribs from Diplodocus. As you can see, it’s a taco, and its taconic form would be perfected if it could roll supine.

The point of the post is not that sauropods had deep, slab-sided bodies. We’ve covered that before. The point is that sauropod torsos are seriously weird. In mammals, the dorsal ribs arch up and out, away from the vertebra, before sweeping around to define the anterior body wall.  In lizards, the proximal part of each rib sticks out sideways. In sauropods, the ribs point down. This is mainly because the vertebrae are FREAKIN’ HUGE compared to the size of the body. Whereas in the mammals and lizards the dorsal vertebrae are titchy little things that span a small fraction of the width of the torso, in Diplodocus and other sauropods the dorsal vertebrae account for about half. (The cow cross-section missed the transverse processes, so that vert looks narrower than it actually is.)

This is relevant when we think about the function of pneumaticity. When I write that pneumaticity lightened vertebrae, I usually mean relative to that same vertebra if it wasn’t pneumatized. But we could also ask if the pneumatic vertebra is lighter than a vertebra from a similar-sized animal that lacks pneumaticity–except that, for big sauropods, there are no similar-sized terrestrial animals without pneumaticity to compare.

Imagine that in a big sauropod the dorsal vertebrae are three times as wide and three times as tall as they would be in a similar-sized mammal. They should weigh nine times more. But let’s also assume that the vertebrae of the sauropod are 85% air by volume, which is in fact pretty typical for Early Cretaceous brachiosaurids. The mass of the dorsal column relative to that of the mammal is then 9 x 0.15 = 1.35, a little heavier, but not much (I’m assuming the length of the torso is the same in the two animals). Bigger bones mean better lever arms for the muscles and lower bending stresses on the ribs, which can function more like curtains and less like cantilevered beams.

I can’t think of much published discussion of this stuff as it relates to sauropods, but it seems like it might be important.

Reference

Holland, W.J. 1910. A review of some recent criticisms of the restorations of sauropod dinosaurs existing in the museums of the United States, with special reference to that of Diplodocus carnegiei [sic] in the Carnegie Museum. American Naturalist 44:259-283.