I was back in Utah the week before last, looking for monsters with Brian Engh and Jessie Atterholt. It was a successful hunt – more about that another time.
We made a run to Fruita, Colorado, to visit Dinosaur Journey. I was just there in May, picking up Haplocanthosaurus caudals for CT scanning (and other fun things). We picked up another specimen this time, for a different project – more on that in another post, too.
Not this one, but like this one. An apatosaurine middle caudal vertebra, MWC 5742, in left lateral view.
There’s a nice ceratopsian exhibit up at Dinosaur Journey right now, with cast skulls from many of the new ceratopsians that have been described in the past couple of decades. My near-favorites were Zuniceratops and Diabloceratops, both of which are small enough that they must have been adorable in life (think pony-sized and big-horse-sized, respectively).
My absolute favorite, of course, was this little thing:
I can tell you exactly how Aquilops came to be on display there. Julia McHugh printed a copy of the holotype, because it’s freely available to the world. And she used Brian’s Aquilops head recon in the signage (correctly, with attribution), because it’s also freely available to the world. In fact, I’ve seen Aquilops on display at several museums now for just those reasons. So, folks, if you want your critters to be seen, make them open. Hiring a paleoartist to do some awesome artwork that can be released under a CC-BY license (because you paid them, not because you asked them to give their art away for “exposure”) is a huge help.
We had to geek out a little about unexpectedly finding ‘our’ dinosaur on display:
But of course it is not our dinosaur anymore – that’s the whole point. Aquilops belongs to the world.
For more on our trip, see Jessie’s posts here, here, and here.
The camarasaur that was more than it seeemed
July 21, 2018
This is SUSA 515, a partial skeleton of Camarasaurus on display in the Museum of Moab. (SUSA stands for Southeastern Utah Society of Arts & Sciences.) It was described by John Foster in 2005.
I like this thing. The neural spines are blown off so you can see right down into the big pneumatic cavities in the dorsal vertebrae. And unlike the plastered, painted, and retouched-to-seeming-perfection mounted skeletons in most museums, this specimen reflects how most sauropod specimens look when they come out of the ground. With a few dorsal centra, a roadkilled sacrum, and some surprisingly interesting caudals, it puts me strongly in mind of MWC 8028, the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus (another John Foster joint: see Foster and Wedel 2014).
Frankly, it doesn’t look like much: 17 centra and some odd bits of pelvis. Surely, with so many good Camarasaurus specimens in the world, this one couldn’t possibly have anything new to tell us about the anatomy of that genus. And yet, it has a couple of unusual features that make it worthy of attention. My colleagues and I are working on those things right now, and you’ll be hearing more about this specimen in the very near future.
References
- Foster, J.R. 2005. New sauropod dinosaur specimens found near Moab, Utah, and the sauropod fauna of the Morrison Formation. Canyon Legacy: Journal of the Dan O’Laurie Museum of Moab 55:22-27.
- Foster, J.R., and Wedel, M.J. 2014. Haplocanthosaurus (Saurischia: Sauropoda) from the lower Morrison Formation (Upper Jurassic) near Snowmass, Colorado. Volumina Jurassica 12(2): 197–210. DOI: 10.5604/17313708 .1130144
Caudal vertebrae of Haplocanthosaurus priscus (formerly H. utterbacki) CM 879 in right lateral view, from Hatcher (1903: plate 2).
You know how you’ll be doing an image search for some vertebrate fossil and you’ll get a page full of SV-POW! stuff and you’ll think, “Dammit, how is it that those lazy SV-POW!sketeers haven’t gotten around to posting just straight-up scans of the plates from all of the classic sauropod monographs?”
Proximal caudal vertebrae of Haplocanthosaurus priscus CM 572 in right lateral (top), anterior (middle), and posterior (bottom) views, from Hatcher (1903: plate 3).
Well, as of now, we’re working on it. Probably highly irregularly, entirely dependent on what we need for whatever has caught our attention, and with no definite progress markers or endpoint, but still. Here are the proximal caudals of Haplocanthosaurus. Go nuts, future self.
Reference
- Hatcher, J.B. 1903. Osteology of Haplocanthosaurus with description of a new species, and remarks on the probable habits of the Sauropoda and the age and origin of the Atlantosaurus beds; additional remarks on Diplodocus. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 2:1-75.
Lots of museums have some version of this, but this is the nicest one I’ve seen myself.
Just back from the field. Will post photos soon. Putting this up to meet the weekly posting requirement.
The 2018 World Cup logo is based on the dorsal view of the Xenoposeidon holotype NHMUK PV R2095
July 7, 2018
Left: Xenoposeidon proneneukos holotype NHMUK PV R2095 in dorsal view (anterior to top), from Taylor (2018: figure 1A). Right: FIFA World Cup 2018 logo.
You can’t tell me that’s a coincidence.
References
Supplementary information
It’s coming home.
I’m delighted to announce the publication today of my new paper “Xenoposeidon is the earliest known rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur”. This is the peer-reviewed version, in my favourite journal PeerJ, of the manuscript that became available as a preprint eight months ago — which was in turn a formalisation of a blog-post from 2015.
Taylor (2018: Figure 3). Autapomorphies of Xenoposeidon proneneukos NHMUK PV R2095, mid-posterior dorsal vertebra, highlighted in red. A. anterior view. B. left lateral view. Numbers pertain to the numbering of autapomorphies in the text. 1a, neural arch covers whole of centrum, and 1b is contiguous with posterior articular facet. 2, neural arch is inclined forward by 30–35 degrees relative to the vertical. 3a, inclined ridge-like lamina marks ventral margin of 3b broad featureless area of bone. 4, large teardrop-shaped anterior fossa. 5a, vaulted laminae bound this fossa, but are not the medial CPRLs (5b, drawn in finer lines), which continue up to the presumed location of the prezygapophyses.
In a sense, then, this paper is old news. It doesn’t contain any startling new insights that readers of this blog wouldn’t already have been aware of. But it’s become more rigorous, better argued and justified, better illustrated (the image above is one of two new figures), and generally toughened in the forge of peer-review. It’s also now, of course, officially part of the scientific record.
I’m delighted about this paper for several reasons. First, of course, because Xenoposeidon is a beautiful specimen and now turns out to be rather more important than I’d previously realised. Second, because I hope this paper’s inclusion of the high-resolution full-colour 3D model as a supplementary file will help to establish this as common practice. But also third, because it’s my first paper in ages.
In fact, if you were being harsh, you could say it’s my first real paper since the annus mirabilis of 2013 when Matt and I had four good, solid papers come out in a single year. My CV lists five papers between then and now, but a case can be made that none of them really count:
- Taylor 2014 is essentially an addendum to my and Matt’s PLOS ONE paper the year before.
- Upchurch et al. 2105 is a significant and substantial piece of work, but almost all the credit on that one is due to Paul and Phil.
- Taylor 2016 is more of an advocacy piece than a scholarly paper.
- Ansolabehere et al. 2016 is merely a report summarising a multi-day discussion, and I am in any case only one of nine(!) co-authors.
- Taylor 2017 is just a short comment on someone else’s ICZN petition. (In fact that one is so feeble I should just remove it from my CV.)
Putting it all together, it’s been the best part of five years since I made a significant contribution to the scientific record, and to be honest I was starting to wonder whether I could still do it. (My deep thanks go to Paul Upchurch and Phil Mannion for keeping my publication record on life-support with that Haestasaurus paper!)
The challenge for me now is, having got back on the horse, to ride it hard. In particular:
- I need to get the preprint on the incompleteness of sauropod necks through peer-review … I’ve been sitting on perfectly good peer-reviews since October 2015, which is just inexcusable.
- Likewise for the preprint on the neck of Barosaurus, for which I got the reviews in September 2016.
- And of course I really really need to get the Archbishop paper written.
That’s not even mentioning other long-in-the-works projects like the descriptions of “Apatosaurus” minimus and “Biconcavoposeidon”. Sheesh. I’m so lazy. Nearly as bad as Darren.
References
Haplocanthosaurus goes digital
July 4, 2018
The most complete caudal vertebra of the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus (Foster and Wedel 2014) in right lateral view: specimen photo, CT scout, 3D model, 3D print at 50% scale. The photos of the specimen and the 3D print probably match the worst with the others, because they are subject to perspective distortions that the digital reconstructions are free from.
Here’s one nice thing about having a 3D print of a specimen that you’re working on: you can hand it to other anatomists and paleontologists and get their take on its weird features, and it’s small enough and light enough that you can bring it halfway across the country to show in person to an entirely different set of colleagues. For all that we hear about humans being a visual species, we are also a tactile one, and in my admittedly limited experience, grokking morphology by handling 3D printed fossils is almost as good as – and for big, heavy, fragile sauropod vertebrae, sometimes better than – handling the real thing.
Many thanks to Julia McHugh at Dinosaur Journey for access to the specimen, John Yasmer at the Hemet Valley Medical Center for CT scanning, Thierra Nalley at Western University of Health Sciences for help with segmenting and visualization in Amira, and Gary Wisser, WesternU’s 3D visualization specialist, for the sweet print. Further bulletins as events warrant.
Reference
Afield in Oklahoma, part 3
July 2, 2018
It’s been a bit since my last update. That’s how things go on the road. We got in some time for exploration and a little prospecting.
We also had to close the quarry. Anne Weil, whose dig London and I were out there to assist on, brought a speaker on the last day and played us out with a hydration song while we shut everything down for another year. We found some great stuff, and I’m anxious for you to get to see it, but there’s work to do first. Rest assured, I’ll keep you posted when the time comes.
The extant wildlife continued to be a source of enjoyment and inspiration, especially this cottontail. Rabbits, baby!
Time goes on, and so does the road. My road leads back home, and then back out again. I’ll check in when I can. Hope your summer is half as fun.