Monthly Archives: October 2025

Colour photos of the “Ultrasaurus” quarry

Long-time SV-POW! reader Tyler Holmes came across a book with the very un-searchable title “Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs” — I tried to find it in the Internet Archive, but there are waaay too many books of that name. He emailed me about it because it contains three colour photos of the excavation of our old friend “Ultrasaurus“.

Here they are, with their captions as they appear in the book.

First, a very familiar image — a similar but not identical one is reproduced in Jensen (1985:figure 4A) and Jensen (1987:fig 6A) — but here it appears for the first time in colour.

Jim Jensen lays alongside the nine-foot-long scapula (shoulder blade) of Ultrasaurus.

(No: Jim Jensen lies alongside the scapula. Also, it’s not just a scapula, it’s a scapulocoracoid, i.e. the coracoid is fused to the scapula. Also, it’s not nine feet long, it’s 2500 mm (Curtice et al. 1995:88), which is eight feet 2.5 inches. Otherwise, this caption is fine.)

Next, a photo that is completely new to me:

Half of a scapula (shoulder blade) of Ultrasaurus is lifted by a crane.

Is this the scapula? Maaaybe, but the shape of the jacket, and the cross-section of bone shown in the end of the jacket closest to us, doesn’t seem right. This looks more like part of a long bone — femur or humerus, or maybe radius/ulna or tibia/fibula. But I’m not aware of any femur or humerus having come out of the Dry Mesa quarry, so who knows?

Finally, this:

The scapula of Ultrasaurus being excavated.

This can’t be right. In the photo above, which definitely is the “Ultrasauros” scap, the glenoid is facing clockwise if you think of the whole bone as being able to rotate about its midpoint; but in this photo it must be facing anticlockwise at top left. So I conclude it’s one of the Supersaurus scaps — either the left in lateral view or the right in medial.

I wonder where the originals of these photos are, and whether there are more? I suppose I ought to ask the people at BYU.

References

  • Curtice, Brian D., Kenneth L. Stadtman and Linda J. Curtice. 1996. A reassessment of Ultrasauros macintoshi (Jensen, 1985). The continental Jurassic M. Morales (Ed.) Museum of Northern Arizona Bulleti. 60:87-95.
  • Jensen, James A. 1985. Three new sauropod dinosaurs from the Upper Jurassic of Colorado. Great Basin Naturalist 45(4):697-709.
  • Jensen, James A. 1987. New brachiosaur material from the Late Jurassic of Utah and Colorado. Great Basin Naturalist 47(4):592-608.

 

doi:10.59350/423p2-5hy43

Yet more lying necks: Backwards Birds edition

Back at the start of October I posted Necks: the lying liars that just keep lying, which included Coy Pearson’s beautiful photo of a Cooper’s hawk from behind, with its neck twisted a full 180 degrees to look at the camera.

Not one but two people emailed me in response, with photos they’ve taken of the same phenomenon. The first is from long-time Friend Of SV-POW!, Jerry Harris, who wrote:

Saw your SV-POW post on bird necks and the Cooper’s hawk photo you shared. I have a similar one taken in our backyard, too (attached), in case it’s at all useful to you!

Here it is.

This one’s interesting because it’s pretty much the complement of the photo in the original post: here we see the front of the bird, but the back of its head. (Unlike the other angle, this one makes it clear which direction the neck is twisting.)

I think (can anyone confirm or deny?) that this is another Cooper’s hawk. Is that just coincidence, or are they known for having particularly flexible necks?

The second email was from Tyler Holmes, a long-time reader but only occasional commenter:

The hawk photo in your last post on the lies of bird necks got me thinking. Our local zoo has a female southern ground hornbill and I’ve gotten to spend a lot of time watching her. One day last month, she walked over to the fence where I was sitting with my kids and spent about 45 minutes staring at us and preening. She was able to reach all the way back to the base of her tail quite easily with her beak. At times she was able to look over 180 degrees behind her, but the whole neck wasn’t used equally. Most of the turn came from the three or four vertebrae at the base of the neck, which already have quite a significant bend to them to incline the rest of the neck into an alert posture. I attached a few photos I took, I thought you might find them interesting.

Here are the photos:

What strange, perverted creatures birds are.

 

doi:10.59350/fvkyr-6rr98

Video of the 2024 SSP debate: “The open access movement has failed”

Readers with good memories will remember that back in May last year I announced I would be one of the two participants in the plenary debate that closes the annual meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing. I was cast against type, proposing the motion “The open access movement has failed”, with preprint advocate Jessica Polka providing the honorable opposition.

I posted the full text of my opening argument and of Jessica’s argument in opposition — but not of the shorter rebuttals that each of us gave, or of course the unscripted Q&A that followed the formal part of the debate.

Now, only a year and a bit late, comes the video of the debate! My apologies for the delay: it wasn’t available straight after the meeting, and then I forgot to check back a month later.

I’d like to embed the video in this page, but WordPress won’t let me (not unreasonably — I wouldn’t let people embed arbitrary JavaScript in my site, either). So you’ll have to link through to the SSP’s page with the video.

It’s the only way to find out who won the debate, after all!

 

doi:10.59350/qsajq-6tn97

If you’d built a “tool” that stupid, why would you advertise the fact?

A few days ago I got a sensationally stupid email from one of those websites that most of us probably have a subscription to, but which I will not give the oxygen of publicity by linking to[1].

The subject line was:

Your paper “NEURAL SPINE BIFURCATION…” is now an analogy.

No; no, it’s not.

Our paper Neural spine bifurcation in sauropod dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation: ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications (Wedel and Taylor 2013) is not an analogy. It’s a scientific study of whether neural spines bifurcate progressively through ontogeny. (Spoiler: not really. Somehow we stretched that out to 34 pages.)

The email then goes on to say:

Our AI turned your research into an easy to understand analogy

Oh, did it now? Do tell.

The bifurcation of neural spines in sauropods can be likened to the branching patterns of river deltas. Just as a river flows into a delta…

But it really, really can’t. You might just as well say “The bifurcation of neural spines in sauropods can be likened to Marcel Proust’s seven-volume masterwork À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.” It would be exactly as meaningful.

To add insult to injury, they want me to pay to upgrade to Premium if I want to see how this nonsense continues. Hard pass.

When I forwarded this exercise in idiocy to Matt, he replied with just two lines:

What is this I can’t even.

If you’d built a “tool” that stupid, why would you advertise the fact?

Well, quite.

The current generation of “AI”s do have some uses. I ask ChatGPT questions about the minutiae of programming all the time, like when I wanted to know whether there is a standard pattern for invoking a React hook on behalf of a class-based component. But for every useful application of LLMs, there are ten useless or actively destructive uses. I’m not sure which of those two categories “Your paper is now an analogy” falls into.

Just stop it.

Notes

[1] It was academia.edu, and who can possibly explain how they were able to get a domain name in the .edu TLD?

References

 

doi:10.59350/5f44y-g3k32

New paper: pneumatic diverticula and blood vessels in the neural canals of the toothed birds Ichthyornis and Janavis

New paper out this week, open access like usual, go get it for free:

Atterholt, Jessie; Burton, M. Grace; Wedel, Mathew J.; Benito, Juan; Fricano, Ellen; and Field, Daniel J. 2025. Osteological correlates of the respiratory and vascular systems in the neural canals of Mesozoic ornithurines Ichthyornis and Janavis. The Anatomical Record. http://doi.org/10.1002/ar.70070.

If I recall the sequence correctly, Jessie Atterholt met Dan Field at one of the recent Society of Avian Paleontology and Evolution (SAPE) meetings. Between them they spun up the idea of looking for evidence of paramedullary diverticula (PMDs) in the neural canals of some fossil birds that Dan and his collaborators and students had been studying, namely Ichthyornis and Janavis, both toothy ichthyornithines from the Late Cretaceous. This was not long after Jessie and I had our paper on PMDs in extant birds published (Atterholt and Wedel 2022), and we were interested in chasing PMDs down the tree. At the same time, Dan and his former student, Juan Benito, had a big war chest of CT scans of Ichthyornis and Janavis. So the actual work for this project was very similar to the work for Atterholt and Wedel (2022): lots of hours in front of a computer, flipping through stacks of CT slices. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Skeletal reconstruction of Ichthyornis from Marsh 1880

Ichthyornis you know, it’s one of the toothed birds that O.C. Marsh described in the 1870s, after basically buying the specimen out from under E.D. Cope, one of the many inciting incidents of the Bone Wars. For most of my career I simply could not keep Ichthyornis and Hesperornis straight. It has always been perversely confusing to me that the flightless swimming bird is not named “fish bird”, and the gull-like flying bird is not named for Hesperus, or Venus, a thing actually up in the sky. The “fish bird” was the flyer and the “Venus bird” was the flightless swimmer. It’s just plain backwards. (Before anyone pushes their glasses up their nose in the comments, yes, I know that Hesperornis is intended as “western bird”. Both taxa are from the West. Still confusing.)

The much larger Janavis (right) compared to the more-completely-known Ichthyornis (left). From Benito et al. (2022: fig. 1).

Janavis I was not familiar with prior to this project. It’s the sister taxon of Ichthyornis, only named in 2022 by Benito et al. Janavis was big, too, with an estimated wingspan of 5 feet, about the same as the largest extant gulls (or for me, an Oklahoma farmboy, a really big hawk). The vertebrae of Janavis are cuh-ray-zee pneumatic, totally honeycombed inside and fairly Swiss-cheesy in places on the outside, edging up to the frankly unbelievable anatomy of pelicans. Or shoebill storks, about which more in a sec.

Jessie Atterholt, Grace Burton, and me at the LACM in August, 2024. Sorry about the unfortunate non-sauropods in the background.

Grace Burton, one of Dan’s current PhD students, came over to SoCal last year to do some research at the LACM and work with Jessie and me on the IchyJan project (it only took me about half a dozen emails to realize that I was too lazy to type “Ichthyornis and Janavis” the thousand or so times I’d need to). The three of us had an enjoyable visit to the LACM Ornithology collection to find comparative specimens, some of which we ended up figuring in the new paper. And Jessie and Grace spend a LOT of time looking through CT scans. I got in on some of that, but really, Jessie and Grace did almost all the heavy lifting with both the research and the writing, so it’s only just that they’re the first two authors. This was mostly an Atterholt joint from the get-go anyway. If my interest in weird neural canal anatomy is a roaring bonfire, Jessie’s is more like the Sun.

One of the cervical vertebrae of the shoebill stork, Balaeniceps rex, LACM 116167. Check out the “bone foam” of pneumatic foramina inside the cervical rib loop and on the side of the centrum.

Of the new coauthors I picked up on this project, one is close to home: Elle Fricano, who works alongside Jessie and me as one of the anatomy faculty at WesternU. We ended up needing to scan some specimens at WesternU with our microCT machine, and Elle did virtually all of the scanning and interp, so we brought her on as an author. Elle’s own research is mostly on the evolution of the cranial base and ear region in humans and other primates, but she’s gotten into pneumaticity with a very nice paper on the human maxillary sinus (Fricano et al. 2025). She also works as a forensic anthropologist, and earlier this year she passed her forensic board exams to became the 176th Diplomate of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology — the 176th ever (full list here) — and one of only 124 active board-certified forensic anthropologists in the world. That is a heck of an achievement for anyone, but especially for someone on the tenure track, with a heavy teaching load, research, committee service, and a family. Am I bragging on my colleague? Heck yes. When a fire burns down a neighborhood out here, Elle is one of the people who goes and sifts bone shards out of the ashes and does her best to give the survivors some closure (not to mention helping investigate other deaths, ones that Nature had less of a hand in). That work is not without its costs, and I’m a little in awe of anyone who chooses to do it.

Hypothesized reconstructions of respiratory, vascular, and neurological structures in the neural canals of Ichthyornis dispar and Janavis finalidens. (a) Ichthyornis (KUVP 25472) cervical 11 showing likely arrangement of paramedullary diverticula (green) and paired extradural ventral spinal vessels (pink) relative to the spinal cord (yellow). (b) Janavis (NHMM RD 271) indeterminate mid-thoracic vertebra 1 showing likely arrangement of the extradural dorsal spinal vein (blue) relative to the spinal cord (yellow). Atterholt et al. (2025: figure 5).

Anyway: neural canals in fossil birds. We were hunting for hard evidence of pneumatic diverticula inside the neural canal, ideally unambiguous foramina opening into clearly pneumatic spaces in the neural arch or centrum. We found those foramina, and lots of other weird stuff besides. Some of the vertebrae of Ichthyornis and Janavis have bilobed neural canals, and from comparisons with extant birds we’re pretty sure the upper lobe held a big venous sinus. Crocs have one, too, in their bilobed neural canals. Most of the critters that fall evolutionarily between crocs and birds don’t have bilobed neural canals, but they may still have had big venous sinuses that simply failed to leave diagnostic traces — the curse of pneumaticity researchers extended to blood vessels.

Some of our CT scans of extant birds show that upper lobe being shared by both a big venous sinus and pneumatic diverticula, and the upper lobe is sometimes expanded into what Jessie and I nicknamed the “pneumatic attic”: a large space of variable geometry that very often has big pneumatic foramina opening into the transverse processes, postzygapophyseal rami, or neural spines. You can see the “pneumatic attic” with the pneumatic diverticula restored in a vertebra of Ichthyornis in Figure 5, above. Virtually everything we found in Ichthyornis and Janavis could be lined up 1-for-1 with an identical geometry or topology in one or another extant bird, which made us feel better about our interpretations.

Paired ventrolateral channels in Ichthyornis dispar, and examples of similar structures in extant avians. (a) Ichthyornis (ALMNH 3316) axis; note that the channel on the right has just given rise to a neurovascular foramen. (b) Ichthyornis (KUVP 25472) vertebra 11. (c) King penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus, LACM 99854) thoracic vertebra. (d) Ichthyornis (ALMNH 3316) sacral vertebra. (e) Blue petrel (Halobaena caerulea) sacral vertebra. (f) Ichthyornis (KUVP 25472) indeterminate caudal vertebra 1. (g) Ichthyornis (KUVP 25472) indeterminate caudal vertebra 2. (h) Common loon (Gavia immer, LACM 112761) caudal vertebra. (i) Antarctic prion (Pachyptila desolata) caudal vertebra. Atterholt et al. (2025: figure 4).

One thing that needs more work is the frequent occurrence of small, paired troughs at the ventrolateral corners of the neural canal, not only in Ichthyornis and Janavis but in many extant birds as well. These troughs often bud off little vascular foramina that we can trace down into the centrum, so we’re pretty sure the troughs held blood vessels in life. A lot of vertebrates have a ladder-like arrangement of arteries in their neural canals, which could be the source of these troughs, but they might also have been produced by little basivertebral veins, which birds otherwise seem to lack. Why don’t we we just inject some dead birds, dissect them, and find out, you maybe wondering. Well, we’re gonna, at some point, but that’s at least another whole paper’s worth of work, and possibly several. We’d rather just go look up the answer, but as far as we and our reviewers could tell, no-one has ever written about these troughs and their contents before (if you know otherwise, please sing out in the comments!).

So once again, Jessie and I find ourselves needing to do novel anatomical research on living animals, partly because it’s worth doing in its own right, but also so that we can make progress on the paleontological questions that got us into this in the first place. It’s awfully hard to make informed paleobiological inferences when so much basic anatomy remains to be documented for the first time, even in extant critters. As I keep saying, a lot of this is work that anyone with sufficient time and curiosity could do, much of it inexpensively. So if you find this stuff intriguing, we’d love to have more explorers out here where the pneumatosphere intrudes into the neural-canal-iverse.

I was up inside the Utah Field House Diplodocus three weeks ago, logging pneumatic structures that no-one had documented in 125 years. More on that another time. Many thanks to John Foster for the ladder and the permission.

As for Jessie and me, this is our fifth neural-canal-related paper (see the evolving list here). We keep kicking them out the rate of one per year, which is nice and sustainable and unlikely to stop anytime soon. According to my to-do list, she and I have at least another 15 collaborative papers planned. Not all of them are about neural canals, but still… I reckon we’d better get to it.

REFERENCES

 

doi:10.59350/8750f-56p27