Posted in cervical

On the evolution of the atlas-axis complex

Matt and I were discussing a paper from last year, Korneisel and Maddin (2025) on the evolution of the atlas–axis complex. (It’s excellent, by the way. Really comprehensive.)

Mike: Atlases are so weird. It occurs to me that had the nomenclatural dice fallen differently, we might not even consider them vertebrae at all, just as we don’t consider metacarpals to be manual phalanges. We might have considered the axial skeleton to consist of skull, atlas, and a sequence of vertebrae starting with the axis. (And, yes, ribs, chevrons and sternal plates.)

Matt: Good point on […] the weirdness of the atlas. The atlas in particular really does feel like an embryonic segmentation error codified and exapted into a useful structure.

Mike: Your mom is an embryonic segmentation error codified and exapted into a useful structure.

References

 

doi:10.59350/xsxxj-yre49

Tutorial 48: my museum collections kit

I was on the road for most of August, September, and October, and in particular I made a ton of museum collections visits. When I visit a museum collection, I bring a specific set of gear that helps me get the photos, notes, and measurements that I want. All of this is YMMV — I’m not trying to predict what will work best for you, but to explain what has worked for me, and why. I’m reasonably happy with my current setup, but even after 28 years of museum visits, I’m still finding ways to improve it. Hence this post, which will hopefully serve as a vehicle for sharing tips and tricks.

A word about my program when I visit a collection, because not everyone needs or wants to do things my way. The closest museums with extensive sauropod collections are states away from where I live and work. If I’m in those collections at all, I’m traveling, and therefore on the clock. Time in collections is a zero-sum game: if I have the time to take 20 pages of notes, that could be 4 pages of notes of each of 5 specimens, 2 pages on 10, 1 page on 20, half a page on 40, etc. In practice, I usually make expansive notes early in the visit, one or two spreads per specimen with detailed sketches and exhaustive measurements of the most publication-worthy elements. I grade toward brevity over the course of the visit, and end with a mad desperate rush, throwing in crude sketches and rudimentary notes on as many newly-discovered (by me) specimens as possible. My collections visits are Discovery Time and Gathering Time, trying to get all the measurements and photographs I’ll want for the next year, or five, or forever. And, to the extent that I can suppress them, not Analysis Time or Graphing Time or Writing Time — I can do those things after hours and in my office back home, IF and only if I’ve spent my collections time efficiently gathering all the information I’ll need later.

The very first thing I do in any collection is a walking survey, to make sure I know roughly what specimens the collection contains and where to find them. For a sufficiently large collection — or even a single cabinet with 10 drawers of good stuff — I may draw a map in my notebook, on which I can note things I want to come back and document, and add new things as I find them.

Enough preamble, on to the gear. The first two or three entries here are in strict priority order, and after that things get very fuzzy and approximate.

1. Research Notebook

Seems obvious, right? Write stuff down, make sketches, capture the info that will be difficult or impossible to recapture later from photos. I have encountered people who don’t take a physical notebook, just a laptop or tablet, and take all their notes digitally. If that works for you, may a thousand gardens grow. For me, sketching is a fundamental activity — for fixing morphology in my mind, disciplining myself to see the whole object and its parts, creating a template on which to take further explanatory notes, and capturing the caveats, stray ideas, and odd connections that surround each specimen in a quantum fuzz in my mind (temporarily in my mind, hence the need for external capture). I also write priority lists in advance of specimens to document each day, and then cross them off, add new ones, and strike out duds with wild abandon in the heat of data collection.

I do a few specific things to increase the usefulness of my notebooks:

– Label the spines and covers with the notebook titles and years. These things live on the shelf directly over my desk, and I pull them down and rifle through them constantly. I also have notebooks for university service (committees, student advising, and so on), astronomical observations, and personal journaling, so “Research” is a useful tag for me.

– Number the pages, if they’re not already numbered, use the books chronologically from front to back, and create the table of contents retrospectively as I go — a tip I got from the Bullet Journal method.

– Paste a small envelope inside the back cover, if a pouch is not already built in, to hold all kinds of ephemera — index cards, scale bars, a bandage (just in case), stickers I acquire along the way, etc.

– Affix a section of measuring tape to the outer edge of the front or back cover. I got this tip from the naturalist John Muir Laws, whose Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling is wonderfully useful and inspiring (UPDATE: that book is now covered in its own post, here). The scale-bar-permanently-affixed-to-research-notebook has been a game-changer for me. Do you know how many times I’ve accidentally left a scale bar on a museum shelf, and then gotten to my next stop and had to borrow or fabricate one? I myself lost count long ago. But never again. If I’m in a hurry, small specimens go straight onto the notebook to be photographed, like the baby apatosaurine tibia above, and the notebook itself goes into the frame with large specimens. (This comes up again — if possible, and it’s almost always possible, put the specimen label in the photo with the specimen. No reason not to, and sometimes a lifesaver later on.)

Behold the thinness of the eminently pocketable IKEA paper tape. Folding instructions, because this seems to bedevil some folks: hold up one end, fold in half by grabbing the other end and bring it up in front, then do that three more times. Finished product is 65mm long, 25.4mm wide, and about 1mm thick when folded crisply and left under a heavy book overnight.

2. Measuring tapes

I find the flexible kind much more convenient and useful than retractable metal tape measures. I like the 1-2mm thick plastic type used by tailors and fabric sellers, because they have just enough inertia to stay where I put them, or drop in a predictable fashion when draped over something sufficiently large, as when measuring midshaft circumference of a long bone.

I LOVE the little plasticized paper tapes that hang on racks, free for the taking, near the entrances of IKEA stores. I tear them off by the dozen when I go to IKEA, cram them in my pockets, fold them flat when I get home, and stash them everywhere, including in my wallet. A few specific reasons they’re great:

– Folded flat, they’re about the thickness of a credit card, so there’s just no reason to be without one. I usually have one in my wallet, another in the envelope at the back of my research notebook, a couple more stashed in my luggage, a couple more stashed in my car, desk, tookbox, nightstand, etc.

– I can write on them. Especially handy if:

– I’ve torn off a section to serve as an impromptu scale bar. Which I never hesitate to do, because they’re free and I have dozens waiting in my toolbox and desk drawers at any one time. Torn off bits also make good bookmarks, classier, more cerebral, and less implicitly gross than the traditional folded square of toilet paper.

– I give them away to folks I’m traveling with, or that I meet in my travels, and they’re usually well-received.

I would NOT have figured out all these laminae if I hadn’t had a way to make them stand out.

3. Writing instruments in various colors

Up until about 2018 my notebooks were always monochrome pen or pencil. Then I realized that color is an extremely helpful differentiator for Future Matt, so now I highlight and color-annotate willy-nilly.

4. Calipers

I borrowed the digital calipers from Colin Boisvert to get the photo up top, having forgotten my own at home. As a sauropod worker, I don’t need sub-millimeter accuracy all the time. But digital calipers have three exceedingly useful functions: measuring the thickness of very thin laminae and bony septa; measuring the internal dimensions of small fossae and foramina; and measuring the depth of fossae and of concave articular surfaces. I also have a little titanium caliper on a lanyard that goes with me most places.

5. Small brush on a carabiner

This is the newest addition to the kit. I got the idea from Matthew Mossbrucker at the Morrison Museum in Morrison, Colorado. Colin and I visited him in September, immediately before our week-long stint in the collections at Dinosaur Journey. Matthew keeps a little brush carabinered to his belt at all times, and the utility was so instantly obvious that when Colin and I rolled into Fruita later that same day, I went to the hardware store and got my own. Cheap, weighs nothing, clips to anything, compact enough to cram in a pocket, good for lab and field alike. Genius!

6. Scale bar

Yes, I have my scale-bar-enhanced research notebook and my hoarder stash of IKEA paper tapes, but good old-fashioned scale bars are still useful, and I use them constantly. And lose them constantly, hence my multiple redundant backup mechanisms.

(Aside: I can’t explain why I hold onto some objects like grim death, but let others fall through my fingers like sand grains. I’ve only lost one notebook of any kind in my entire life — set it on top of the car while packing and then drove off [grrrr] — so I have no problem investing in nice notebooks and treating them like permanent fixtures. But I can’t hang onto pens and scale bars to save my life, hence my having gravitated to Bic sticks and IKEA paper tapes.)

7. Index cards

I try to get as much information into each photograph as possible. Ideally alongside the specimen I will have:

– a scale bar at the appropriate depth of field;

– the specimen tag with the number, locality, and other pertinent info;

– my notebook open to my sketch of the specimen, for easy correlation later (I don’t do this for every single view, just the ones that I think are particularly publication-worthy, or have info I’m likely to forget later);

– anything else I might want — serial position, anatomical directions, whether the photo is part of an anaglyph pair, and so on — written on an index card, which being a standard size will itself serve as an alternate/backup scale bar.

8. Pencil case

To hold all the smaller fiddly bits you see in the photo up top. I can’t now fathom why, but I resisted getting one of these for a loooong time. I was young and foolish then. Pretty useful all the time, absolutely clutch when it’s 4:58 pm and I’m throwing stuff in bags, caught between the Scylla of working as late as possible and the Charybdis of wanting to be polite to whatever kind, patient person is facilitating my visit. That is also when the pocket in the back of the notebook comes in especially handy.

Headlamp in action, casting low-angle light on a pneumatic fossa on the tuberculum of this sauropod rib. Note also the scale bar, elevated on a specimen box to be the same depth of field, and the notebook open to my sketch of the specimen.

9. Artificial lighting

This was another very late discovery for me — I don’t think I was regularly bringing my own lights prior to 2018. For me, portable, rechargeable lighting is useful in many circumstances and absolutely critical in two: casting low-angle light to pick out subtle pneumatic features, as in the photo above, and lighting up big specimens that I don’t have the time, energy, or space to pull off the shelves, as in the photo below.

I’m particularly taken with the big orange fan/light combo. It charges using a USB-C cable, has four settings for fan speed (handy when it’s hot, humid, or just oppressively still) and three for light intensity, a rotating hook that folds flat, and a USB power-out socket for charging phones, headlamps, fitness trackers, and what have you. I use it practically every day whether I’m on the road or not.

Magnetic flashlight hanging from steel shelving to illuminate Camarasaurus cervical vertebrae in the Utah Field House collections.

Whether it’s a hook or a magnet, some kind of mechanism for suspending a light at odd heights and angles is super useful. I usually have a strong flashlight with an integral seat-belt cutter and window-smasher in the door pocket of my car, and its magnetic base makes it omnidirectionally functional in collections spaces, which are usually liberally supplied with steel in the form of shelving and cabinets.

Haplocanthosaurus CM 879 caudal 2 in left lateral view, with rolled-up paper neural canal visualizer and scale-bar-stuck-to-flashlight.

Sometimes I use a bit of blue tack to stick a scale bar to a flashlight, to create a free-standing, truly vertical scale bar that I can rapidly place at different distances from the camera. Beats leaning the scale bar against a stack of empty specimen boxes or a block of ethofoam (which in turn beats nothing at all).

What else?

USUALLY — Laptop

Not for recording notes or measurements — all of that goes into the notebook, which I scan and upload new stuff from every evening. Mostly for displaying PDFs of descriptive monographs, and hugely useful in that regard.

MAYBE — Monographs

When I have the freedom (= baggage allowance) to do so, I find it handy to bring hardcopies of descriptive monographs, both for quick reference and so I can photograph specimens alongside the illustrations. Doesn’t even have to be the same specimens, just comparable elements. In the photo above, MWC 7257, a partial sacral centrum of Allosaurus from the Mygatt-Moore Quarry, is sitting next to a plate from Madsen (1976), illustrating the same vertebra in a specimen from Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry. Thanks to Colin Boisvert for bringing the specimen to my attention — I’ve got a longstanding thing for sacrals — and for loaning me his copy of Madsen (1976) for this photo.

OUT — Camera and tripod

I suspect that some folks will shake their heads in mute horror, but after a couple of decades of lugging dedicated cameras and tripods everywhere, I stopped. For the past few years I’ve been rolling with just my phone, which is objectively better than any dedicated camera I owned for the first half of my career. Sometimes I brace it in an ad hoc fashion against a chair or shelf or cabinet, but mostly I just shoot freehand. For my purposes, it does fine, and any minor improvements in field curvature or whatever that I’d get from a dedicated camera don’t outweigh the logistical hassle. Again: YMMV!

Over to you

So, that’s what I roll with right now. It was different six months ago, and will almost certainly be a little different six months hence, hopefully as a result of people responding to this post. With all that said: what’s in your kit?

P.S. Many thanks to Matthew Mossbrucker and Julia McHugh for their hospitality and assistance in their collections, and to Colin Boisvert for being such a great travel companion, research sounding board, and generous loaner-of-things-I’d-forgotten. The Wedel-Boisvert Morrisonpocalypse 2025 deserves more blogging.

 

doi:10.59350/c21vr-f8727

What’s up with your perforated parapophyseal ramus, Apatosaurinae indet. BYU 20178? — Featuring: What have we learned?

I happened to be reading back over Tutorial 34: How to document a specimen, when something caught my eye in the example photo we used of how to capture the label and appropriately positioned scalebar along with the specimen:

BYU 20178, cervical vertebra from an apatosaurine sauropod in ventral view, anterior to the left.

Somehow, when I wrote that post, I didn’t actually look at the photo I was showing you all as an example of How To Do It Right. And, worse, I ignored my own advice from the same tutorial: to actually look at the damned specimen while you’re right there with it.

If I’d done either, I would have noticed that the left parapophyseal ramus (at the top of the photo, supporting the cervical rib) has a whacking great hole in it. Here you go, in close-up.

Merely a close-up of the previous photo, showing the relevant area.

Infuriatingly, it’s one of only three photos I took of this specimen (it was during the Sauropocalypse of 2019), and the only one in ventral view.

BUT! Check out this posterior view, which is one of the other two photos. (The third is useless for our present purposes.)

BYU 20178, cervical vertebra from an apatosaurine sauropod in posterior view, upside down.

From this angle, it looks like a perfectly respectable apatosaurine cervical. Could it be that the parapophyseal ramus, facing us edge-on at top right in the photo, is just not displaying the perforation from this angle?

I dont think so: there is a distinctive pattern of cracks in  the posterior face of the diapophyseal ramus, which you can see in both photos, and which I’m highlighting here in red here:

And here:

What appeared in the first photo to be the part of the parapohyseal ramus with those cracks is now seen to be diapophyseal. And that original photo up at the top doesn’t show a perforation at all, just an oblique view of the cervical rib loop. It looks like a perforation because from that one angle the parapophyseal ramus perfectly overlays the diapophyseal. But now we know what we’re looking for, we can see where the overlap is.

Here’s that first photo again with the overlap emphasized by adding a fake shadow:

What have we learned?

First, we’ve learned that nothing is up with the unperforated parapophyseal ramus of Apatosaurinae indet. BYU 20178. It can go about its business.

But there is a broader lesson here, about looking a photos of complex three-dimensional objects, especially when they also have complex surface textures. By all means, look at such photos and enjoy them — but be very careful about drawing conclusions from them in isolation. They can be terribly misleading.

So misleading that when I laid down the first sketch of this post, it really was going to be about the osteological novelty of the perforation. I’m laying my card on the table here, I’m dumbass enough to have walked right into the trap I’m warning about. The only thing that saved me was a trivial wrinkle of my method, which I’m going to share now in the hope that it helps. Here it is:

When I prepare an image for use in the blog, I don’t rename it from the camera’s uninformative name IMG_3527.JPG to something like BYU-20178–apatosaurine-cervical–ventral.JPG. No, instead I rename it pedantically to a filename that also retains the camera’s originally allocated filename — in this case, IMG_3527–BYU-20178–apatosaurine-cervical–ventral.JPG.

Why does that help? Because it meant that when I returned to this draft post long after that first sketch, I was able to see that image number 3527, locate the original IMG_3527, and see that I had IMG_3528 right next to it — and that photo had the critical posterior view.

This probably seems like a very little thing; but it’s helped me many, many times over the years. Not only in blogging, either, but in figure preparation for formal publications. When I make a multiview like the apatosaur cervical that’s Figure 6 of Wedel and Taylor (2023) on bifurcated cervical ribs, the layers aren’t just named things like anterior and ventral, but IMG_6735 anterior.That means if I need to check my interpretation of part of the figure, I can find the other photos I took around the same time to compare with.

I recommend it.

References

 

doi:10.59350/37nhm-hhq17

To what extent is science a strong-link problem?

Here’s a fascinating and worrying news story in Science: a top US researcher apparently falsified a lot of images (at least) in papers that helped get experimental drugs on the market — papers that were published in top journals for years, and whose problems have only recently become apparent because of amateur sleuthing through PubPeer.

I’m going to wane philosophical for a minute. In general I’m very sympathetic to Adam Mastroianni’s line “don’t worry about the flood of crap that will result if we let everyone publish, publishing is already a flood of crap, but science is a strong-link problem so the good stuff rises to the top”. I certainly don’t think we need stronger pre-publication review or any more barrier guardians (although I have reluctantly concluded that having some is useful). But when fraudulent stuff like this does in fact rise to the top in what seems to be a strong-link network — lots of NIH-funded labs, papers in top journals (or, apparently, “top” journals) — then I despair a bit. Science has gotten so specialized that almost anyone could invent facts or data within their subfield that might pass muster even with close colleagues (even if those colleagues aren’t on the take, he said cynically — there is a mind-boggling amount of money floating around in the drug-development world).

Immediate thought experiment: could Mike or I come up with material for a blog post or paper that would be false but good enough to fool the other? Given how often we find surprising or even counterintuitive results, I think possibly so. I’m not particularly motivated to run the experiment when we’re already digging out from a deep backlog of started-but-never-finished papers, but it remains a morbidly fascinating possibility.

Fang and Casadevall 2011: fig. 1.

Anyway, one problem is that “top” journals have a lot of fraudulent or at least incorrect science in them, roughly corresponding to their impact factors. Now, you might say “yeah but the positive correlation means bad actors get caught”, to which I’d reply “not fast enough” and “how do you know we’re catching all of them?”

Sinking feeling

There’s another problem, I don’t know if it’s equal-and-opposite but it definitely exists: good science that doesn’t float to the top. Here are a couple of quick examples from my neck of the woods:

Working from very little evidence by modern standards, Longman (1933) had correctly figured out that pneumatic sauropod vertebrae come in two flavors, those with a few large chambers and those with many small chambers. He called them “phanerocamerate” and “cryptocamerillan”, corresponding to the independently-derived modern terms “camerate” for the open-chambered form and “camellate” or “somphospondylous” for the honeycombed one. As far as I have been able to determine, nobody paid any attention to this before Wedel (2003b) — Longman’s work on vertebral internal structure wasn’t mentioned or cited by Janensch in the 1940s or Britt or anyone else in the 1990s. To be clear, I’m not putting myself forward as a better researcher than anyone that came before. I just got lucky, to have read a fairly obscure paper while I had my antennae out for any possible mention of pneumaticity.

Speaking of Janensch, his 1947 paper on pneumaticity in dinosaurs was pretty much ignored until the 1990s and early 2000s.

OMNH 1094, a cervical centrum of an apatosaurine, and a crucial player in the Wedel origin story — this was the first vertebra of anything other than Sauroposeidon that Kent Sanders and I scanned.

I owe my career to the Dinosaur Renaissance

Here’s what bothers me about this: I made my career studying pneumaticity in sauropods, buoyed in large part by the fact that I stumbled backwards into a situation where I had access to a big collection of sauropod bones (at the OMNH), free time on a CT scanner (at the university hospital), and a curious and collaborative radiologist (Kent Sanders). But you don’t need a CT scanner to study pneumaticity, as John Fronimos has convincingly demonstrated (see Fronimos 2023 and this post). So why didn’t the revolution in sauropod pneumaticity happen in 1933 or 1947? Or, heck, in 1880 — Seeley and Cope and Marsh and many others recognized that sauropods had highly chambered vertebrae.

I think the most likely explanation is that at the time no-one cared. Pneumatic vertebrae in sauropods were possibly interesting trivia, but sauropods were an evolutionary dead end and so their vertebrae couldn’t tell us anything important about evolutionary success. These attitudes may not have been universal, but they were certainly prevailing.

I had the good fortune to come along at a time when there was renewed interest in dinosaur paleobiology, particularly any characters or body systems shared between non-avian dinosaurs and birds. Suddenly pneumaticity wasn’t some obscure bit of trivia, but the skeletal footprint of a bird-like respiratory system that was potentially a key adaptation for sauropods (Sander et al. 2011) and possibly for dinosaurs more generally (Schachner et al. 2009, 2011). And dinosaurs weren’t any more of an evolutionary dead end than we are, they just happened to mostly not fit into small holes or deep water when the asteroid hit.  (Let’s heat the atmosphere to 400F for a few hours and then make the world dark for a few months or years and then we can talk about evolutionary dead ends.) So adaptations that facilitated dinosaurosity might tell us something about evolutionary success after all.

What are you doing in that cell?

Having a successful career because I happened to hitch a ride on a wave of renewed interest in dinosaur paleobiology is certainly nice, but also worrisome. If it takes 70 or 100 years for the good science to float to the top, does that really count? Whatever convection cells push the good science toward the top would ideally work more like a cook pot on a rapid boil, and not like the imperceptible roiling of Earth’s mantle. So ask yourself: what’s still on its way up to the top right now, that no-one has clocked yet? What’s the Longman (1933) of 2024 — the seemingly incidental observation that is going to seem prophetic in a few decades? Or worse, what was the Longman (1933) of 1994 or 2004, the solid paper that attracted no attention and won’t for another half century?

The convection cell metaphor is particularly apt because a lot of science is siloed. A good idea — say, that the peroneus tertius muscle occurs at a lower frequency in monkeys and apes than in humans, and this tells us something about its evolution — may rise to the top in one cell (comparative anatomy), but not make it over to the neighboring cell (clinical anatomy), where all the happy little molecules think that peroneus tertius is a muscle unique to humans (if you have no idea what I’m on about, see the second numbered point in this post).

So if you want to do good work — in this metaphor, to be at the top where the good science floats (eventually, alongside a seasoning of not-yet-unmasked bad science) — then I think you have to be aware that other cells exist, and occasionally peer into them, if for no other reason than to make sure you don’t accept an idea that’s already been debunked over there. And you need to read broadly and deeply in your own cell — there’s almost certainly valuable stuff you don’t know because the relevant works are stuck to the bottom of the pot. Go knock ’em loose.

References

 

doi:10.59350/27ewm-zn378

Fossil Friday grab-bag: bird diverticula, Oklahoma dinos, Tate trip pics, and more

BYU 12613, a very posterior cervical (probably C14 or C15) of a diplodocine sauropod, probably Kaatedocus or Diplodocus, from Dry Mesa, original fossil and 50% scale 3D print. The real bone has a mid-height centrum length of 270mm, compared to 642mm for C14 of D. carnegii.

I intended for the next post to be a follow-up on the new paper describing the Dry Mesa Haplocanthosaurus, as I hinted/promised in the last post. But that post is still gestating, there’s a lot of other cool stuff happening right now, and I don’t want to put off posting about it and risk never getting around to it.

Pneumatic diverticula in birds on the cover of Nature

I’m probably getting to be a crank on the subject of how pneumatic diverticula in birds are so grotesquely understudied. F’rinstance: the poultry industry is a $77 billion per year concern in the US alone, and the lung/air-sac system and its diverticula are a route for potentially lethal infections (which also affected sauropods), so you’d think we’d have the diverticular system of chickens and turkeys completely mapped, and its development fully charted. But we don’t!

See? Crank!

Anyway, Emma Schachner — who’s been doing awesome work in the arena of reptile and bird respiration for years (see here, here, and the comment thread here, for starters) — and colleagues just put bird diverticula on the map in a most spectacular fashion, with a cover article in Nature.

The short, short version is that Schachner et al. surveyed the sub-pectoral diverticulum (SPD) in 68 species of birds (in 42 families and 25 orders), and found that it was present in all soaring taxa, where it evolved at least 7 times, but absent in non-soarers. Furthermore, the SPD is in the right place to improve the mechanical advantage of the pectoralis muscles, which have a different architecture in soaring taxa, one that appears to be adapted in concert with the SPD for the particular demands of soaring flight. Schachner et al. illustrate their findings with just a ton of cool dissection photos, CT slices, and 3D reconstructions, in both the paper proper and the SI. Happily, the paper is a proper publication, 6 pages long and with plenty of detail, and not cut down to a glorified abstract.

Many things make me happy about this paper: the references to Owen (1836) and Strasser (1877), who independently suggested that the diverticula of birds might positively affect their flight dynamics; a strong team of authors taking a largely neglected anatomical system and spinning it into scientific gold; and the participation of my friends Raul Diaz and Jessie Atterholt. Together with our 2022 paper in the Anatomical Record, this is Jessie’s second taxonomically broad survey of a previously under-documented diverticular system in birds in just over two years, which is a heck of a (ahem) feather in her cap.

Given that birds have a whole internal zoo of diverticula that go between their muscles, among their viscera, under their skin, and into their bones — almost all of which are known from a bare handful of documented examples — I’m sure that there are many, many more exciting discoveries to make in this space. As Schachner et al. put it, “The discovery of a mechanical role for the respiratory system in avian locomotion underscores the functional complexity and heterogeneity of this organ system, and suggests that pulmonary diverticula are likely to have other undiscovered secondary functions.”

(If you’re thinking of not working on pneumaticity because some people are already working on [their own little corners of] it, perish the thought. At the current rate it could take decades just to document where the diverticula are and what they look like, let alone their functional implications. If the world can accommodate a new theropod phylogeny every couple of weeks, it can stand a lot more work on pneumaticity in birds and other dinos.)

Video: all the Oklahoma dinosaurs

My longtime friend and mentor, Kyle Davies, is the head preparator at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in Norman, where I did my undergrad and master’s work. Kyle is a phenomenally skilled morphologist, and if he needs something for education or exhibit that he can’t otherwise get hold of, he’ll just sculpt it himself — we’ve featured his work before (here and here). He recently gave a brown-bag lunch talk reviewing all of Oklahoma’s dinosaurs, and it’s just been posted to YouTube. Go have fun.

More travel and collections pics real soon

Luke Horton helping me get a shot of the right side of the ‘Jimbo’ Supersaurus dorsal on display at the Tate Geological Museum in Casper. The left side of this cast is visible in this post.

I just got back from a crazy-awesome research trip that I structured around the Tate Geological Museum’s 2024 summer conference. I got to spend time seeing the exhibits and working in the collections of a host of institutions, including:

  • the University of Wyoming Geological Museum in Laramie,
  • the Tate Museum in Casper,
  • the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis,
  • the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City,
  • the Museum of Ancient Life in Lehi, Utah,
  • and — chronologically last but certainly not least — the BYU Museum of Paleontology in Provo.

At BYU I got three days to roam through the collections with Colin Boisvert, Brian Curtice, Ray Wilhite, and Gunnar Bivens. It was easily one of the most productive research trips I’ve ever had, rivaled only by the 2016 Sauropocalypse with Mike. In fact, we’d hoped that Mike would get to join me for part or all of the trip, but as luck would have it he had day job trips of his own in the same time frame. He did at least get to see the mounted cast of D. carnegii in Vienna, which he was keen to see.

This trip also had this in common with the 2016 Sauropocalypse: everywhere I went, curators, collections managers, and students were unfailingly kind, hospitable, and generous with their time and knowledge. Thanks in particular to Julian Diepenbrock, Laura Vietti, and Whitney Worrell in Laramie; JP Cavigelli, Dalene Hodnett, Shaedon Kennedy, and Rachel Stevens in Casper; Tom Moncrieffe and all the staff in Thermopolis; Carrie Levitt-Bussian at the NHMU; Rick Hunter and April Hullinger in Lehi; and Rod Scheetz, Colin Boisvert, Jacob Frewin, and Isaac Wilson at BYU.

Luke Horton measuring Tate v10533, a caudal vertebra of an apatosaurine from the Nail Quarry.

A special thanks to Luke Horton, who is currently an undergrad at Texas A&M. He made it out to Casper for the Tate conference and field trips, and he stuck around for a day afterward to assist me in collections. Given his passion for paleontology and his work ethic, I expect you’ll be hearing more about Luke in the not-too-distant future.

The upshot of all of this is that I have roughly a million cool things to post from the trip, many of which I’ll no doubt forget about or never get around to, but I will make an effort to convert trip photos into blog fuel this summer. The photo up top is the first snowball in what will hopefully become an avalanche. At BYU I was cruising down one of the aisles of sauropod vertebrae (yes, at BYU they have literally aisles of sauropod vertebrae — heaven!) and I did a double-take: it was my old friend BYU 12613! Mike and I figured that vert in our 2013 neural spine bifurcation paper, and I’d used the 50% scale 3D print in my Dolly video. I’d brought the print along on the trip as a handy visual and tactile aid for introducing people to sauropod cervical morphology, and I’d passed it around for show-and-tell during my Tate keynote talk. I couldn’t resist putting the real fossil and the 3D print together for a photo op. Here’s one more for the road, in postero-dorsal view this time:

In addition to blog posts, you’ll be seeing photos from this trip in presentations and papers as soon as it can be decently arranged. Stay tuned!

References

 

doi:10.59350/423d3-16z18