New paper out today with Logan King, Julia McHugh, and Brian Curtice, on pneumatic ribs in Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus (King et al. 2024). This one had an unusual gestation. In the summer of 2002 2022 I did a road trip to Utah and western Colorado with my friend and frequent collaborator Jessie Atterholt.
I don’t remember now when I first noticed bifurcated cervical ribs in apatosaurines. I imagine 2016 at the latest, because on our Sauropocalypse that year Mike and I saw examples at both BYU and Dinosaur Journey.
Here are some cervical ribs of sauropods that show a spectrum of morphologies, from a low dorsal process that makes an obtuse angle with the shaft of the rib in Dicraeosaurus (upper right), to one that makes a right angle in Brontosaurus (center), to a prominent spike of bone in Apatosaurus (bottom left), to a […]
Everybody(*) knows that the turiasaurian sauropod Moabosaurus has bifurcated cervical ribs: it was all anyone was talking about back when that animal was described (Britt et al. 2017). We’ve featured the best rib here before, and here it is again: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-21111 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“21111”
As described in the last post, Jessie Atterholt is presenting our poster on this project today, at the 14th Symposium on Mesozoic Terrestrial Ecosystems and Biota (MTE14) in Salt Lake City, and the related paper is in the MTE14 volume in The Anatomical Record.
This is one of those posts where the title pretty much says it all, but here’s the detailed version.
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Today marks the one-month anniversary of my and Matt’s paper in Qeios about why vertebral pneumaticity in sauropods is so variable. (Taylor and Wedel 2021). We were intrigued to publish on this new platform that supports post-publication peer-review, partly just to see what happened.
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Our old sparring partner Cary Woodruff is a big fan of Monarobot, a Mexican artist who does all of her pieces in a Maya artistic style.