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Having given pterosaurs all the glory in two earlier posts, it’s time to move yet further away from the sauropods we know and love, and look at epipophyses outside of Ornithodira.

This just in, from Zurriaguz and Powell’s (2015) hot-off-the-press paper describing the morphology and pneumatic features of the presacral column of the derived titanosaur Saltasaurus . (Thanks to Darren for bringing this paper to my attention.) Now, as everyone knows, titanosaurs don’t have epipophyses. In fact, they’re the one major sauropod group where Matt has not observed them. Until today.

Many thanks for the various people who chipped in, both in comments on the last post and in this thread on twitter, where I asked a bunch of pterosaur experts for their thoughts on epipophyses in pterosaurs. I now know more than I previously knew about epipophyses outside of Sauropoda — and especially outside Dinosauria. I’ll try to credit everyone who contributed.

Matt’s last post contained a nice overview of the occurrence of epipophyses in sauropodomorphs: that is, bony insertion points for epaxial ligaments and muscles above the postzygapophyseal facets. What we’ve not mentioned so far is that these structures are not limited to sauropods. Back when we were preparing one of the earlier drafts of the paper that eventually became Why sauropods had long necks;