Last Thursday I gave a public lecture for the No Man’s Land Historical Society in the Oklahoma Panhandle, titled “Oklahoma’s Jurassic Giants: the Dinosaurs of Black Mesa”. It’s now on YouTube, on the No Man’s Land Museum’s channel. There’s a point I want to make here, that I also made in the talk: we can’t predict the value of natural history collections.

I closed the last post by claiming that finding the infected bone in Dolly was “a crazy lucky break”. Here’s why: {.size-large .wp-image-19753 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“19753” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2022/02/19/sauro-throat-part-4-the-osteological-paradox/dolly-and-the-osteological-paradox/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2022/02/dolly-and-the-osteological-paradox.jpg” orig-size=“3000,6800” comments-opened=“1”

Naturally I was grateful when Cary invited me to be part of the team working on Dolly, the diplodocid with lesions in its neck vertebrae (Woodruff et al. 2022; see previous posts on Dolly here and here). I was also intellectually excited, not only to see air-filled bones with obvious pathologies, but also for what those pathologies could tell us about Dolly and other sauropods. That’s the part of our new paper I want to unpack in this post.

Dolly the dinosaur - pathological vertebrae by WitmerLab at Ohio University 3D Navigation basics All controls Orbit around Left click + drag or One finger drag (touch) Zoom Double click on model or scroll anywhere or Pinch (touch) Pan Right click + drag or Two fingers drag (touch) Orbit navigation Move camera: 1-finger drag or Left Mouse Button

I was at the SVP meeting in Albuquerque in 2018 when Cary Woodruff called me over and said he had something cool to show me. “Something cool” turned out to be photos of infected sauropod vertebrae from the Morrison Formation of Montana. Specifically, some gross, cauliflower-looking bony lesions bubbling up in the air spaces on the sides of the vertebrae.

Here’s a pretty cool image: Plate 7 from Lull (1919), showing the partial skeleton of Barosaurus YPM 429 (above), compared to the much more complete skeleton of Diplodocus CM84/94 (below). I’ve been pretty familiar with that Barosaurus skeleton diagram since I was about 9 years old, because it’s in Donald Glut’s New Dinosaur Dictionary , which I’ve written about here before.

Here’s figure 1 from my 2005 book chapter. I tried to cram as much pneumatic sauropod vertebra morphology into one figure as I could.

Have you been reading Justin Tweet’s series, “Your Friends the Titanosaurs“, at his awesomely-named blog, Equatorial Minnesota? If not, get on it. He’s been running the series since June, 2018, so this notice is only somewhat grotesquely overdue. The latest installment, on Alamosaurus from Texas and Mexico, is phenomenal.

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