A simple, old-school paper about bifurcated cervical ribs

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:

(*) All right, but you know what I mean.

A few years back, Matt started noticing similar (though less extreme) structures in various apatosaurine cervicals, and speculating about what they meant. We thought it would be nice to write this up in a short paper, but that project got quietly left in the long grass, as so many do.

Until this summer.

I’d not seen Matt in the flesh since 2019’s Carnegie Museum visit, thanks to pandemics and whatnot. With Covid finally starting to look less of a threat, my awesome employer Index Data flew us all out to Chicago for a team meeting in August. Since I was going to be in the States anyway, I extended that visit by a week, going via southern California to hang out with Matt before the work meeting.

Here we are on the slopes of Mount Baldy, north of Matt’s stomping ground in Ontario, in the kind of glorious sunshine that you just never get in England. ” data-medium-file=”https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/mpt-socal-2023-092.jpg?w=300″ data-large-file=”https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/mpt-socal-2023-092.jpg?w=480″ class=”size-full wp-image-21450″ src=”https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/mpt-socal-2023-092.jpg?w=480&h=360″ alt=”" width=”480″ height=”360″ srcset=”https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/mpt-socal-2023-092.jpg?w=480&h=360 480w, https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/mpt-socal-2023-092.jpg?w=960&h=720 960w, https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/mpt-socal-2023-092.jpg?w=150&h=113 150w, https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/mpt-socal-2023-092.jpg?w=300&h=225 300w, https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/mpt-socal-2023-092.jpg?w=768&h=576 768w” sizes=”(max-width: 480px) 100vw, 480px” />

Here we are on the slopes of Mount Baldy, north of Matt’s stomping ground in Ontario, in the kind of glorious sunshine that you just never get in England.

I don’t think we particularly expected that week to be a fruitful one for work, we just wanted to do fun stuff. But the way it worked out, we stayed up late most nights and did a lot of thinking and writing. So our surprise, we ended up getting two papers completed and submitted that week — and one of them was the study on bifurcated cervical ribs.

Today, that paper is out in VAMP (Vertebrate Anatomy Morphology Palaeontology), and you can read it there (Wedel and Taylor 2023).

I’m fond of this one because it’s pleasingly low-tech and traditional. We looked at some fossils, noticed some interesting features, thought about what they mean, wrote it up, illustrated it with specimen photos and diagrams, and called it done. There is certainly a time and place for phylogenetic analysis, geometric morphometrics, and all the other numerical methods that are increasingly common in vertebrate palaeontology, but I genuinely think it’s important that this kind of work doesn’t squeeze out the more foundational process of looking at, and thinking about, fossils.

Wedel and Taylor 2023:figure 5. Partial neck skeleton of Apatosaurus louisae holotype CM 3018, mounted at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. C4 (posterior half), 5–7, and 8 (anterior half), in left anteroventrolateral view. White circles highlight the cervical ribs of C6, showing the dorsolaterally directed processes. Photograph by the authors. ” data-medium-file=”https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/figure-5-cm3018-c6-img_9469.png?w=300″ data-large-file=”https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/figure-5-cm3018-c6-img_9469.png?w=480″ class=”size-full wp-image-21461″ src=”https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/figure-5-cm3018-c6-img_9469.png?w=480&h=360″ alt=”" width=”480″ height=”360″ srcset=”https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/figure-5-cm3018-c6-img_9469.png?w=480&h=360 480w, https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/figure-5-cm3018-c6-img_9469.png?w=960&h=720 960w, https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/figure-5-cm3018-c6-img_9469.png?w=150&h=113 150w, https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/figure-5-cm3018-c6-img_9469.png?w=300&h=225 300w, https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/figure-5-cm3018-c6-img_9469.png?w=768&h=576 768w” sizes=”(max-width: 480px) 100vw, 480px” />

Wedel and Taylor 2023:figure 5. Partial neck skeleton of Apatosaurus louisae holotype CM 3018, mounted at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. C4 (posterior half), 5–7, and 8 (anterior half), in left anteroventrolateral view. White circles highlight the cervical ribs of C6, showing the dorsolaterally directed processes. Photograph by the authors.

We’ll have more to say about this paper, but as noted, you can just go and read it if you like: it’s only ten pages long, beautifully illustrated (if I say it myself) and of course open access.

References

• Britt, Brooks B., Rodney D. Scheetz, Michael F. Whiting and D. Ray Wilhite. 2017. Moabosaurus utahensis, n. gen., n. sp., a new sauropod from the Early Cretaceous (Aptian) of North America. Contributions from the Museum of Paleontology, University of Michigan 32(11):189-243.
• Wedel, Mathew J., and Michael P. Taylor. 2023. The biomechanical significance of bifurcated cervical ribs in apatosaurine sauropods. VAMP (Vertebrate Anatomy Morphology Palaeontology) 11:91-100. doi:10.18435/vamp29394