Opportunism, helpfulness, disappointment, persistence: the genesis of the Brachiosaurus rib paper
Just a quick post about the genesis of the Brachiosaurus rib paper (Taylor and Wedel 2023) that I wrote about at the very end of last year. Although this is in some respects a minor paper, I’m fond of it because it fell into place so quickly and easily.
Taylor and Wedel 2023:Figure. 3. Sauropod dinosaur Brachiosaurus altithorax Riggs, 1903, holotype FMNH PR 25107 from Dinosaur Quarry No. 13 near Grand Junction, Colorado, dating to the Kimmeridgian–Tithonian ages of the Late Jurassic, left dorsal rib “Rib B”. A1, the whole rib, posterior face in proximal view. Foreshortening makes the shaft look shorter and narrower than it actually is: the position of the rib between two shelves makes it impossible to photograph in true posterior view; A2, close-up of the pneumatic opening in the tuberculum in medial view, with anterior to the bottom; A3, red-cyan anaglyph of the same, indicating the form and depth of the fossa. Scale bars provide only a rough indication of the size of the elements: see the text for measurements.
The background: from 14–22 August last year I was in Chicago with my day-job. The work events finished on the 21st and it happened that the best-value flight back home from O’Hare wasn’t until nearly 7pm. So I had the best part of a day free in Chicago.
When I’d been in California with Matt on the previous week, we’d seen something in the LACM public gallery[1] that I wanted to follow up. I only realised quite late in the day that my late flight gave me an opportunity to look at material in Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. So it wasn’t until 19 August that I dropped a line to Bill Simpson, the Field Museum’s fossil-reptile collection manager, asking if I could visit in three days. (Actually it’s even worse than that: I got my dates wrong and asked if I could visit in four days, then had to go back and change it!)
Well, Bill was super-helpful, just as he had been when Matt and I visited way back in 2005. He arranged to let me into the collection at 8:30am and then leave me free to look through the material, armed with a spreadsheet of what’s where. I really can’t emphasize enough how consistently helpful I’ve found pretty much all museum staff when I’ve visited anywhere — contra the unfair stereotype of curators being obstructive or difficult — but the Field Museum has gone above and beyond for me on both my visits.
Unfortunately, the mystery purpose of my visit[1] was a bust: I was disappointed to find that the thing I was looking for wasn’t there. But the day wasn’t a bust. When I’d told Matt I’d been able to arrange the visit, he’d written to me:
I know you’ll be moving quickly but I have a request […] AFAIK the only rib of BOBA that’s ever been figured by anyone, and the only photo of that rib, is the one included by Riggs that shows the proximal 1/4 or so with a pneumatic foramen on the shaft. Any photos of that rib or any others would be super helpful, especially if they show pneumatic features. […] If you could get photos without scale bars in the way, and if possible measurements of foramen dimensions, that would be fantastic, and probably worth a short note somewhere, since the foramen on the shaft of Riggs’s rib is the only costal pneumaticity ever documented in Brachiosaurus.
(The photo that Matt attached to that email was one that we took in 2005 of what we’re now calling “Rib B” — not Rib A, the one that Riggs had illustrated. Here it is.)
Brachiosaurus altithorax holotype FMNH P 25107, proximal portion of ?left rib “Rib B” in ?posterior view, with dorsal to the top right. Photo taken in 2005, when we were young and stupid.
I wrote back to Matt:
We hardly need to write a short note on BOBA’s costal pneumaticity since we already mention it in [an in-progress manuscript]. We just need to substitute in a better image and some measurements.
Idiotially, I needed Matt to persuade me that this was something worth looking into. It’s worth quoting his message at length, since it contains all the seeds of what eventually became this paper:
Sorry, didn’t explain myself well re: BOBA costal pneumaticity. In Giraffatitan, the only (documented) pneumatic features in the dorsal ribs are foramina that open into the tuberculum — on both sides! See attached cap from Janensch [which turns up in our new paper’s Figure 5B]. And in fact that is one of the most common places for costal pneumaticity to manifest in sauropods, the other being on the web of bone that connects the tuberculum to the capitulum (as in Brontomerus [reproduced in the new paper’s Figure 5E]).
BOBA has been an anomaly in only having pneumaticity documented a decent distance down the shaft; I’ve found other sauropods that have lines of fossae or foramina that extend down about that far (Supersaurus and Paluxysaurus if you’re curious), but no others that have a long, bare shaft and then BOOM a totally isolated pneumatic foramen. I don’t doubt that foramen is real, but right now it’s the only form of costal pneumaticity in BOBA that anyone other than you and me knows about (or, if others have noticed the proximal pneumatic features, they haven’t said anything in public). Documenting more proximal pneumatic features will be valuable, both for showing that BOBA does have those features in common with other brachiosaurids and other sauropods more generally, and for showing that a single individual can have a diversity of pneumatic features at different distances down the rib. Not terribly surprising for us, but probably more so for people who are less well-acquainted with rampaging diverticula on the loose.
Well, obviously Matt was right, and I spent the bulk of my Field Museum visit with those ribs. The new paper in Acta Pal. Pol. is the result. It’s Taylor and Wedel rather than Wedel and Taylor because I was the one who visited the fossils, photographed and measured them, wrote the text and prepared the illustrations. But in a deeper sense, it’s Matt’s paper — it would never have happened at all without his insight and insistence.
Once I was convinced, it didn’t take long to get the paper written up and illustrated: it was submitted on 1 September, eight days after I got home from America. It had an unusually positive path through peer-review, thanks to positive and constructive reviews from Jerry Harris, Virginia Zurriaguz and Pat O’Connor. And it went pretty quickly through production, as the people at Acta Pal. Pol. wanted the issue containing it to come out in 2023. The result is that it took four months and a week from seeing the specimen to publication of the paper.
So that’s how we ended up with this new paper: my opportunism in sneaking a collections visit while I had a few spare hours in Chicago; Bill Simpson’s helpfulness in making that happen at very short notice; my disappointment in not finding what I’d been looking for in the collections[1]; and Matt’s persistence in pushing me to properly look at the pneumaticty in the BOBA ribs.
References
Notes
[1] I’m keeping the powder dry on this for now, but we’ll probably talk about it soon.
Source: https://svpow.com/2024/01/12/opportunism-helpfulness-disappointment-persistence-the-genesis-of-the-brachiosaurus-rib-paper/
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