Analysing the distribution of complete sauropod necks

Matt dropped me a line midweek about the catalogue of complete sauropod necks, with some interesting thoughts. He broke down the necks as listed across a basic phylogeny of sauropods, and counted the occurrences:

Matt and I were both surprised to see that non-neosauropods are quite well represented, both inside and outside of Mamenchisauridae — although it’s a pity that two of those ten specimens are of Jobaria, for which we have next to zero information.

Diplodocoids are surprisingly poorly represented, with essentially just one each in Dicraeosauridae and Diplodocidae that are complete. And brachiosaurids are a black hole, with absolutely no representation — see the 2015 preprint for details on how unconvincing the neck of Giraffatitan is.

But camarasaurids are crushing it, probably just by being the most abundant sauropods of all time in terms of individual specimens in museums. (Of course when we say “camarasaurids”, we just mean Camarasaurus, which is the only named sauropod currently considered to belong to Camarasauridae unless you follow Mateus and Tschopp (2013) in considering Cathetosaurus to be generically distinct. But Matt and I both suspect that Camarasaurus is way over-lumped, so we’ll see how this pans out over the next decade or two.)

It’s surprising, though, that the second and third best represented sauropods in museums, Diplodocus and Apatosaurus, are both barely represented in terms of complete necks. And while it’s encouraging to see quite a few complete and nearly-complete necks among somphospondyls, including titanosaurs,it’s disappointing that about half of them are not yet described.

References

• Mateus, Olivier, and Emanuel Tschopp. 2013. Cathetosaurus as a valid sauropod genus and comparisons with Camarasaurus. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, Program and Abstracts, 2013:173.
• Taylor, Michael P. 2015. Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1767. doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.1418v1