A six-year quest is finally complete! Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted

Today finally sees the publication of a paper (Taylor 2022) that’s been longer in gestation than most (although, yes, all right, not as long as the Archbishop). I guess the first seeds were sown almost a full decade ago when I posted How long was the neck of Diplodocus? in May 2011, but it was submitted as a preprint in 2015. Since then it’s taken far longer than it should have done to get it across the line, and it is primarily with a feeling of relief that I see the paper now published.

In this quarry map for the Carnegie Diplodocus, does it seem to you that the vertebrae of the neck (in purple) are drawn unconvincingly, compared with the fairly detailed drawings of the dorsals? Does that suggest that maybe Reed — who drew this diagram years after the excavation was complete — didn’t really remember how the neck was laid out? How well does the textual description of the skeleton in situ match this map? These are the kinds of questions I was asking myself as I started thinking about what has become the paper published today.

In some ways it’s a really simple paper, pretty much summarised by its title: almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted. It started out as a formalised version of three posts on this blog (How long was the neck of Diplodocus?, Measuring the elongation of vertebrae and The Field Museum’s photo-archives tumblr, featuring: airbrushing dorsals), but somewhere along the line the tale grew in the telling and it’s ended up as 35 pages of goodness. In the process of review it acquired a lot of new material, including: a discussion of how to locate the cevicodorsal junction (summary: it’s complicated); a couple of ways to numerically quantify the degree of distortion along a neck; and a brief discussion of retrodeformation (summary: it’s complicated).

I hope this paper will be of use, especially to people coming into the field with the same unrealistic assumptions I had back in the early 2000s. Back then, I had in mind a project to determine the thickness of intervertebral cartilage in the neck of Diplodocus by measuring the radii of curvature of the condyles and cotyles of successive vertebrae — an idea that distortion makes unrealistic. I took the DinoMorph work at face value — something that seems incredible to me knowing what know now. The paper that came out today is basically the one I wish I’d been able to read in 2000 (but updated!)

By the way, when I was fine-tooth-combing the proof PDF a few days ago, I was delighted to be reminded that I got the phrase “rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty” into the paper — a reference of course, to the words of the philosopher Vroomfondel in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’ll file this alongside the Monty Python reference in my history-of-sauropod-research book chapter and the Star Wars paraphrase that opens a computer-science paper I lead-authored in 2005.

References

• Taylor, Michael P. 2022. Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted. PeerJ 10:e12810. doi:10.7717/peerj.12810