New paper: Dolly, the dinosaur with a sauro-throat

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.

Pathologic pneumatic tissue in MOR 7029. (A) Schematic map of the neck of Diplodocus (Hatcher 1901; bones not present in grey), with the pathologic structures denoted in red. (B) Cervical 5 of MOR 7029 with red box highlighting the pathologic structure; close up in (C) with interpretative drawing in (D) (by DCW) (pathology in red). Woodruff et al. (2022: fig. 1).

I was stoked, because I’ve been working on air-filled bones in sauropods since 1998, and in that time I’ve gotten countless versions of this question: “Do you ever see any evidence of respiratory infections in those air spaces?” For 20 years, the answer had been ‘no’, but now Cary was showing me a likely ‘yes’.

Better still, Cary asked me if I wanted to collaborate on writing up the case. He could have done it on his own, but right out of the gate he wanted to assemble a collaborative team. He also got paleopathologist and veterinarian Ewan Wolff, veterinary radiologist Sophie Dennison, and anatomist and paleontologist Larry Witmer. It was my first time collaborating with all of those folks, and it was really cool firing around ideas, observations, and references. Cary coined the clever title “Sauro-Throat” when we presented our preliminary results at SVP (Woodruff et al. 2020), and you’ll probably see it a lot in conjunction with this paper.

The elaborate and circuitous pulmonary complex of the sauropod, with the hypothetical route of infectious pathway in MOR 7029. Skeletal reconstruction of the diplodocine Galeamopus pabsti by and copyright of Francisco Bruñén Alfaro to scale with MOR 7029. Human scale bar is the exemplar of pandemic education and rationalism, Dr. Anthony Fauci, at his natural height of 170 cm. Woodruff et al. (2022: fig. 3).

A little over three years after our meet-up in Albuquerque, one global pandemic notwithstanding, our results are out this morning in Scientific Reports (Woodruff et al. 2022). Normally I’d write a mini-dissertation about our findings, but I decided to do a little video explainer instead. That’s the video linked up top — many thanks to Fiona Taylor (music), Brian Engh (paleoart), and Jennifer Adams (filming and editing) for the timely help in getting it done.

I’ll have more to say about this in the future. For now, the paper is a free download at this link. Go have fun!

References

Woodruff, D. Cary, Wolff, Ewan D.S., Wedel, Mathew J., Dennison, Sophie, and Witmer, Lawrence M. 2022. The first occurrence of an avian-style respiratory infection in a non-avian dinosaur. Scientific Reports 12, 1954. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-05761-3

Woodruff, D. Cary, Wolff, Ewan D.S., Wedel, Mathew J., and Witmer, Lawrence M. 2020. Sauro-Throat: the first occurrence of a respiratory infection in a non-avian dinosaur. Society of Vertebrate Paleontology 80th Annual Meeting, Abstracts, p. 298.