You’d think that in 100+ posts we’d be starting to exhaust the territory, but there are vast swaths of sauropod vertebral morphology that we haven’t even touched. Like fused vertebrae. Sauropods fused their vertebrae all the time. Some of those fusions are age-related, many are pathological, and some are…hard to classify.
So, 2008 has come and gone. Was it a good year for sauropods? In terms of new taxa, it wasn’t amazing, but it wasn’t too bad, and (as we’ll see in this and a few following posts) some of the taxa involved had pretty interesting vertebrae.
In the last post I introduced Aerosteon , which has been touted as providing the first solid evidence for bird-like air sacs in non-avian dinosaurs, and I explained a little about how we know what we think we know about dinosaur air sacs.
Pneumatic dorsal vertebrae of Aerosteon (Sereno et al. 2008:fig 7) Big news this week: Sereno et al. (2008) described a new theropod, aptly named Aerosteon (literally, “air bone”), with pneumaticity out the wazoo: all through the vertebral column, even into the distal tail; in the cervical and dorsal ribs; in the gastralia; in the furcula; and in the ilium. This is huge news, and it’s free to the world at PLoS ONE.
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It’s very rare that all three of us SV-POW!ers get together: in fact, until Tuesday this week, it had only ever happened once, at SVPCA 2005. But as Matt was spending nearly a fortnight with me (Mike) in England, far from his native land — an unholy blend of Oklahoma and California — it would have been stupid not to have all got together.
One of our great palaeontological heroes (well, one of mine anyway) is Charles Whitney Gilmore (1874-1945), former curator of the Division of Vertebrate Paleontology at the United States National Museum (USNM), successful monographer of stegosaurs, ornithopods and theropods, and prolific describer of ceratopsians, crocodilians, ichthyosaurs… and sauropods.
Just to break the stranglehold that titanosauriforms clearly have on SV-POW! (kidding), every now and again we need a diplodocoid or mamenchisaurid.
Long-time SV-POW! readers will have detected a brachiosaurid bias in our writings, and this is for a good reason: it is because brachiosaurids are best. They just are.
Those of you who have been paying attention to my recent posts will have pretty much known this was coming.