My most depressing paper
I have a new preprint up at PeerJ (Taylor 2015), and have also submitted it simultaneously for peer review. In a sense, it’s not a paper I am happy about, as its title explains: “Almost all known sauropod necks are?incomplete and distorted“.
Taylor 2015: Figure 10. Manipulation of consecutive sauropod vertebrae by hand. Cervicals 2 and 3 of Giraffatitan brancai lectotype MB.R.2181 (formerly HMN SI). I attempted to articulate these two vertebrae, and empirically determine the feasible range of motion. Due to subtle distortion of the zygapophyses of these vertebrae, it was not possible to articulate C2 in a more extended position relative to C3 than shown here. Photograph by Mathew J. Wedel.
This paper has been a?while coming, and much of the content will be familiar to long-time readers, as?quite a bit of it is?derived from three SV-POW! posts:?How long was the neck of Diplodocus? (2011),?Measuring the elongation of vertebrae (2013) and?The Field Museum?s photo-archives tumblr, featuring: airbrushing dorsals (2014). It also uses the first half?of my 2011 SVPCA talk, Sauropod necks: how much do we really know??(and the second half became the seed that grew into?our 2013 neck-cartilage paper.)
So in one sense, publishing this is a bit of a mopping up exercise. But it’s also more than that, because I think it’s important to get all these observations (and the relevant literature review) down all in one place, to help us recognise just how serious the problem is.?There are, to a first approximation, no complete sauropod necks in the published literature. ?And the vertebrae of the necks we do have are crushed to the point where trying to articulate them is close to meaningless.
Taylor 2015: Figure 8. Cervical vertebrae 4 (left) and 6 (right) of Giraffatitan brancai lectotype MB.R.2180 (formerly HMN SI), in posterior view. Note the dramatically different aspect ratios of their cotyles, indicating that extensive and unpredictable crushing has taken place. Photographs by the author.
I’m not happy about this. But I think it’s important to face the reality and be honest with ourselves about how much we can really know about sauropod necks. There’s a lot we can do in a?qualitative way, but most quantitative results are going to be swamped in supposition and error.
