Trust me, you want to click for the full effect.

This post is just an excuse for me to show off Brian Engh’s entry for the All Yesterdays contest (book here, contest–now closed–here). The title is a reference to this post, by virtue of which I fancy myself at least a spear-carrier in what I will grandly refer to as the All Yesterdays Movement.

Oddly enough, I don’t have a ton to say about this; I think Brian has already explained the thinking behind the piece sufficiently on his own blog. In the brave new world of integumentarily enhanced ornithodirans, these diamantinasaurs are certainly interesting but not particularly outlandish (Brian’s already done outlandish). And it’s pretty darned hard to argue that sauropods never went into caves, although I can’t off the top of my head think of any previous spelunking sauropods (I’m not counting Baylene in Disney’s Dinosaur; feel free to refresh my memory of others in the comments). The glowworms are not proven, but biogeographically and stratigraphically plausible, which is probably as good as we’re going to get given the fossilization potential of bioluminescence.

I’m much more excited about this as a piece of art. I got to see a lot of the in-progress sketches and they were wonderful, with some very tight, detailed pencil-work. The danger in investing that kind of effort is that then you’re tempted to show it off, and if I had any worry about the finished piece, it was that it would be over-lit to show off all the details. But it isn’t. I can tell you from seeing the pencil sketches that the detail went all the way down, but Brian was brave enough to let some of that go, especially on the animals’ legs, to get the lighting effect right. My favorite touches are the reflections in the water, and the fallen pillar in the foreground–toppled by a previous visitor, perhaps–with new mineral deposits already forming on it.

All in all, it takes me back to the best paleoart from my childhood, which made me think, “Wow, these were not monsters or aliens, they were real animals, as real, and as mundane in their own worlds, as deer and coyotes and jackrabbits.” * **

And that’s pretty cool. What do you think?

———-

* Okay, maybe not  in those exact words. I am translating a feeling I had when I was nine through 28 years of subsequent experience and vocabulary expansion.

** My major discovery in the last two decades is that deer and coyotes and jackrabbits are just as exotic as dinosaurs, if only you learn to really see them. And before Mike jumps me for saying that, I said ‘just as exotic’, not ‘just as awesome‘.

UPDATE the next day

If you thought the glowworms were unrealistic–and at least one commenter did–check these out (borrowed from here, pointed out by Brian):

That’s game, set, and match on the glowworm issue.

The cervical series of Giraffa camelopardalis angolensis FMNH 34426, articulated by Mike and me and photographed by Mike back in the summer of 2005, cropped and composited by me recently, not previously posted because there’s just too much cool stuff, man. But we’re working on it.

By the way, if you want the details on this critter:

Generally when we present specimen photos in papers, we cut out the backgrounds so that only the bone is visible — as in this photo of dorsal vertebrae A and B of NHM R5937 “The Archbishop”, an as-yet indeterminate Tendaguru brachiosaur, in right lateral view:

But for some bones that can be rather misleading: they may be mounted in such a way that part of the bone is obscured by structure. For example — and this is a very minor case — the ventral margins of the centra in the photo above are probably slightly deeper than they appear, because the centra are slightly sunk within the plinth that holds the vertebrae upright.

So I’ve been toying with a different idea: instead of cutting the background out completely, leaving it in place but toning it down. Then the supporting structure is visible, but clearly distinct from the actual bone. (For a more extreme case, see the “Apatosaurus” minimus sacrum.)

Here’s how the image above looks if I desaturate the background:

I’m not sure what to make of this. It looks a bit strange to me, but that might only be the strangeness of unfamiliarity.

And it might not work so well (or indeed it might work better) for photos taken against a busier background.

What do you think?

From The Dinosaur Heresies.

Part 1.

I was at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in March to look at their Apatosaurus material, so I got to see the newly-mounted baby apatosaur in the “Clash of the Titans” exhibit (more photos of that exhibit in this post). How much of this is real (i.e., cast from real bones, rather than sculpted)? Most of the vertebral centra, a few of the neural arches, some of the limb girdle bones, and most of the long bones of the limbs. All of the missing elements–skull, neural arches, ribs, appendicular bits–were sculpted by the OMNH head preparator, Kyle Davies. Kyle is one of those frighteningly talented people who, if they don’t have what they need, will just freaking build it from scratch. Over the years he has helped me out a LOT with the OMNH sauropod material–including building a clamshell storage jacket for the referred scapula of Brontomerus so we could photograph it from the lateral side–so it’s about time I gave him some props.

Case in point: this sweet atlas-axis complex that Kyle sculpted for the juvenile Apatosaurus mount.

Most fish, amphibians, and other non-amniote tetrapods only have a single specialized vertebra for attaching to the skull. But amniotes have two: a ring- or doughnut-shaped first cervical vertebra (the atlas) that articulates with the occipital condyle(s) of the skull, and a second cervical vertebra (the axis) that articulates with the atlas and sometimes with the skull as well. Mammals have paired occipital condyles on the backs or bottoms of our skulls, so our skulls rock up and down on the atlas (nodding “yes” motion), and our skull+atlas rotates around a peg of bone on the axis called the odontoid process or dens epistrophei (shaking head “no” motion). As shown in the photos and diagrams below, the dens of the axis is actually part of the atlas that fuses to the second vertebra instead of the first. Also, reptiles, including dinosaurs and birds, tend to have a single ball-shaped occipital condyle that fits into the round socket formed by the atlas, so their “yes” and “no” motions are less segregated by location.

Anyway, the whole shebang is often referred to as the atlas-axis complex, and that’s the reconstructed setup for a baby Apatosaurus in the photo above.  In addition to making a dull-colored one for the mount, Kyle made this festive version for the vert paleo teaching collection. Why so polychromatic?

Because in fact he built two: the fully assembled one two photos above, and a completely disassembled one, some of which is shown in this photo (I had to move the bigger bits out of the tray so they wouldn’t block the key card at the back). I originally composed this post as a tutorial. But frankly, since Kyle did all of the heavy lifting of (a) making the thing in the first place, (2) making a color-coded key to it, and (d) giving me permission to post these photos, it would be redundant to walk through every element. So think of this as a self-study rather than a tutorial.

Oh, all right, here’s a labeled version. Note that normally in an adult animal the single piece of bone called the atlas would consist of the paired atlas neural arches (na1) and single atlas intercentrum (ic1), and would probably have a pair of fused cervical ribs (r1). Everything else would be fused together to form the axis, including the atlas pleurocentrum (c1), which forms the odontoid process or dens epistrophei (etymologically the “tooth” of the axis).

Here’s the complete Romer (1956) figure from the key card, with a mammalian atlas-axis complex  for comparison. Incidentally, the entire book this is drawn from, Osteology of the Reptiles, is freely available online.

And here’s the complete Gilmore (1936) figure. Sorry for the craptastic scan–amazingly, this one is NOT freely available online as far as I can tell, and Mike and I have been trying to get good scans of the plates for years. Getting back on topic, single-headed atlantal cervical ribs have been found in several sauropods, especially Camarasaurus where several examples are known, so they were probably a regular feature, even though they aren’t always preserved.

Also, as noted in this post, it is odd that in this specimen of Apatosaurus the cervical ribs had not fused to the first two vertebrae, even though they normally do, and despite the fact that the vertebrae had fused to each other, even though they normally don’t. Further demonstration, if any were needed, that sauropod skeletal fusions were wacky.

For comparison to the above images, here is the atlas-axis complex in the synapsid Varanops, from Campione and Reisz (2011: fig. 2C).

Those proatlas thingies are present in some sauropods, but that’s about all I know about them, so I’ll say no more for now.

There is a good overview of the atlas-axis complex with lots of photos of vertebrae of extant animals on this page.

Previous SV-POW! posts dealing with atlantes and axes (that’s right) include:

• A fused atlas and axis in Apatosaurus
• Yet more uninformed noodling on the future of scientific publishing and that kind of thing
• Another mystery: embossed laminae and “unfossae”
• Tutorial 15: the bones of the sauropod skeleton

References

• Campione, N.E. and Reisz, R.R. 2011. Morphology and evolutionary significance of the atlas−axis complex in varanopid synapsids. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 56 (4): 739–748.
• Gilmore, C.W. 1936. Osteology of Apatosaurus with special reference to specimens in the Carnegie Museum. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 11: 175-300.
• Romer, A.S. 1956. Osteology of the Reptiles. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 772 pp.

We’ve blogged a lot of Bob Nicholls‘ art (here, here, and here) and we’ll probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future. We don’t have much choice: he keeps drawing awesome things and giving us permission to post them. Like this defiantly shaggy Apatosaurus, which was probably the star of the Morrison version of Duck Dynasty. Writes Bob:

On my way home at the airport I did a sketch of your giant Apatosaurus* – see attachment.  My thought was that massive thick necks were probably pretty sexy things to apatosaurs, so maybe sexually mature individuals used simple feathers (stage 1, 2 or 3?) to accentuate the neck profile.  The biggest males would of course have the most impressive growths so in the attached sketch your giant has one of the biggest beards in Earth’s history!  What do you think of this idea?

Well, I think it’s awesome. And entirely plausible, for reasons already explained in this post.

“Now, wait,” you may be thinking, “I thought you guys said that sauropod necks weren’t sexually selected.” Actually we made a slightly different point: that the available evidence does not suggest that sexual selection was the primary driver of sauropod neck elongation. But we also acknowledged that biological structures are almost never single-purpose, and although the long necks of sauropods probably evolved to help them gather more food, there is no reason that long necks couldn’t have been co-opted as social billboards. This seems especially likely in Apatosaurus, where the neck length is unremarkable** but the neck fatness is frankly bizarre (and even inspired a Star Wars starfighter!).

I also love the “mobile ecosystem” of birds, other small dinosaurs, and insects riding on this Apatosaurus or following in its train. It’s a useful reminder that we have no real idea what effect millions of sauropods would have on the landscape. But it’s not hard to imagine that most Mesozoic terrestrial ecosystems were sauropod-driven in a thousand cascading and ramifying chains of cause and effect. I’d love to know how that worked. At heart, I’m still a wannabe chrononaut, and all my noodlings on pneumaticity and sauropod nerves and neural spines and so on are just baby steps toward trying to understand sauropod lives. Safari by way of pedantry: tally-ho!

For other speculative apatosaurs, see:

• An Apatosaurus worthy of All Yesterdays
• Get down, get fuzzy, speculative juvenile Apatosaurus!

* “My” giant is the big Oklahoma Apatosaurus, which I gave a talk on at SVPCA a couple of weeks ago. See these posts for more details (1, 2, 3).

** Assuming we can be blasé about a neck that is more than twice as long (5 m) as a world-record giraffe neck (2.4 m), for garden variety Apatosaurus, or three times that length for the giant Oklahoma Apatosaurus (maybe 7 m).

Janensch’s (1950) paper on the vertebral column of Giraffatitan (which he called Brachiosaurus brancai, wrongly as it turns out) is in many ways a superb piece of work. Together with a separate paper on the skull of Giraffatitan and other Tendaguru sauropods (Janensch 1935-6), and yet another on their limbs and girdles (Janensch 1961), it makes up one of the most comprehensive descriptions ever published of any sauropod.

But limitations of the era meant that he wasn’t able to illustrate the vertebrae to the level that we’d hope to see today — certainly nothing like the glorious job Tschopp and Matteus (2012) did on Kaatedocus. As a result, all you get is smallish black-and-white drawings like this one, of C5 of MB.R.2180 (previously known as S I):

And, perpetuating what’s rapidly becoming a bugbear of  mine, there are no dorsal-view illustrations at all.

As it happens, Matt and I need a dorsal-view brachiosaur vertebra for a paper we’re working on. So I finally got my GIMP on and prepared a nice, high-resolution multiview illustration from the photos that Matt and I took back in 2008. Here it is:

As always, click through for the full-size version, which is 3781 by 2008.

We have here the same vertebra as above: MB.R.2180:C5. On the top row, the long-awaited dorsal view, with anterior to the left; on the bottom row (from left to right): anterior, left lateral and posterior views.

You’ll notice that I’ve illustrated the left side rather than the right that Janensch used. We have photos from both sides, but none of the right-side images came out as cleanly as this one. The anterior and posterior views are pleasantly familiar from Janensch’s figures — although my posterior one is evidently from a slightly more elevated aspect, hence the obscured upper parts of the transverse processes. I also note that Janensch rather sneakily restored the broken parts on both sides of the neurapophysis, and threw in some more prominent spinopostzygapophyseal lamine than the fossil really justifies.

Let’s look more closely at that crucial dorsal view:

It’s now apparent just how narrow brachiosaur cervicals are — at least, those as anterior as C5. You can also see how neatly the spinoprezygapophyseal and spinopostzygapophyseal laminae converge in an “X” shape to form the neurapophysis; and how the prezygapophyseal rami are drawn out almost to a point, with relatively small facets.

References

• Janensch, W. (1935-36). Die Schadel der Sauropoden Brachiosaurus, Barosaurus und Dicraeosaurus aus den Tendaguru-Schichten Deutsch-Ostafrikas. Palaeontographica (Suppl. 7) 2:147-298.
• Janensch, Werner. 1950. Die Wirbelsaule von Brachiosaurus brancai. Palaeontographica (Suppl. 7) 3:27-93.
• Janensch, Werner. 1961. Die Gliedmaszen und Gliedmaszengurtel der Sauropoden der Tendaguru-Schichten. Palaeontographica (Suppl. 7) 3:177-235.
• Tschopp, Emanuel, and Octávio Mateus. 2012. The skull and neck of a new flagellicaudatan sauropod from the Morrison Formation and its implication for the evolution and ontogeny of diplodocid dinosaurs. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology. doi:10.1080/14772019.2012.746589

I thought I’d done a decent job of illustrating MB.R.2180:C5 last time, but Wedel was not satisfied, demanding ventral and right-lateral views as well as the provided right lateral, anterior, posterior and dorsal.

All right then: here you go!

Here once more, for comparison, is Janensch’s (1950) illustration of the same vertebra:

As you’ll see, I changed the composition of my version, now that I have a right lateral view, to more closely match the composite of Janensch’s figures. The third row of mine is now exactly the same composition as I used for his illustrations, so it’s easier to compare the two.

Because “here’s that Brian Engh sketch of a sauropod literally stomping the guts out of a theropod you ordered” was a bit ungainly for a post title.

Here we have Futalognkosaurus sporting some speculative soft tissues, smooshing some very non-speculative soft tissues out of SeriouslywhogivesacrapwhatitisImjustgladitsdyingvenator. If you just look at the theropod’s face and not the…other stuff, you can imagine that maybe it is laughing. “Oh, ha-ha, you found my tickle spot! Hahaha, stop it! HAHAHA TOO MUCH AAIIIIEEEE–” Schploorrchtbp!!

Futalognkosaurus is clearly saying, “…and I thought they smelled bad on the outside.”

Brian drew this just because we’ve been living up to our mandate lately and posting pictures of sauropod vertebrae. So clearly we gotta do more of that.

For more posts with Brian’s art, go here.

Mark Witton, pterosaur-wrangler, Cthulhu-conjurer, globe-trotting paleo playboy and all-around scientific badass, drew this (and blogged about it):

I liked it, but I thought it could use some color, so I hacked a crude version in GIMP and sent it to Mark with a, “Hey, please put this on a t-shirt so I can throw money at you” plea. Lo and behold, he did just that.

You can get your own from Mark’s Zazzle store. And apparently he will have more sauropod-themed merch coming soon.

This beauty is by Bryan Riolo, aka Algoroth on DeviantART, who also let me use his giant space Cthulhu for my Collect Call of Cthulhu over on Echo Station 5-7. Update: and here, belatedly, is a link to the piece on DA, with Bryan’s thoughts on it.

I love the sense of scale here, with paralititans striding through the surf, the chiaroscuro, and the sheer amount of stuff going on. It reminds me of William Stout’s murals, and lots of atmospheric classic paintings. Sure, there’s a theropod getting his guts rearranged, which I’m always up for, but that’s literally just a sidelight (or sidedark?) in this epic image. In short, I’m diggin’ the art in this paleoart.

For more sauropods stomping theropods, see:

• Genesis of an instant paleo-art classic
• Sauropods stomping theropods: a much neglected theme in palaeo-art
• Sauropods stomping theropods redux
• Brian Engh: Stomp time!

And if your definition of ‘stomping’ encompasses pooping on, vomiting at, and blowing away with sheer awesomeness, you may also enjoy:

• The most awesome piece of art EVER
• Greatest. Palaeoart. Ever.
• Vomiting dinosaurs of SVPCA 2013

For a palaeontology blog, we don’t talk a lot about geology. Time to fix that, courtesy of my middle son Matthew, currently 13 years old, who made this helpful guide to the rock cycle as Geology homework.

I just found out — thanks to a tweet from abertonykus — that this exists:

That’s me on top of the Giraffatitan, Matt to the right, and Darren swinging from its wattle.

It’s the work of classicalguy on Deviant Art. He provides a poem and some brief commentary along with the original. There also one for the Tetrapod Zoology podcats, and one for Tom Holtz.

It’s a strange time of year for me. Teaching and SVP are both behind me, my tenure dossier is in (I’ll find out how that goes next April, probably), and for the first time in a while, I’m not shepherding any pressing manuscripts through the valley of potential rejection. Urgency has dissipated. Flights of fancy are very in right now.

Take this post. I was supposed to be writing about intervertebral cartilage thickness in sauropods, but I got distracted and drew this instead. I am going through one of my periodic bouts of fascination with dodos, inspired by the awesome poster by Biedlingmaier et al. at SVP. So here’s an attempt. It’s based on this photo from Arkive:

with some details filled in from this plate from Strickland and Melville (1848):

and, to be honest, a very generous helping of artistic license. I don’t know from bird skulls so I may have the basioccipital wired to the nasals or some other godawful assault on sanity. I did it for fun, not for science.

If you want dodo science, I have mixed great news. Crappily–and futilely–enough, Owen’s descriptive papers on the dodo are paywalled at Transactions of the Zoological Society of London. (Seriously, guys? After 140 years you still haven’t made your nut off those papers?) BUT you can get them for free from a couple of other places–see Sarah Werning’s comment below. And happily Strickland and Melville (1848) is available for free from the Internet Archive, and in a host of formats. I am sorely tempted to have a hardcopy printed through Lulu. For more on the dodo side of the Aves 3D project underway at the Claessens lab, of which the Biedlingmaier et al. poster is early fruit, check out the news stories here, here, and here, and keep your fingers firmly crossed for the coming year. I can say no more for now.

If, like me, you are just a dodo fanperson, these videos with Adam Savage make interesting viewing: original, sequel.

Röck döts inspired by a few hours of stippling, and copied and pasted, appropriately, from False Machine.

References

• Biedlingmaier, A., Leavitt, J., Monfette, G., Allan, D.G., and Claessens, L.P.A.M. 2013. Digital surface scanning and analysis of a cave specimen of the dodo (Raphus cucullatus). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, Program and Abstracts 2013, p. 87.
• Strickland, H.E., and Melville, A.G. 1848. The Dodo and Its Kindred; or the History, Affinities, and Osteology of the Dodo, Solitaire, and Other Extinct Birds of the Islands Mauritius, Rodriguez, and Bourbon. London: Reeve, Benham and Reeve.

When we last left my better half, Dr. Vicki Wedel, she was helping to identify a Jane Doe who had been dead for 37 years by counting growth rings in the woman’s teeth. That case nicely illustrated Vicki’s overriding interest: to advance forensic anthropology by developing new methods and refining existing ones. To that end, for the past few years she has been working with her PhD advisor, Dr. Alison Galloway at UC Santa Cruz, to revise and update Alison’s 1999 book, Broken Bones: Anthropological Analysis of Blunt Force Trauma. The revised and much expanded (504 pages vs 371) second edition, co-edited by Vicki and Alison, came out Monday (Amazon, Amazon.co.uk).

You can read the whole table of contents on Amazon (click to look INSIDE!), but the short short version is that the book has three major sections. The first covers the science and practice of trauma analysis (pp. 5-130), and the second classifies hundreds of common fractures throughout the skeleton, with illustrations (pp. 133-313). The chapters in these sections were all written by Vicki, Alison, and another of Alison’s former students, Dr. Lauren Zephro, solo and in varying combinations. Lauren, whom I always think of as “the Amazon cop”, is a 6-foot blackbelt forensic anthropologist for the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office. If push came to shove I have no doubt that she could beat me to death with her bare hands and then produce a technical analysis of my corpse.

The final section (pp. 314-410) consists of nine case studies contributed by forensic anthropologists, pathologists, medical examiners, forensic and medical artists, and a DoD casualty analyst, based across the Anglophone world from Hawaii to Scotland. There’s some grim stuff in there: trauma to the homeless and elderly, from intimate partner violence, and from child abuse. It’s gut-churningly awful that the defenseless suffer from bone-breaking violence; it’s always been amazing to me that people like Vicki, Alison, Lauren, and the other contributors have both the courage to face these horrors and the technical chops to make the unspeakable solvable.

Beyond that unavoidable darkness, if you’re interested in the many, varied, and often just plain weird ways in which people die, the book is a treasure trove. There’s an elderly woman lying on her deathbed for six years, slowly turning into a natural mummy… (wait for it) …while her daughter went on living in the same house. There’s a classification of plane crashes with a description of what human remains will be found and over what area. There are people hit by trains; the funniest line in this very serious book is the deadpan and unsurprising, “The typical pedestrian hit by a train is male and often highly intoxicated.”

That’s from the top of page 122. At the bottom of the same page is my one contribution to the book, which also appears as the cover art (yeah, nepotism, whatcha gonna do). There’s a story behind this. This guy–yes, male, dunno if he was intoxicated–was hit by a train and his head was sheared in half, with the somewhat fractured but mostly intact facial skeleton separated by a lot of missing bone from the occipital region. With no way to obtain the deceased guy’s permission to use his mortal remains in the book, Alison and Vicki didn’t feel comfortable including their photos, so I spent a weekend bashing out a technical drawing for them to use instead. That reawakened my interest in pen-and-ink work and led to the dödö pöst.

I should say two things right here: first, that yes, I am hijacking the rest of the post to talk about myself. (Is anyone really surprised? I thought not.) Second, that I have had no training and possibly my stippling violates Art Rules or best practice guidelines of which I am ignorant. But I hope it also illustrates what can be achieved in a couple of days, with about $15 worth of supplies, by a guy whose only rule is “möre döts”.

So anyway, if you’re curious, here’s the method I use for my pen-and-ink illustrations:

1. Get a decent-sized photo of the object to be drawn. I usually roll with $2 8x10s from MalWart, in this case one for each half of the skull.
2. Tape the photo down to your work surface. I have a large, incredibly hard, perfectly smooth cutting board that I use for this, but in a pinch you could use just about anything, including just a larger piece of paper. Cardboard off the backs of desk calendars is nice.
3. Over the photo, tape down a piece of tracing paper.
4. Lightly trace the outline of the photo and all the major details in pencil.
5. Once you’ve gone as far as you can with that, peel up one side of the tracing paper, unstick the photo from the work surface, and remove it. Stick the tracing paper back down the work surface.
6. Using the uncovered photo as a reference, pencil in any other salient details by eye. Also contour lines for shadows. All of the pencil lines are going to be erased later, so don’t be shy.
7. Whenever you decide you’re done with the pencil, get a good pen and start tracing, directly over the pencil lines. I tend not to be too persnicketty about my tools but decent pens are a real help here. For these recent works, I picked up a three-pack of beige-tubed Micron pens for $7 (this set).
8. In all of the following pen-related steps, be careful to keep your big stupid hand and arm off the wet ink you just laid down–one careless smear can ruin a few hours’ work. Having a work surface that you can rotate is nice, so your pen hand can approach the drawing from any angle. Anytime I have to lay my hand on the drawing, I put down a piece of clean scrap paper first. Even if the underlying ink is dry, it just feels like a smart precaution.
9. Once the lines are on, add döts to taste. With a little experimentation, you can get patterns of dots to not only indicate light and dark but also suggest textures. Different pen tips and amounts of pressure will yield dots of different sizes, which can also be useful. Dense, overlapping dots can produce an effect similar to scratchboard. BTW, sometimes I do “gear down” and place each dot with thought and care, but in the dense sections I just rat-a-tat-tat like a Lilliputian jackhammer. Try different speeds and see what you can tolerate.
10. When you’re done dötting, at least to a first approximation, and you’re dead certain the ink is all dry, get a decent eraser and erase all of the pencil lines. I used one of those clicky mechanical erasers because it was cheap and soft enough to not tear up the paper.
11. Re-ink any lines lightened by the erasing. I find that the döts are usually unaffected, but lines are often knocked down a bit by the eraser work. I suppose it would be cleaner to just draw natively in pen, with no prior pencilling and therefore no erasing, but the few times I’ve tried it, it hasn’t gone well. YMMV. If you’re drawing a 3D solid, this is a good time to employ an old illustrator’s trick, which is to make the bottom outline heavier and darker than the rest, to subtly convey a sense of weight.
12. Scan, touch up as needed in GIMP, post to blog, bask in self-admiration.

In this case I had a few more steps, which consisted of making variants of the drawing and test-driving them by Vicki and Alison so they could pick their favorites.

This is just embarrassing: after scanning the two drawings and doing a little touch-up, I just scooted them together until they looked like a skull. The problem is that the occiput is nowhere near anatomical position. See that flange of bone above the ear-hole, pointed down and right at a 45-degree angle? That’s the back end of the zygomatic arch, and it should be aimed at the forward stump of the arch, which is just down and back from the eye socket.

Here’s the B version, where I was working entirely off of the zygomatic arch ends, and trying to get the skull into anatomical position. Scientifically this is probably the best variant I produced (I’m not claiming it’s the best possible), but aesthetically it’s a little crowded.

I’ll spare you versions C-E, all of which just scooted the back end of the skull around in an attempt to find a balance between scientific and aesthetic concerns. Here’s the winning F version, which got used for the figure, and became the seed variant for the cover.

For the cover, we tried a lot of things, including the white skull on a black background, and one that was simply inverted from the figure. By this point the publisher had sent Vicki some test versions of the cover, and I thought it would be cool if the drawing was in the same color as the cover text, so I sampled that color from the publisher’s sample cover image and applied it to all of the drawn bits. They knocked it down a few tones for the printed version, so happily it’s not this garish.

Incidentally, I had never tried to replace a bunch of discontinuous areas of the same color with another color in GIMP, so I had to look it up. The two key steps are Select > By color, with the threshold set to zero (or not, if you want to grab a bunch of related colors at once), and “Fill whole selection” in the Bucket tool. Hat tip to this dude and his commenters.

One last step: I thought the bare, unfilled yellow version looked too flat, so I tried different levels of fill to make the skull pop out from the background. I didn’t use bucket fill here–too fiddly with so many dots and edges. Instead I created a new layer of solid yellow and dropped the opacity to 17%. Then went to the drawing layer and used the magic wand tool to select the whole non-skull background. Then popped back to the yellow layer and cleared that selection, leaving yellow fill only in the boundaries of the skull outline. I also tried 10% and 25% opacity for the fill layer, but 10% was too subtle and 25% was starting to swamp some of the detail in the drawing. Between goofing around with colors and opacity levels we went through 10 versions at this stage, of which the one above is the ultimate champion.

So, that’s how the cover art came to be. Back to the book. There’s a bibliography with 1237 references (Vicki knows), and an index. The book is hardbound, with a printed cover and no dustjacket, and IMHO reasonably priced at $65, currently a few bucks less on Amazon. You probably already know whether you want a copy. If so, do the right thing–it’s not too late to get it by Christmas.

References

Wedel, V.L., and Galloway, A. 2013. Broken Bones: Anthropological Analysis of Blunt Force Trauma, Second Edition. Charles C. Thomas, Springfield, 504 pp.

Wedel, V.L., G. Found, and G.L. Nusse. 2013. A 37 year-old cold case identification using novel and collaborative methods. Journal of Forensic Identification 63(1): 5-21.

In his post on Vicki’s new book Broken Bones, Matt told us his twelve-step process for producing stippled illustrations like this one of a crushed skull, which became the cover image of the book:

As soon as I saw that, I found myself thinking that it would look nice with some shading of the bone. Of course the existing stippling is a perfect guide to how dense the shading should be at each point, so I figured there had to be an easy way to do this automatically. There is, and this is what I whipped up in five minutes:

Here’s how I did it.

1. I loaded Matt’s image into the GIMP, my image editor of choice.
2. For some reason the crucial next step doesn’t work with greyscale images, so I converted it to RGB (Image → Mode → RGB)
3. I removed the white background, leaving it transparent (Colours → Colour to Alpha… and click OK on the default colour, white)
4. I added a new all-white background layer.
5. I duplicated the skull layer, and named it “shading”
6. I blurred the shading layer by 50 pixels (Filters → Blur → Gaussian Blur…, set the blur radius to 50 pixels and hit OK.) That gives you the shading you want, but it smudges out past the outline of the skull, hence the last two steps:
7. I went back to the skull layer, and using the Fuzzy Select Tool (magic wand) selected the contiguous transparent area outside the skull parts.
8. I went back to the shading layer and cut the selected area, leaving only that shading that’s inside the boundary of the skull.

As always with Gimp tutorials, it takes about ten times as long to explain as to actually do.

When I showed this to Matt, I rather immodestly said I was “super-happy with it”. Matt said he was “super-happy with the idea, but only regular happy with this specific execution”. He felt that the blurring was too strong, and that it should be backed off by 30-40%. So I made a new shading layer in the same way as above, but this time blurring by only 30 pixels. Here’s the resulting image:

It’s quite a subtle difference, but clear if you flip back and forth between the images (which you can most easily do by putting them in adjacent tabs of your browser). Personally, I think I prefer the 50-pixel version, since I think the shading clings rather too closely to the lines in this one, but YMMV.

Since I had both blur layers right there in the image, I thought it might be interesting to see how they look together. Here’s the result:

I’m actually rather fond of this version, but it’s a long way from the crisp, clinical feel of the original.

You can thicken up the shading by duplicating one or both of the shading layers as many times as you wish (or or course thin it out by sliding down the opacity level). Its also easy to make the shading coloured: just use Colours  → Levels, select the individual colour channels, and bring up their bottom levels to taste.

Putting all that together, here’s one I made with very dense, yellowish (bone-coloured) shading. I did it starting with the 50-pixel shading layer, upping the red output level to 200 and the green to 150, then duplicating that layer, and reducing the 30-pixel shading layer to 50% opacity.

You can play for hours with all these sliders, tweaking as you wish, thanks to the magic of layers. It’s well worth investing a bit of time to learn some of the capabilities of a program like GIMP. Matt and I are very far from wizards, but we have at least got a bit past just using it to cut out backgrounds, and it opens up possibilities.

“Look at all the things you’ve done for me
Opened up my eyes,
Taught me how to see,
Notice every tree.”

So sings Dot in Move On, the climactic number of Stephen Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize-winning music Sunday in the Park with George, which on the surface is about the post-impressionist painter Georges Seurat, but turns out to be a study of obsession and creativity.

Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte – 1884 [A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte – 1884]

In fact, the psychology of perception is complicated and sophisticated, and the brain does an extraordinary amount of filtering of the visual signals we get, to save us the bother of having to consciously process way too much data. This is a whole scientific field of its own, and I’m going to avoid saying very much about it for fear of making a fool of myself — as scientists so often do when wandering outside their own field. But I think it’s fair to say that we all have a tendency to see what we expect to see.

Phylogeny of Sauropoda, strict consensus of most parsimonious trees according to Wilson (2002:fig. 13a)

In the case of sauropods, this tendency has meant that we’ve all been startlingly bad at seeing pneumaticity in the caudal vertebrae of sauropods. Because the literature has trained us to assume it’s not there. For example, in the two competing sauropod phylogenies that dominated the 2000s, both Wilson (2002) and Upchurch et al. (2004) scored caudal pneumaticity as very rare: Wilson’s character 119, “Anterior caudal centra, pneumatopores (pleurocoels)”, was scored 1 only for Diplodocus and Barosaurus; and  Upchurch et al. (2004:286) wrote that “A few taxa (Barosaurus, Diplodocus, and Neuquensaurus) have pleurocoel-like openings in the lateral surfaces of the cranial [caudal] centra that lead into complex internal chambers”. That’s all.

And that’s part of the reason that every year since World War II, a million people have walked right past the awesome mounted brachiosaur in the Museum Für Naturkunde Berlin without noticing that it has pneumatic caudals. After all, we all knew that brachiosaur caudals were apneumatic.

But in my 2005 Progressive Palaeontology talk about upper limits on the mass of land animals estimated through the articular area of limb-bone cartilage, I included this slide that shows how much bigger the acetabulum of Giraffatitan is than the femoral head that it houses:

And looking at that picture made me wonder: those dark areas on the sides of the first few caudals (other than the first, which is a very obvious plaster model) certainly look pneumatic.

Then a few years later, I was invited to give a talk at the Museum Für Naturkunde Berlin itself, on the subject “Brachiosaurus brancai is not Brachiosaurus“. (This of course was drawn from the work that became my subsequent paper on that subject, Taylor 2009) And as I was going through my photos to prepare the slides of that talk, I thought to myself: darn it, yes, it does have pneumatic caudals!

So I threw this slide into the talk, just in passing:

Those photos were pretty persuasive; and a closer examination of the specimen on that same trip was to prove conclusive.

Meanwhile …

Earlier in 2009, I’d been in Providence, Rhode Island, with my Index Data colleagues. I’d managed to carve a day out of the schedule to hope along the coast to the Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven, Connecticut. My main goal was to examine the cervicals of the mounted Apatosaurus (= “Brontosaurus“) excelsus holotype (although it was also on that same trip that I first saw the Barosaurus holotype material that we’ve subsequently published a preprint on).

The Brontosaurus cervicals turned out to be useless, being completely encased in plaster “improvements” so that you can’t tell what’s real and what’s not. hopefully one day they’ll get the funding they want to take that baby down off its scaffold and re-prep the material.

But since I had the privilege of spending quality time with such an iconic specimen, it would have been churlish not to look at the rest of it. And lo and behold, what did I see when I looked at the tail but more pneumaticity that we thought we knew wasn’t there!

An isolated pneumatic fossa is present on the right side of caudal vertebra 13 in Apatosaurus excelsus holotype YPM 1980. The front of the vertebra and the fossa are reconstructed, but enough of the original fossil is visible to show that the feature is genuine. (Wedel and Taylor 2013b: Figure 10).

What does this mean? Do other Giraffatitan and Apatosaurus specimens have pneumatic tails? How pervasive is the pneumaticity? What are the palaeobiological implications?

Stay tuned! All will be revealed in Matt’s next post (or, if you can’t wait, in our recent PLOS ONE paper, Wedel and Taylor 2013b)!

References

• Taylor, Michael P. 2009. A re-evaluation of Brachiosaurus altithorax Riggs 1903 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) and its generic separation from Giraffatitan brancai (Janensch 1914). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29(3):787-806.
• Upchurch, Paul, Paul M. Barrett and Peter Dodson. 2004. Sauropoda. pp. 259-322 in D. B. Weishampel, P. Dodson and H. Osmólska (eds.), The Dinosauria, 2nd edition. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles. 861 pp.
• Wedel, Mathew J., and Michael P. Taylor. 2013. Caudal pneumaticity and pneumatic hiatuses in the sauropod dinosaurs Giraffatitan and Apatosaurus. PLOS ONE 8(10):e78213. 14 pages. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0078213
• Wilson, J.A. 2002. Sauropod dinosaur phylogeny: critique and cladistic analysis. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 136:217-276.

Following on from Matt’s post about the difficulty of photographing big specimens without distortion, I thought I’d have a play with our best Sauroposeidon C8 photo, which I think is this one:

(That’s been the basis for classic SV-POW! posts such as Your neck is pathetic and Darren’s new indeterminate Wealden maniraptoran is inadequate.)

I was motivated by Andy Farke’s comment:

Another–and perhaps more important–area where surface models excel is when you can remove colors on the original specimen that wash out relevant details…I bet this is probably the case for the example vertebra of Sauroposeidon. How many fossae and foramina just don’t show up well on the photos above?

Andy was talking about completely colourless 3d surface models, in which the 3d shape allows a render to make shadows that bring out the subtle shapes. But it made me wonder whether we could get anywhere just by washing out the most prevalent colour in the photo.

I started by doing a big, fat Gaussian blur on a duplicate layer — 500 pixels in each direction — and sampling the colour in the middle, to get a rough-and-ready average. (There may be a better way — please shout if you know one.) That average colour was#7e6b2f. I used it to run Colour To Alpha on another duplicate of the original layer, so that we’d be left with only residual colours. Here’s the result:

I’m in two minds about this. It may be informative, but it sure is ugly. To compromise, I reinstated the original layer underneath this mostly-transparent one, and turned its opacity down to 75%. Here’s the result — a nice compromise:

Of course, there are endless other approaches you can take — that’s the blessing and the curse of image-editing programs like GIMP. For example, here’s what I got doing a simple Colours → Auto → White Balance:

I’m not sure that isn’t the best of the bunch, in terms of informativeness.

–

I also tried something else — not amazingly successfully, but I think it’s worth seeing. Since the two photos that Matt showed in the previous post were evidently taken from somewhat different angles, I thought I’d have a go at compositing them into a red-cyan anaglyph. Because the variation in camera position is mostly dorsoventral rather than anteroposterior, the vert has to be pointed upwards for the two eyes to see the two versions from different horizontal points. Here’s the best I could do:

I would say this is of some value; but it’s nowhere near as good as, for example, the anaglyph of Cervical S of the Archbishop. I could sit and look at that one all day. The problems with this one arise for three reasons.

First, I had to reduce both parts of the Sauroposeidon anaglyph to monochrome (since one was already in that form), so all colour information was lost.

Second, I had to scale the high-resolution picture to the same size as the lower-resolution one, throwing away more detail.

Finally, and most important, the two photos were not taken with the intention that they should be used to make an anaglyph. To work well, this has to be done with the images taken under the same lighting conditions, at the same distance from the specimen, from perspectives differing by about the distance between the pupils of the viewer, and with the camera-position difference being perfectly in the plane of the specimen. Needless to say, none of these conditions was met in this case, so it’s actually quite impressive that it works as well as it does.

We have a lot of options for illustrating specimens these days. Postage-stamp-sized greyscale photos really don’t cut it any more.

Today (12th February) is the one-year anniversary of the first PeerJ papers! As Matt put it in an email this morning:

Hard to believe it’s been a year already. On the other hand, it’s also hard to believe that it’s only been a year. PeerJ is just such an established part of my worldview now.

That’s exactly right. PeerJ has so completely rewritten the rule-book (on price, speed and quality of service) that now when I’m thinking about new papers I’m going to write, the question I ask myself is no longer “Where shall I send this?” but “Is there any reason not to send it to PeerJ?”

Dorsals A and B (probably D8 and D9) of NHM R5937, “The Archbishop”, a still-undescribed brachiosaurid sauropod from the Upper Jurassic Tendaguru Formation of Tanzania, which I will get done this year, and which is destined for PeerJ. Top row: dorsal view with anterior to the right. Bottom row, from left to right: left lateral, posterior, right lateral, anterior.

Yesterday in the comments of a post on The Scholarly Kitchen, Harvey Kane asked me “I am curious as to where you get the notion that publishing OA is less expensive and in some way “better” than the traditional model?” My reply was (in part):

My notion that OA publishing yields better results than traditional is rooted in the online-only nature of articles, which allows them to ignore arbitrary limits on word-count, number of figures, use of colour, etc., and to exploit online-only formats such as video, 3d models, CT-slice stacks, etc. In my own field of vertebrate palaeontology, it’s now routine to see in PLOS ONE descriptive articles that are many times more comprehensive than their equivalents in traditional journals — see for example the recent description of the frog Beelzebufo.

Of course there is nothing specific to open-access about this: there is no technical reason why an online-only subscription journal shouldn’t publish similarly detailed articles. But my experience so far has been that they don’t — perhaps because they are tied to the mindset that pages and illustrations are limited resources.

For Beelzebufo in PLOS ONE, read baby Parasaurolophus in PeerJ, which we described as “the world’s most open-access dinosaur“. This paper is 83 pages of technicolour goodness, plus all the 3d models you can eat. And the crazy thing is, this sort of detail in descriptive papers is not even exceptional any more — see for example the recent description of Canardia in PLOS ONE, or this analysis of croc respiration in PeerJ

Years ago, I said that in the Archbishop descriptions I wanted to raise the bar for quality of illustration. Well, I’ve taken so long over getting the Archbishop done that the bar has been raised, and now I’m scrambling to catch up. Certainly the illustrations even in our 2011 description of Brontomerus are starting to look a bit old-fashioned.

And of course, the truly astonishing thing about PeerJ is that it does this so very cheaply. Because I’m already a member (which cost me $99), the Archbishop description is going to be free to me to publish this year. (This year for sure!) If we also get our Barosaurus neck preprint published properly this year,then I’ll have to find $100 to upgrade my Basic membership to Enhanced. That’s cheap enough that it’s not even worth going through the hassle of trying to get Bristol to pay for me. And if I ever hit a year when I publish three or more papers, I’ll upgrade once more (for another $100) to the Investigator plan and then that’s it: I’m done paying PeerJ forever, however many papers I publish there. (Matt jumped straight to the all-you-can-eat plan, so he wouldn’t even have to think about it ever again.)

Barosaurus lentus holotype YPM 429, Vertebra Q (C?13). Top row: left ventrolateral view. Middle row, from left to right: anterior view, with ventral to the right; ventral view; posterior view, with ventral to the left. Bottom row: right lateral view, inverted. Inset shows diapophyseal facet on right side of vertebra, indicating that the cervical ribs were unfused in this individual despite its great size. Note the broad, flat prezygapophyseal facet visible in anterior view. (Taylor and Wedel 2013b: figure 6)

PeerJ’s pricing is making PLOS ONE’s $1350 APC look distinctly old-fashioned; and the $3000 charged by the legacy publishers (for a distinctly inferior product) is now frankly embarrassing. You might expect that as such low prices, PeerJ’s quality of service would suffer, but that’s not been our experience: editing, reviewing, typesetting and proofing for our neck-anatomy paper were all up there with the best we’ve received anywhere.

And it’s great to see that it’s not just minor researchers like Matt and me who are persuaded by PeerJ: they’ve now accumulated a frankly stellar list of 20 universities (so far) with institutional plans for researchers to publish there. When I say “stellar” I mean that the list includes Harvard, MIT, Cambridge, Berkeley, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, UCL, Carnegie Mellon, Duke … the list goes on.

We can only hope that the next year, and the next ten and twenty, are as successful for PeerJ as the first has been; and that other New Generation publishers will join it in pushing the field forward.

I leave the last word to Matt:

I’m getting Vicki a lifetime membership for Valentine’s Day. Because I’m a romantic.

She’s a lucky, lucky woman.