Worth a try: thank your dog for barking
October 29, 2026
This big floof is my self-appointed protector.
This probably sounds insane. Let me explain.
I can’t count the number of times in my life that I’ve witnessed this exchange, or have been part of it:
Dog: bark
Human: [silence or mildly irritated noise]
Dog: Bark!
Human: Shush.
Dog: Bark Bark!!
Human: Quiet!
Dog: BARK BARK BARK!!!
Human: SHUT UP DAMMIT!!!
Then I was faffing about on r/greatpyrenees and a commenter recommended thanking the dog for barking. The logic being that some breeds like Great Pyrenees are bred for guarding livestock, and in that scenario barking is as much to put their fellow herding dogs, their flock or herd, and their shepherds or cowpokes on notice, as it is to warn off any potential intruders. When these dogs bark, sometimes it’s just to let their humans know that something is up, and what they are seeking is acknowledgement, that the humans are now alert to the issue (which might be anything from an armed burglar to a leaf blowing past in a suspicious manner). So a quick “Thank you!” can let the dog know that they’ve achieved that goal and they can go back to being chill.
And you know what? For some of us, it really works. I decided to write this post because I was just in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner, and Franklin was out in the back yard and started barking at something. The back door was open, so I hollered, friendly-like, “Thank you Franklin! I got it!” — and he stopped. Immediately. And went back to whatever he had been doing, probably fighting a stick or giving some bug the chase of its life. I also know from the subreddit that other Great Pyr owners have had similar success.
This short-legged goofball is my other one.
Now, some caveats.
One, this won’t work for all dogs. Some dogs have other motivations for barking. Heck, given the mind-boggling physical and psychological diversity of dogs, I’ll bet there are dogs out there that will bark harder if they know their human is also on alert. BUT: it costs nothing to try, and if works, hey, you just improved your life and that of your dog (and probably the lives of your neighbors).
Two, this may not work right away. I didn’t start using this technique with Eleanor until she was basically an adult, and she picked it up in just a few days. Franklin is 8 months old and still basically a puppy, and we’ve been working on it for a while now. He’s getting better. ALSO: I’ve rarely seen getting mad at a dog and yelling be effective (scaring a dog into submission is not the same as building good habits), so if you’re open to trying something that might not work anyway, why not try something positive?
Three, like most things related to good dog discipline, this requires some human training, too. The “Thank you!” method is most effective if you say it loudly and happily right after the first full bark (which might be anything from “Yip!” to “Whooo-wooo-woo-woo-woo”). If you wait until the second or third bark, you’re just being rude and making the dog bark more to get the positive response they’re looking for — and also conditioning the dog to expect that they will need to bark more than once to get your attention. You can bake in bad habits just as easily as good ones. I don’t have much use for Dr. Phil, but I agree with his dictum that “You teach people how to treat you”, and IME that goes double for dogs.
Four, it’s not going to work every time. Here’s my most recent exchange with Franklin, which happened as I was finishing the previous paragraph:
Franklin: Bark!
Matt: Thank you, Franklin!
Franklin: …
Franklin: Bark!
Matt: Thanks, Franklin. I got it. You can stop now.
Franklin: mrrRRMMmmrrmmrr
Matt: I hear ya, buddy. It’s all good.
If it had gone any farther, I would have told him to stop. At this point he knows that if I raise my voice and sound cross, it’s time to concede or lose a privilege — in this case, the privilege of being outside.
Eleanor (left) and Franklin (right) just want confirmation that you are cool, man.
Also, if anyone’s wondering, I’m not trying to get my dogs to stop barking entirely. If something is genuinely amiss, I want to know about it. I just want them to settle down quickly the 999 times that it’s nothing. How will I know the difference? If someone or something is trying to get into the yard or the house, “thank you” isn’t going to stop them barking. This is where the training thing goes both ways — if they keep barking after I’ve thanked them, they generally have a reason, it’s just usually an innocuous reason, like the aforementioned suspicious leaf, or a bug farting three blocks away (not my joke, it’s an r/greatpyrenees classic). If they seem genuinely upset, I go check.
That’s about it. Not perfect, not effortless, not going to work in every case — but good enough and easy enough to be worth a try, I think. Let me know how it goes in the comments.
A truly radical take on scholarly publication and peer review
October 28, 2026
I just read this on Mastodon, and found it striking. I’m republishing it here, with permission from François Rincon, exactly as originally posted.
The more scientific papers I write, the more I realize that the only truly substantial reason left for writing science these days is to improve your own self and to hone your own understanding of a problem.
There is essentially no attentive readership anymore for science papers anyways (except perhaps for reviews, which a lot of young people in particular read to train). Peer review has not provided a single benefit to my work over twenty years, and the other reasons for publishing in a journal are for the most part superficial systemic incentives.
Corollary is that I am increasingly thinking of just dumping things on arxiv when I feel so in case someone someday finds it useful (i increasingly doubt academia will still use papers to communicate in the future though, and even survive the slopocalypse), and using the freed time to do what i consider more useful things.
N.B. I never bowed to publish or perish even as a non-tenured scientist.
Discuss.
Trying to categorize SV-POW! posts
October 22, 2026
As you may know, SV-POW! uses the excellent Rogue Scholar service to archive all our posts and to allocate DOIs. There’s plenty more going on at Rogue Scholar, and one of the in-progress initiatives is an attempt to categorize scholarly blog posts. Martin Fenner, who created and maintains Rogue Scholar, has tentatively proposed a simple split into seven categories, and is seeking feedback.
His seven proposed categories are (and here I quote directly):
- Research findings. Original results, data or analyses published first (or only) on the blog.
- Methods and tools. How to do something: research practice, software, data and teaching material.
- Commentary and peer review. Critical engagement with other people’s work: Reviews of papers, software, or books.
- Review. Bringing existing knowledge together or making it accessible: Literature overviews, explainers, “state of the field” posts, accessible summaries of one’s own papers
- Editorial. Arguments and positions on the field or on research practice: Essays, policy positions, open science advocacy.
- Community news. The research community and working life: Conference reports, announcements, obituaries, interviews, career advice, lab news, job postings, reflections on teaching.
- Microblogs. Short, informal posts similar to social media: a single observation, link or reaction, with little or no argument.
I thought it might be useful to try to categorize the last 40 SV-POW! posts and see where there might be gaps. Here’s what I came up with (in reverse chronological order):
(5) — No AI comments. None. No exceptions.
(1ish) — Friday’s impromptu tortoise rescue
(1ish) — Easty the box turtle: both osteophagous and coprophagous
(6ish) — BYU’s fossil vending machine
(4) — Speculative sauropods
(6ish) — SV-POW! at 19, and trying to see what’s not there
(1) — (When) will we find apatosaurines outside of North America?
(1ish) — The atlas/axis complex of Apatosaurus louisae CM 3018 in dorsal and lateral views
(7) — Horrible Megalosaurus larva tears its way out of Matt’s stomach
(3) — Documenting Skeletal Mounts
(7) — Current status
(6ish) — A gentle rebuke, well taken
(3) — Wildlife on the Planet Furaha by Gert van Dijk
(3) — Andy Frazer’s Aquilops, and DinoCon 2026
(1ish) — Dogs are experiments in applied genetics
(7ish) — My adventures with Tri-bear-atops
(1ish) — Genuinely, my all-time favourite image: Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis
(3) — Revisiting Aquilops and Pentaceratops at the Sam Noble Museum
(1ish) — Where did the One of our Dinosaurs is Missing dinosaur come from?
(3) — Curiousiday at the Sam Noble Museum: Sauroposeidon, Apatosaurus, Aquilops, and more
(3) — The “Bizarre Headgear” exhibit at the Sam Noble Museum is incredible
(1ish) — The mystery of the other rearing sauropod of the Egidio Feruglio museum
(1ish) — Looking for CC By photos of these rearing sauropod mounts
(1ish) — An even earlier life restoration of a sauropod (1885)
(1ish) — The Lego Natural History Museum, and the question of scale
(6) — Upcoming public talks about dinosaurs at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
(7ish) — On the evolution of the atlas-axis complex
(1ish) — In search of rearing mounted sauropod skeletons
(4ish) — The Nazi sauropod — Giraffatitan (= “Brachiosaurus“) brancai in 1937
(1) — The checklist for new zoological genus and species names is published
(1) — Checklist for new zoological genus and species names
(1ish) — What was the first life restoration of a sauropod?
(1) — Belatedly … here’s DRAFT v4 of the checklist for new zoological genus and species names
(2) — Never name a new species of an existing dinosaur genus
(1ish) — Stop it, birds, your necks are stupid
(1ish) — Yet more raptors with their heads on backwards
(2) — Three Four quotes about doing good work
(2) — Do it yourself.
(1ish) — More raptors with their heads on backwards
(3) — New paper: Hart et al. 2025 on neural canal ridges in crocs
Some of these categorizations could be quibbled with, and 40 posts is not a huge sample, but I think there are still two findings worth discussing.
First, category 1 (Research findings) significantly dominates, with 19 of the 40 posts falling more or less into this category. That’s followed by category 3 (Commentary and peer review) with 7 posts. All seven categories do appear, but there’s only one post in category 5 (Editorial) and only two posts in category 4 (Review).
Second, it’s a bit shocking how many of our posts don’t really seem to fit neatly into any of Martin’s suggested categories. 21 of the 40 posts — more than half — I had to qualify with “ish”. For example, is A gentle rebuke, well taken really “Community news”? I put it in that category because Martin’s description includes conference reports in its brief: “The research community and working life: Conference reports, announcements, obituaries, interviews, career advice, lab news, job postings, reflections on teaching.”
Martin astutely comments on his tentative categorization:
It is no coincidence that the list has seven categories: that is the level of differentiation I can understand, even if means some details are conflated. I hope this posts generates a discussion that refines the list. Not more categories, but potentially different labels or groupings. This starting list helps clarify some questions that I wondered about ever since I started Rogue Scholar.
I think that’s smart, and I don’t want to propose adding more categories. (It really doesn’t take long before such categorizations become too unwieldy to be much use.)
But.
It’s the 15 posts categorized as “1ish” that bother me. Fully 37% of our posts fall squarely into a not-really-research category that is not included among the seven, which I would characterize as “observation”. Calling Stop it, birds, your necks are stupid a research finding is obviously an overreach, yet it seems a less wrong categorization than any of the others.
What’s more, I think that observations are a great example of what scholarly blogs can be really useful for. You would never be able to get Easty the box turtle: both osteophagous and coprophagous published in a journal, and probably not even onto a preprint server, yet it contains a significant and AFAIK novel observation that is properly part of the scholarly record. I have more than once published blog-posts containing observations primarily so I can then go on to cite them in a more formal paper, e.g. Atlantal ribs of the Carnegie Diplodocus, Moscow and Vienna casts cited in Taylor et al.’s (2025) history of the Carnegie Diplodocus mount.
So my humble suggestion to Martin is this: promote Observation to its own category, and merge two of the others to make space. (Maybe merge Review into Commentary and peer review, for example?)
Long live observations!
References
- Taylor, Michael P., Amy C. Henrici, Linsly J. Church, Ilja Nieuwland and Matthew C. Lamanna. 2025. The history and composition of the Carnegie Diplodocus. Annals of the Carnegie Museum 91(1):55–91. doi: 10.2992/007.091.0104
No AI comments. None. No exceptions.
October 19, 2026
Yesterday, an AI posted a comment on this blog — or tried to. It was superficially helpful, relevant to the top of the post it was on, and turned out to contain that characteristic blend of things we already knew and things that are (subtly or blatantly) wrong. Needless to say, we shoved it in the spam folder.
This is a good moment to remind everyone of our AI policy: SV-POW! is an AI-free zone. (Follow the link for the detail.)
That applies to comments as well as to our own posts.
Do not post AI-generated content as a comment(*). If you do, we may warn you once, or we may just block you. As Matt put it in an email:
Make it clear that this is absolutely zero-tolerance. A single instance of posting AI slop can get you perma-banned. People can go publicly crap their pants on the rest of the internet.
We’re interested in what our readers have to say, and in engaging with humans. Slop is not welcome here.
(*) The sole possible exception, and be very careful about this, is posting clearly labelled AI output for the purpose of going on to critique it. But given how grumpy we’re both feeling about aslopalypse, it’s probably best not to risk it.
Friday’s impromptu tortoise rescue
October 12, 2026
I was working away at my laptop Friday afternoon when the front doorbell rang. It was a guy asking me if I was missing a tortoise. I was not, but I was curious, so I went to go see what was up.
The situation in a nutshell: a decent-sized male Sulcata or African spurred tortoise, Centrochelys sulcata, had gotten loose from somewhere. The guy who rang my doorbell had seen it crossing the street in front of my house, which is reasonably busy in the late afternoon on a Friday. He didn’t want the tortoise to get hurt, so he pulled over and parked his car, moved the tortoise to a sidewalk, and called Animal Control. Then he flagged down another guy who was out on a walk to mind the tortoise while he rang doorbells to see if anyone in the nearby houses was missing a tortoise.
So far so good. Except that by the time I got across the street to take a look, the random passerby tortoise-minder let the tortoise crawl under a minivan in someone’s driveway. Oops.
Don’t worry, the tortoise was fine. That’s human blood on the plastron, from the knuckles of the other guy who helped me scoot the tortoise to freedom.
At this point, several facts about tortoises in general and about this particular tortoise become relevant:
- Chances are that any tortoise of this size would have gotten wedged under the minivan.
- This particular tortoise had gotten improper nutrition when it was young — too much protein for a species that mostly eats grass, leading to too-rapid growth and a carapace that was not smooth but pyramided. The too-tall, hook-shaped scutes were just perfect for getting caught on the various metal bars and pipes on the underside of an automobile.
- Turtles and tortoises are unbelievably strong for their size, to a degree that is probably hard to imagine if you’ve never kept one. This male Sulcata was about 70lbs (I feel pretty qualified to guess since my dogs are currently 60 and 82lbs), and when he felt threatened he would dig his feet in and stand up as tall as he could. When he did that, he raised the minivan on its suspension by about a finger’s width.
Now the dimensions of the problem are clear. We couldn’t use a jack to lift the minivan, which didn’t belong to any of us — not the tortoise-finder, the tortoise-minder, nor me — but rather to a random semi-neighbor whose driveway happened to be tortoise-accessible. Absent lifting the vehicle, the only way to free the stuck tortoise was to sort of Tetris it backwards out of the tortuous mechanical cul-de-sac its pyramided scutes were stuck in. But every time we pushed or pulled on the tortoise, it would balk, dig its feet in, and stand up, slightly lifting the minivan and absolutely locking itself in place between a cement slab and a two-ton vehicle. So the program we settled on was this: wait for the tortoise to relax and lower its plastron to the ground, then slide it about an inch toward freedom, at which point it would freak out, stand up, and lock in, then we’d wait for it to relax again, vamp ’til fade.
Did I mention that it was a 70lb tortoise and we were lying full-length on the cement, arms outstretched, pushing and pulling with fingertips? It took a long time, and it was tiring. But also pretty cool, because hey, awesome animal encounter. Now I can add one-time tortoise-rescuer to one-time ostrich-herder and one-time pronghorn-racer on my life list. You know, the one titled “What Are the Freaking Chances?”
Eventually we did get the tortoise out from under the vehicle, no worse for the wear. He promptly took off at a blistering 1mph, but the small group on on-lookers herded him away from the street and away from any other vehicles to hide under. While they were doing that, I ran back across the street and got a collapsible wagon out of the garage. Got the tortoise into the wagon, shook hands all around, and tortoise-sat him for the five minutes or so until Animal Control arrived. I didn’t mean to end up in charge of a tortoise, but everyone else had other places to be, and when they heard that I was a professional biologist with a lot of first-hand turtle experience, my fate was sealed.
BTW can we get some respect for the dragon-level scales and spurs on this tortoise’s hindlimbs and butt? I like how the end of the tail tucks in between the two big spurs on the back of the thigh. And look at the crazy scales on the hindfoot — this is the back of the hindfoot, the heel, so those aren’t claws or digits, just bigass scales.
I had assumed that this would not be the first tortoise rodeo for the Animal Control crew. Sulcatas are reasonably popular in the pet trade, because they are cute as heck when they are little, and not everyone fully thinks through the commitment of owning an animal that can grow to 200lbs, dig a burrow 100 feet long, and live 150 or 200 years. From everything I’ve ever read and from my own personal experience, essentially all turtles and tortoises are champion diggers, surprisingly good climbers, and otherwise gifted escape artists. More than one person has said they’re surprised I didn’t volunteer to keep this tortoise. I was tempted — for about five seconds. But a Sulcata is a lifestyle choice, and one I am not prepared for. I don’t want to be the distraught owner with a two-foot hole under the backyard fence and a beloved pet loose in suburbia, crossing busy streets…slowly. Besides, I already have a turtle, and Easty and the dogs are plenty of pet action for me right now (and yes, my son London understands that with any luck, Easty will become his responsibility after I’m gone — box turtles are also century-plus commitments).
Anyway, the Animal Control guys confirmed that they get these big tortoises fairly often, they know how to care for them, and if the owner of this particular tortoise doesn’t come forward to claim him, he’ll go to a tortoise rescue. So I said farewell, and that was the end of my Friday afternoon tortoise adventure. But it is not the end of this little run of turtle posts, which started with Easty snacking on dog doo, and will continue with a speculative sauropod crossover. Stay tuned!
Easty the box turtle: both osteophagous and coprophagous
October 5, 2026
That’s our three-toed box turtle (Terrapene carolina triunguis), Easty, munching on a chihuahua turd in the summer of 2023. For Easty’s earlier adventure eating part of a rat skull, see this post.
Happy Monday.
BYU’s fossil vending machine
October 3, 2026
Love this thing. Every place should have one. The dinosaur bits are all casts, the clams and rocks and whatnot are real. Photo from my visit to the BYU Museum of Paleontology in the summer of 2024, on the way up to Wyoming from California.
I didn’t get anything from the machine, but I did buy a cast, this little femur of a baby apatosaur. It was an agreeable travel companion, and I have it right here with me in my home office. Good times.
Everyone should visit the BYU Museum of Paleontology, and see about a zillion interesting specimens. When you go, get yourself a little something to commemorate the trip.
Speculative sauropods
October 2, 2026
If you travel in the same circles I do, you probably know that my friend and colleague Mark Witton is working on a speculative biology book, Dinosaurs Evolved, that takes a fresh look at what life on Earth might be like now had the asteroid missed and the K-Pg extinction never happened. As a lifelong spec-bio fan, I’m stoked for that project. Speculative sauropods have given me a lot to think about, especially in the past few years, so I thought it would be fun to revisit some in this post. Maybe all? There aren’t a ton of examples. If you know of any I missed here, sing out in the comments. (I’m not including any from the Speculative Dinosaur Project out of lack of familiarity — the project was basically dead by the time I would have started following it — and I’m not sure any are currently accessible anyway.)
Rather than proceeding chronologically, I’m going to start with my favorites and proceed in the direction of the most-loathed, for reasons that will become apparent later on. Back in 2010, Memo Kösemen kindly let us — Mike, Darren, and me — debut his Brontosapiens here on SV-POW!, and give our thoughts on it. I’m not going to say much about this critter in this post, mostly because I think our ideas from 16 years ago hold up pretty well, and you can just go read the original post if you’re curious.
Pp. 42-43 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.
Of course the OG speculative sauropods are the ones dreamt up by Dougal Dixon for The New Dinosaurs (1988), the recent reprint of which I reviewed here. In addition to the ones shown above, there are a couple more in the book: a dwarf island sauropod, which we now know actually happened more than once, and the Rajaphant, which is basically an unremarkable large titanosaur. Of the ones in the above spread, the Lumber has a trunk and is actually built for it, unlike any real-world sauropods discovered so far, and the Turtosaur takes titanosaur osteoderms to their logical conclusion. I like ’em both. The box on the far left shows the skeleton of a group of slender-bodied running sauropods that flourished only briefly during Dixon’s alternate Cenozoic.
I’m not going to say much about the brontosaurs in Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005), because they’re not really attempts at spec bio, but rather deliberately old-fashioned Charles R. Knight/Rudolph Zallinger-esque productions realized in CG. I’ll say of the movie that it has a lot of dinosaurs but not particularly interesting ones; if you thought that the Jurassic Park/World movies were too realistic and you’d prefer your dinosaurs to look like cliches from decades past and act like voracious monsters, King Kong has you covered. That said, as monster fights go, King Kong vs. three V. rexes is a banger.
Much more interesting from a spec bio perspective is a book that accompanied the movie, The World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island. It explains the fictional evolutionary backstory of the Skull Island critters from the movie, both the ones that made it to the screen, and many others that did not. Among those never realized on screen are two sauropods. The first, shown above, is Asperdorsus (“rough back”), which has spines on its back and hanging from its neck. This is pretty much just a spiny Diplodocus and it wouldn’t surprise me if someone dug one of these up in Montana while I was writing this post.
Then there’s this thing, Diablosaurus, which I have an almost visceral dislike of, for many reasons. First off, it’s boring. It’s just a dinosaur squeezed into the shape of a rhinoceros. In a world with the full-tilt wackiness of actual ceratopsians (f’rinstance) — of which there were also fictional examples on Skull Island! — a rhino-alike with horns but no frill is both uninspired and unexciting. Also, hello, Iguanodon from the 1830s is calling.
But it gets worse. Although the skeletal diagram shows that this dumb thing was clearly an ornithischian, or at least had an ornithischian pelvis, the text says that it’s an aberrant sauropod. Er, wut? I guess some Camarasaurus finally got drunk enough to evolve into an ornithischian and then into a mammal-shaped ornithischian. Of course it would.
I should give some credit to Diablosaurus, though, because it forced me to think about why I hated it so much. That got me thinking about what actual sauropods did, evolutionarily (be large-bodied, long-necked and long-tailed, graviportal, non-oral-processing oviparous quadrupedal herbivores), and what they did not do (er, pretty much everything else, including being Diablosaurus-like).
My “nontosaurs”: the gazelleopod, antlertitan, and poseidonposeidon.
And that led to my “Sauropod Heresies” mini-paper and talk for the Tate 2024 conference (link), which I tuned up with another year’s worth of thoughts for DinoCon 2025. The image above is a doodle I did for those talks, illustrating some of the paths not taken in sauropod evolution. If real sauropods were brontosaurs, I call the ‘forbidden’ experiments, including Diablosaurus, the nontosaurs.
To bring this full circle, Mark Witton has been kind enough to share some behind-the-scenes thinking for Dinosaurs Evolved, and he’s thought of some ways out of what we might call “brontosaur lock-in” that hadn’t occurred to me, but which I think are eminently plausible. One of them is the subject of a recent post on his Patreon. I’ll say no more for now, but let’s circle back after the book is out, to revisit both speculative sauropods and the real and imagined limits on the sauropod body plan.
SV-POW! at 19, and trying to see what’s not there
October 1, 2026
Where it all began, from a certain point of view.
Today is SV-POW!’s birthday. Not a nasty, dirty, wet birthday, like a 2nd or a 13th, nor yet a grand, nice-round-number birthday like a 10th or a 20th: it is our 19th birthday, and that means we’ve been around a while. I decided to celebrate by posting surprising facts about RNA.
Nah, that was a transparent and rather feeble misdirect. It’s going to be sauropod vertebrae! (Although if you were really hoping for a surprising fact about RNA, hit me up in the comments.)
We’ve talked here about sauropod neck muscles, most recently in the posts linked here, and for obvious reasons. Witmer (1997) evocatively described the form of pneumatic bones as the result of a sort of morphogenetic tug-of-war, in which pneumatic diverticula expand opportunistically and invasively and tend to resorb bone tissue that isn’t actively being maintained, and bone tissue grows and is maintained in response to biomechanical stress. That paper landed almost 30 years ago, right after I’d started studying sauropod vertebrae (in 1996, story told here) and right before I got to start looking at CT scans of sauropod vertebrae (in 1998, story told here), it was one of the first things I read when I started working on pneumaticity, and it’s been part of my intellectual bedrock ever since.
The jacket of pneumatic diverticula around a cervical vertebra of Diplodocus, from Schwarz et al. (2007: fig. 4).
It struck me with the force of inevitability that the shapes of sauropod vertebrae were driven by a small constellation of factors: supporting great weight and long necks and tails — mostly compressive forces; resisting or accommodating the forces exerted by muscles, tendons, and ligaments — mostly tensile, at least up close;* doing those thing with the same basic developmental Lego kit as virtually all other vertebrates (as touched on here, and, er, way back here) — but with the spicy addition of pneumatic diverticula, with their rabid tendency to cart away everything not nailed down. Or more succinctly:
vertebra shape = development + size + muscles – pneumatization
*Two or more tension members can load a bony element in compression by pulling on opposite sides to snug it down tight to the next bone in line, but where the muscle or tendon fibers actually attach, the force exerted on the bone tissue will be primarily tensile.
I look at this Barosaurus vertebra (at the Museum of Ancient Life in Lehi, Utah) and I feel like I can almost see the code.
It is almost a haunting thought — if diverticula have removed all the bone that isn’t being loaded,* then the forms of sauropod vertebrae should be their biomechanical loading regimes incarnate, and it feels like we should be able to easily visualize where all the muscles, tendons, and ligaments attached. Alas, that “easily” is more of a “hardly”, because vertebrae are kind of a biomechanical nightmare of complex forces and lots and lots of muscles, big and small, and we’re still uncertain about some basic stuff like which vertebrae had synovial intervertebral joints and which had fibrocartilaginous discs (birds have both in the same vertebral column), and there are probably limits to how far we can get just tracing bird muscles (or croc muscles, or what have you) onto sauropod vertebral columns, not least because birds are spectacularly diverse, sauropods were pretty darned disparate themselves, as well as freakin’ huge, and those two lineages parted ways well over 200 million years ago.
*To a first approximation — there are exceptions to the hypothesis of “optimization by pneumatization” in its purest form (f’rinstance).
How complex are we talkin’? Well, here’s a very simple, diagrammatic map to the neck muscles of the chicken, from Zweers et al. (1987: fig. 7). Not multiple chickens, like different individuals or breeds, just…a chicken. Any chicken. Every chicken. Even drawing each slip of muscle as a line, and packing things together almost to the limit of readability, it still took four different diagrams to show the muscles on one side of one neck from one angle. In a chicken. A chicken!!
EDIT after I’d slept: Actually it’s even worse, because that multi-part diagram only shows the multi-segment muscles, the ones that cross more than one intervertebral joint. All the single-segment muscles that connect adjacent vertebrae, like the interspinales, intercristales, and intertransversarii, are omitted for clarity.
The awesome mounted Brachiosaurus skeleton that used to stand outside the Field Museum — a wonder that this blog has sadly outlived. From our sixth-ever post.
So when in future posts in this series I talk blithely about the longus colli dorsalis muscles of sauropods inserting on their epipophyses, or anything along those lines, I want you to do three things: (1) remember that simple, line-based diagram from Zweers, that isn’t even trying to represent the muscles realistically, but only to map their connections; (2) think about trying to translate that to animals with necks as long as tour buses; and (3) take everything that I or anyone else ever says on this topic with an evaporated ocean of salt.
Reasonable inference, or a hopeful monster? Wedel and Taylor (2023: fig. 7).
But still. We oughta be able to figure some things out, right? Stay tuned.
Thanks for reading, whether you’ve been here from the start or you’re one of the readers we picked up along the way (at this point, possibly because you were born along the way). And thanks to Mike and Darren, for a conversation 19 years ago that hatched a joke that became a blog that wholly unexpectedly evolved into one of the biggest and most rewarding things I’ve done, and for all the years of inspiration, support, and friendship along the way. Next round’s on me.
The SV-POW!sketeers at DinoCon 2026 — about which more real soon.
References
- Schwarz, D., Frey, E., and Meyer, C.A. 2007. Pneumaticity and soft−tissue reconstructions in the neck of diplodocid anddicraeosaurid sauropods. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 52(1):167–188.
- Wedel, Mathew J., and Michael P. Taylor. 2023. The biomechanical significance of bifurcated cervical ribs in apatosaurine sauropods. VAMP (Vertebrate Anatomy Morphology Palaeontology) 11:91-100. doi: 10.18435/vamp29394
- Witmer, L.M. 1997. The evolution of the antorbital cavity of archosaurs: a study in soft-tissue reconstruction in the fossil record with an analysis of the function of pneumaticity. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 17(Supplement 1): 1-76.
- Avian cranio-cervical systems. Part I: Anatomy of the cervical column in the chicken (Gallus gallus L.) Acta Morphologica Neerlando-Scandinavica 25:131–155.
(When) will we find apatosaurines outside of North America?
September 16, 2026
My happy place: in the Dinosaur Journey collections, surrounded by Apatosaurus vertebrae.
Hot on the heels of the discovery of Diplodocus in Spain (Sánchez-Fenollosa et al. 2026), I am publicly committing to this prediction. I think it’s inevitable that someone will find an apatosaurine in Europe, for the following reasons:
- Apatosaurines were around for a decent chunk of time, from pretty low in the Salt Wash to the very top of the Morrison, and that’s just counting the record we have. That may seem short on the scale of the Mesozoic, but Morrison deposition went on for three times as long as the Great American Interchange to date (2.7Ma), so biogeographically it’s an eternity. Related: we don’t have good morphologically transitional apatosaurines yet — or at least, if we have them, no-one has IDed them as such — and IMHO apatosaurines are too weird to have evolved from other diplodocids in one saltatory leap. So I expect there are more lurking out there somewhere/somewhen.
- So many faunal elements were shared between the Morrison and the Iberian peninsula, it would be very odd if apatosaurines never made the trip.
- The Iberian peninsula in particular is going through a discovery phase. F’rinstance: when I visited Dinopolis in Teruel back in 2008, I was told that the material they’d published at that time was from the 5 best quarries out of the 80 new localities that had been discovered since the museum was established. And that was almost 20 years ago.
- Apatosaurines are pretty morphologically distinctive (ahem) so they shouldn’t be hard to identify if and when they do turn up.
That is all.
Reference
