Here’s a short post on another 5PVC presentation: Raber et al. (2025) on a musculoskeletal lesion in an apatosaur femur.
At the Utah Field House in Vernal, there’s a partial skeleton of an apatosaur from just north of Dinosaur National Monument. It’s nicknamed the “Soft Sauropod” because the bone is softer than the matrix, which made preparation a bit of an adventure.
I first became aware of this specimen a few years ago, when the distal end of the right femur was temporarily on display at the Field House. There’s a big bony prominence just proximal to the medial femoral condyle, right where we’d expect the medial head of the gastrocnemius to originate. It’s about the size of an ice cream cone, and it looks for all the world like a gastrocnemius tug lesion — indeed, it’s pretty hard to imagine what else could have caused a big conical spike of bone to form in precisely that place. Gastrocnemius tug lesions happen in humans and dogs and horses and loads of other extant animals, so they’re pretty well understood. As far as any of us know, this is the first one in a non-avian dinosaur.
I tend to not bring medical students in on paleo projects, unless those projects are going to teach them something relevant to their future careers as physicians. In this case, though, it was a no-brainer. One of our first year osteopathic medical students, Katherine Raber, got in touch with Jessie and me last fall and said she was interested in working on a paleo project, and I’d already talked with John Foster about the possibility of letting a med student tackle this very-diagnostic-and-highly-relevant-to-medicine project. And here we are.
Want to know more? Our slideshow on this specimen will be up for a few days yet, and there will be a paper along in due time.
References
- Gould, C.F., et al. (2007). Bone Tumor Mimics: Avoiding Misdiagnosis. Current Problems in Diagnostic Radiology, 36(3):124-141.
- Raber, K., Wedel, M., Atterholt, J., Foster, J., Gray, D., and Bennis, M.B. 2025. A musculoskeletal lesion in a femur of Apatosaurus. 5th Palaeontological Virtual Congress. [NB: you will probably need to be registered for 5PVC to follow that link.]
- Seiler, G. & Thrall, D.E. (Eds.). (2018). Thrall’s Textbook of Veterinary Diagnostic Radiology (7th ed.). Saunders.
When our paper on neural canal ridges came out last year (Atterholt et al. 2024), I hoped that it would inspire other people to go peer inside neural canals and discover a lot more of them. My wish was granted, and quickly. In early October I was contacted by William Jude Hart, then an undergrad at Hofstra University in New York (he graduated in December). He was making a poster for the upcoming SVP meeting on a specimen of the large tomistomine crocodilian Thecachampsa, specifically an anterior caudal vertebra with pretty darned unambiguous neural canal ridges:
Since then we’ve found more examples, in both extinct and extant crocodilians, and William invited me to be his coauthor on the description. Our first salvo, Hart and Wedel (2025), is a slide presentation at the 5th Palaeontological Virtual Congress, which is going on right now. Find us in the thematic session, “Unraveling crocodylomorph evolution: insights from fossils and new methodologies“. All of the 5PVC presentations will be up for another week, and registration is measly 5 Euros, so if you’re curious about our findings — and a great many other fascinating paleo things — go check it out.
More 5PVC news shortly. And if you’re interested in neural canal ridges, or neural canal anything, or pretty much any kind of anatomy whatsoever, I have good news: there are tons of things waiting to be discovered by curious folks. I mean, heck, the first neural canal ridges in crocs — not an obscure or understudied clade — were found by an observant undergrad.
Come play.
References
- Atterholt, J., Wedel, M.J., Tykoski, R., Fiorillo, A.R., Holwerda, F., Nalley, T.K., Lepore, T., and Yasmer, J. 2024. Neural canal ridges: a novel osteological correlate of postcranial neuroanatomy in dinosaurs. The Anatomical Record, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.25558
- Hart, W.J., and Wedel, M.J. 2025. First report of neural canal ridges in fossil crocodilians. 5th Palaeontological Virtual Congress. [NB: you will probably need to be registered for 5PVC to follow that link.]
I’m kidding, of course. It will continue no matter what.
Loads of more and better photos of the upcoming Aquilops Lego sets — yes, sets, plural — thanks to the Brothers Brick.
What’s that other thing included in this jeep-and-raptor set?
It’s a teensy widdle Aquilops of teensiness! And it’s pretty darned accurate! I don’t see a lot of room for improvement at minifig scale.
CAN’T WAIT CAN’T WAIT CAN’T WAIT!!!
And here are some more photos of set 76970, the brick-built poseable Aquilops.
Head on over to the Brothers Brick for more photos, set descriptions, and so on.
Theoretically these sets will drop on June 1. My birthday’s June 3. Close enough!
For previous posts on Aquilops, see the linked list on this page. And don’t forget that the scientific paper describing Aquilops is free to the world here. Aaand Brian Engh has Aquilops posts here, here, and here, and Aquilops art in the Living Relic Productions store.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 