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Friday, November 11, 2011
Gauging stance in "wide-gauge" sauropods
12:08 PM
| Posted by
Scott Hartman
In 1999 Jeff Wilson and Matt Carrano published an excellent paper addressing the phenomena of "wide-gauge" sauropod trackways. For years researchers had been working to explain why sauropod trackways seemed to come in two very different flavors - some of them were very closely spaced...so much so that they would actually overlap on the midline of the track. Other sauropod tracks seemed to show animals walking with their feet spread much further apart.
What were paleontologists to make of this?
One explanation was that the trackways were made by the same type of sauropods that were engaging in different behaviors. In other words, perhaps sometimes a sauropod would walk with its legs close in, while at other times it would use a wide-gauge stance.
Wilson & Carrano proposed that instead the trackways were made by sauropods with different skeletal adaptations. They mustered quite a few lines of evidence, but perhaps the best was that there was a group of sauropods - titanosaurs - that in fact had a much wider pelvis than other sauropods. The paper created a framework for later workers to use when attempting to correlate track makers with fossilized trackways, and is generally a towering success.
But I did want to take issue with one figure of the paper - one that pops up repeatedly at SVP. It is figure 5, demonstrating their interpretation of hing leg stance:
That's Camarasaurus on the left and Opisthocoelicaudia on the right. The clever reader may have already surmised from the title of this post that I think the animal on the right has its legs spread too far apart. But I have a larger issue: both animals have their legs spread much too far apart.
Remember that narrow-gauged trackways actually have their feet fall so close together that they frequently overlap along the midline. There's no way even sauropod "A" could make those tracks in the stance as figured. And this is why I'm bringing this up, because animals generally don't walk around with their legs acting as perfectly vertical beams. If you spend time watching large animals walk away from you, you'd see something like this:
![]() |
| Elephant image from here, rhino image from here. |
And the trackways also demonstrate this. If you place place sauropods over the actual trackways in question, you end up with a stance more like this:
In this case I've put a diplodocid (Supersaurus) on the left, while the animal on the right is scaled to the pelvic dimensions of Opisthocoelicaudia as seen in the original paper. Both animals have the hind legs mostly vertical but gently sloping inward.
This is not to say that sauropods never adopted a pose with their legs spread out a bit; Wilson & Carrano point out that titanosaurs have adaptations that may have allowed them to evert their hind limbs more effectively. They suggest that titanosaurs may have done so when rearing up, or during other activities that require greater stability.
I don't take issue with that, and those sorts of differences in the legs and pelvis may make it possible to tease out further behavioral differences between sauropod groups. But when walking around in their day to day lives both the footprints and modern analogs make a strong case that the limbs should be vertical, and if anything sloping in towards the midline rather than spread away from it.
Reference:
Wilson, J. A, & Carrano, M. T. 1999. Titanosaurs and the origin of "wide-gauge" trackways: a biomechanical and systematic perspective on sauropod locomotion. Paleobiology, 25(2), pp. 252-267.
Labels:sauropods
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Encountered this with my Kentrosaurus walk... gets funky when you try to balance track information (i had to do with other thyreophora) with an eye-balled cog and half-way plausible shifted gait pattern to optimize 3 leg contact time.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this post. I'll have a bit of a head start when I start on sauropods!
as I have repeatedly pointed out, the femur of Plateosaurus seems shaped to bring the foot under the body midline (i.e., track crosses midline).
ReplyDeletesee Fig. 7.1 in
http://www.palaeo-electronica.org/2010_2/198/index.html
The distinction of titanosaurs, a tad amiss in your reconstruction, is that their femur has a higher angle from the shaft to across the distal condyles, which in the authors' opinions meant that the femoral attitude was different for the sauropods. Placing the feet in the tracks with an accurately "bowed" femur should actually produce a bow-legged stance, which was also amiss in the old wide-gauge-stance paper. Placing the feet in the tracks for casual walking should produce something of a novelty if the body elements correctly reflect the extent and shape of the cartilages in the knee and hip and thus not qualify any distinct gaps that cannot be inferred from the bones themselves.
ReplyDelete@Jaimie: Actually, the head of Opisthocoelicaudia is pretty close to what I drew. Also, the acetabulum is highly modified to accept the differently-shaped femoral head without sprawling.
ReplyDeleteFinally, there simply isn't much of any bowing in the femur of Opisthocoelicaudia. I'll post the femur from the original paper later today.
That's not a problem. I went through and mocked up the figure a bit and it seems I got something funky wrong. You are right, the legs do tend to articulate in a more or less straight line, although there are some oddities.
ReplyDeletehummmm the problem with tracks is that there are not in theroy where they were made, the earth movement could mean the original shapes diffent from the shape we see. pehaps in a person with an animaltion program put in the prints/rough depth and then played a sketleton walking and viewed below it, taking in estimaeds weight/speed it would give a better idea of the joints potiom in relation to the shoulder and hips. Love your work buy the way.
ReplyDelete