Cervical ligament systems in sauropod dinosaurs: what support is there?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sauropod dinosaurs, such as Diplodocus and Dicraeosaurus, have been the subject of numeroushypotheses about what ligamentous structures could have aided in lifting and supporting their long necks. Because the supportive tissues rarely fossilize, palaeontologists historically have relied on assumptions and on presumed osteological correlates, such as rugosities, on cervical vertebrae to infer their nature. Based on comparisons with extant animals, options for supportive cervical ligaments in sauropods include mammal-style nuchal ligaments, avian-style interlaminar elastic ligaments, reptilian-style supraspinal ligaments, or some combination thereof. This study tested for the presence of a mammal-style nuchal ligament using histology and micro-computed tomography of cervical hemispinous processes of Apatosaurus and Diplodocus, as well as the examination of gross morphological features of the cervical vertebrae of Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, and Camarasaurus. A non-uniform bone orientation in the thin sections from a hemispinous processes of Diplodocus and from micro-CT imaging of a hemispinous process of Apatosaurus suggests that a dorsally or dorsolaterally positioned supraspinal ligament, rather than a mammal-like nuchal ligament, attached to the distal tips of the spines. Additionally, initial observations of pseudospinous tubercula in Diplodocus and Apatosaurus suggests that they also possessed interlaminar elastic ligaments in at least portions of their necks. Whether or not such ligaments were the sole means of cervical support and whether or not such ligaments were capable of providing entirely passive (non- or minimally muscle aided) neck support remain unclear. These findings could be incorporated into future models of sauropod neck mobility and further the understanding of sauropod feeding styles and mechanics.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".