A great paper: Scott et al. (2015) on a traumatically amputated timber wolf femur

Jessie Atterholt and I are helping one of our students write up a pathological dinosaur bone (you’ll definitely hear more about this in time), and we needed a good example paper for our student to use as a model. We chose several, but for me the standout was Scott et al. (2015), and that’s the one I’m focusing on here.

The short, short version is that they found a partial timber wolf femur from the La Brea tar pits that was sheared off near the proximal end and healed. The healing demonstrates that the animal survived whatever violent event tore off the rest of the hindlimb. There’s no sign of a pseudarthrosis, so although it’s not impossible that the rest of the limb was there and just hanging uselessly, we can be sure that the animal wasn’t bearing any weight on it and was effectively tripodal. Maybe it was a loner that managed to hunt and scavenge enough to stay alive long enough to heal, but maybe its pack either helped supply it with food or at least tolerated its presence.

I’m tempted to go down a rabbit hole telling stories about the three-legged dogs I’ve known — and one two-legged dog that was amazingly fast (one front leg, one hind, and it could run much better than it could walk). Instead, my one short digression is going to be about severed arteries. “If something ripped this wolf’s leg off, why didn’t it bleed out?” you might ask. The answer is that arteries that are completely severed in amputation injuries will often clamp shut on their own. I don’t know how much has been written about this, but I’ve confirmed it with both veterinarians and trauma surgeons. So remember, folks, it’s better to get a major artery severed completely than to simply have it torn open.

ANYWAY, I love this paper. It is not lacking for information, it’s just concise and efficient. Four pages, two figures (figure 1 is the pathological specimen in anterior and posterior views), a few refs, boom, done. I realize that not every study can be done and dusted in four pages, but I’ll bet that a lot more of them could be done in four than are written that way, my own included.

Scott et al. (2015) is free at the link below — check it out.

Reference

Scott, E., Rega, E., Scott, K., Bennett, B. and Sumida, S., 2015. A pathological timber wolf (Canis lupus) femur from Rancho La Brea indicates extended survival after traumatic amputation injury. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County Science Series, 42, pp.33-36.