5th Palaeontological Virtual Congress: a bony lesion in an apatosaur femur
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.
Source: https://svpow.com/2025/03/20/5th-palaeontological-virtual-congress-a-bony-lesion-in-an-apatosaur-femur/
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