The pneumatic rib evolution figure in a more useful format

Here’s a funny thing I hadn’t given much thought to until recently: virtually all journals, even the born-digital variety, have pages in portrait mode for easy printing on 8.5×11 or A4 paper. And many offer a column-width option for figures. So if you want to line up a whole bunch of stuff for easy comparison, for a paper it’s usually easier to orient a figure vertically, like so:

And here it is in context on the page:

But virtually all slide presentations use a landscape format, 4:3 for a long time but often 16:9 these days to accommodate wider screens, or phones and tablets in landscape mode. For this a figure much taller than wide is usually not a good use of space, and may present at too small a scale to be readable.

I ran into this last week while prepping a presentation on my research for an anatomy department meeting at work. I wanted to use that King et al. figure because it summed up so much of the paper in one image, but the only version I had was the skyscraper version we’d used in the JVP paper. So I went into GIMP and rotated the image and every element within it by 90 degrees, to produce this landscape version:

I was presenting to an intellectually diverse audience, most of whom do not work on dinosaurs, so I added little silhouettes (my own, cribbed and hacked from all kinds of older work) to make it all more explicable:

This is all my original work, and I’m letting it out in the world here in case anyone else wants to use it. CC-BY like everything else on this blog. FWIW I think mamenchisaurs and diplodocids held their necks elevated — the baseline alert posture for extant tetrapods — I was just moving quickly and more concerned with getting little doodads for all the genera than with any paleobiological implications.

So now I’m wondering if there are any figures in old papers that I’ve avoided putting in talks, possibly subconsciously even, because they’re the wrong shape. Not that I need to do any more navel-gazing than I already do, but maybe something for me to keep an eye out for when I have reason to go back to them (which is often — they’re thought archives).

The more forward-looking takeaway is that if you have to make a taller-than-wide figure to fit a journal page, consider making a wider-than-tall version at the same time to throw into your talks — or vice versa if you’re making the talk first. It’s a time investment for sure, but it may be easier while all the bits are fresh in your head and you have all the elements in separate layers or whatever. Hopefully you already back up the uncompressed versions of all your figures, but Past Matt didn’t always do that, so at least be smarter than that guy!

Parting shot (and an excuse to post a photo for Fossil Friday): on my Tate trip this summer I hit a gang of museums, and everywhere I went I found pneumatic sauropod ribs. I think there are a lot more of these things out there than most folks have appreciated. I’m proud of my recent pneumatic rib papers (Taylor et al. 2023 and King et al. 2024), but I hope they are the just the start of something.

And because I picked that photo: you know what institution has a ton of super-interesting, well-preserved, well-prepped, not-yet-published-on sauropod vertebrae and ribs in a really nicely appointed collections room in an awesome museum run by a small team of excellent human beings? The Tate Geological Museum, that’s who. If you can get yourself to Casper and you have a legit research interest, go check out their collections, there’s SO MUCH good stuff in there. I myself will be back as soon as it can be conveniently arranged.

References

• King, J.L., McHugh, J.B., Wedel, M.J., and Curtice, B. 2024. A previously unreported form of dorsal rib pneumaticity in Apatosaurus (Dinosauria: Sauropoda) and implications for pneumatic variation among diplodocid dorsal ribs. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2024.2316665
• Taylor, Michael P., and Matthew J. Wedel. 2023. Novel pneumatic features in the ribs of the sauropod dinosaur Brachiosaurus altithorax. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 68(4): 709–718. doi:10.4202/app.01105.2023

Source: https://svpow.com/2024/10/25/the-pneumatic-rib-evolution-figure-in-a-more-useful-format/