RESEARCH ARTICLE Ontogenetic similarities between giraffe and sauropod neck osteological mobility 1 1,2,3 4 4,5 Daniel VidalID *, Pedro Mocho , AdriaÂn PaÂramo , Jose Luis Sanz , 1 Francisco OrtegaID 1 Grupo de BiologõÂa Evolutiva, Facultad de Ciencias, UNED, Paseo Senda Del Rey, Madrid, Spain, 2 Instituto Dom Luiz, Universidade de Lisboa, Bloco C6, 38 Piso, sala 6.3.57, Campo Grande, Lisbon, Portugal, 3 The Dinosaur Institute, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles, CA, United States of America, 4 Unidad de PaleontologõÂa, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad AutoÂnoma de Madrid, Calle a1111111111 Darwin, Madrid, Spain, 5 Real Academia Española de Ciencias Exactas, FõÂsicas y Naturales, Calle Valverde, Madrid, Spain a1111111111 a1111111111 *
[email protected] a1111111111 a1111111111 Abstract The functional morphology of sauropod dinosaur long necks has been studied extensively, OPEN ACCESS with virtual approaches yielding results that are difficult to obtain with actual fossils, due to their extreme fragility and size. However, analyses on virtual fossils have been questioned Citation: Vidal D, Mocho P, PaÂramo A, Sanz JL, Ortega F (2020) Ontogenetic similarities between on several of their premises, such as the ability to accurately reconstruct intervertebral tis- giraffe and sauropod neck osteological mobility. sue with only skeletal data; or whether zygapophyseal overlap can be used to determine the PLoS ONE 15(1): e0227537. https://doi.org/ limits of range of motion, since some extreme neck poses in extant giraffes have been 10.1371/journal.pone.0227537 claimed not to retain any zygapophyseal overlap. We compared articulation and range of Editor: Leon Claessens, Universiteit Maastricht, motion in extant giraffes with the exceptionally well-preserved and complete basally branch- NETHERLANDS ing eusauropod Spinophorosaurus nigerensis from the Middle (?) Jurassic of Niger, under Received: May 24, 2019 the same virtual paleontology protocols.