By Daniel Dunaief

From picking out Stegosaurus flashcards when he was under a year old to dressing as one for Halloween to celebrating birthdays at the American Museum of Natural History, James Napoli has always been fascinated by dinosaurs. His passion recently reached another level.

The Setauket native, who is a Research Instructor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences in the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, recently published a dinosaur discovery in the prestigious journal Nature. The research focuses on the finding of a bone called the pisiform that is considered important for flight.

“Flight or near flight behaviors in dinosaurs only appears in lineages after the pisiform has moved in,” said Napoli. “This is suggestive that this may have been one of the last key evolutionary innovations that dinosaurs need to try to fly.”

A complicated behavior, flight requires some sophisticated changes in an animal’s skeleton from a creature that ran around on the ground and captures food to do “this other bonkers thing and stay up in the air,” said Alan Turner, Professor and Chair in the Department of Anatomical Sciences. 

“Where this paper shines and falls into this Nature worthy category is that it helps solves one of the important problems in life” regarding when the structural changes necessary to automate folding the wrist occurred to put a dinosaur on the path to flight.

An impulse

While Napoli’s interest in dinosaurs stems from an early age, his particular focus on this bone in theropods developed in the last year of his PhD research at the American Museum of Natural History.

“This was entirely a chance discovery,” said Napoli. He had been looking intently at the bones in the forearm of a Citipadi, which is a close relative of the oviraptor, and suspected that a pisiform or ulnare was present.

He noted it in his work, suggesting it looked like a carpal bone. He found another museum specimen in a field jacket, which is a plaster protective covering, from a site in the Gobi Desert in 1993.

When the prep team carefully opened it the way an orthopedist might remove the plaster of Paris from a cast, he “immediately saw a completely articulated forearm and hand and, in the wrist, [he] could see the pisiform was there,” Napoli recalled. “It was just amazing. My jaw dropped.”

A fortunate confirming piece to this anatomical find also occurred by coincidence.

Napoli was speaking about another fossil with Alexander Ruebenstahl, a close friend who was a PhD student at Yale University. Ruebenstahl was processing a CT scan of a dinosaur hand from another theropod that he couldn’t identify and sent the pictures to Napoli.

“When I looked at them, I couldn’t believe that I was seeing another pisiform,” said Napoli. He had discovered two different bird like dinosaurs with the same important bone.

Ruebenstahl, Napoli and Matteo Fabbri from Johns Hopkins University came up with a plan for the paper. An “amazing CT data wizard” Ruebenstahl processed the data sets.

The CT scans told the researchers almost everything they needed to confirm this bone. The final piece came from looking at research on bird embryonic development, which showed them that the suspected migrated pisiforms were similar to those seen in bird embryos. This indicated that the theropod fossils made an evolutionary transformation that is mirrored in bird development.

Turner suggested that these discoveries sometimes lead to similar findings once researchers know where to look.

“The evidence has been sitting there [until] someone realizes it,” said Turner. Once a researcher finds a needle in a haystack, other scientists can go into these other haystacks and make similar discoveries. “You don’t know what to look for, until you do.”

Returning to his roots

Turner isn’t just a colleague and chair of the department, but also served as a mentor. When Napoli attended Brown University as an undergraduate, he volunteered in Turner’s lab, where he learned the art of CT scanning.

“It’s quite the completion of the circle,” said Turner, who recalled how “eager and hard working’ Napoli had been when they first starting working together. “It’s really good to see the hard work he put in is starting to bear fruit” with these high-profile papers.

Turner appreciates the opportunity to provide support for Napoli and added that professional development “takes a village.”

For Napoli, that village included his parents John and Amalia Napoli, who were dedicated to helping James and his two sisters with their cognitive development even before they were born.

Amalia, who was a musician when James was born, played music for him and engaged in word activities. Once he was born, she provided flashcards in different areas, such as science and history.

“He was always interested in the natural world like animals,” she said. “We always joked that if anyone was ever born to a career, it was him.”

She would put the flashcards out and would ask him to find a triceratops. He would either point or, at times, would move over and sit on the card.

Passionate about science herself, Amalia started her own scientific training after her youngest daughter entered school. Amalia earned a master’s and PhD and is now completing her postdoctoral research in the Neurobiology and Behavior.

Amalia and her son were both earning their PhDs at the same time. James would call his mother when he was walking back to his apartment to exchange stories about what happened that day in their work.

Conducting PhD research can be “isolating because most people just don’t have the experience to empathize with the ways in which it can be particularly stressful or challenging,” James Napoli explained. “It helped both of us to have such a close confidant who had that kind of lived experience” during the challenges and the triumphs.

A mother’s pride

As a fellow scientist, the maternal Napoli can appreciate the excitement that comes from publishing research in Nature. “It’s a tremendous boost to his career,” she said. “High-profile papers have a big impact on how you’re perceived in the scientific community.” And, of course, “I’m so proud,” she added. “I’ve been posting it” everywhere.

When the Napoli progeny found out Nature accepted his paper, he celebrated with his mother and one of his sisters at a steakhouse in the area. 

The former musician, who works on the pathogenesis of neurodevelopmental disorders and will be a lecturer in the fall, appreciates how people see the Napoli scientists from different perspectives. Some think of her as “James’s mom” while others see him as “Amalia’s son.”

Additional questions

As for the Nature results, James Napoli and Turner see this discovery as inspiration for future research.

“The little pisiform we’re seeing doesn’t have that complex and well-defined anatomy,” said Napoli. “It’s best interpreted based on these two lines of evidence as a transitional step. It hasn’t become anatomically complicated.”

Napoli is already planning to search for ways evolution tinkered with the bone as he seeks a clearer answer about when these simpler parts transitioned to a more modern design. He suggested the work he and his colleagues did on this study provides “evidence that dinosaurs with a pisiform are the dinosaurs that start to experiment evolutionarily with flight.”