I saw a video comparing a bunch of dinosaur speeds, but I can’t seem to find any logical explanation of how this was discovered? Is this even real?
I’m very confused and can’t seem to wrap my head around any of this. We have never SEEN dinosaurs in action and (to my knowledge) only discovered bones. So how does any of that add up?
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Well you’re right that we don’t really know. The field is called ‘biomechanics’ and basically involves making educated guesses about how an animal was likely to move, given the shape and size of the bones. Animals adapted to walking or running in a certain way will have foot and leg bones that fit that. And you can make some estimations based on the reconstructed size and muscle mass of the animal. But there are other factors to consider. For example if one animal is thought to have been an active predator, well, it’s got to at least be able to outrun its prey. Also, we have found footprints of some dinosaurs, and the placement of those prints relative to one another can give you an estimate of whether the animal was walking or running and its stride distance.
But yeah no it is an estimate and we don’t know for sure.
Mercurian answered perfectly while I was typing it out so I’ll just add I love the term dinosaur philosophers.
We can have a really good idea about what kind of musculature they had based on the bones we have and the muscles of their closest living relatives.
Similarly from all that stuff we can figure out about how much they probably weighed.
If we know how strong/their muscles are/how much energy they can put out/how much force it would take to break their bones and how heavy they were, it’s a simple matter of solving the physics, since 1 kg of matter is 1 kg, doesn’t matter if it’s muscle, fat, or bone.
You’re correct that we can’t know for certain, BUT we know a few things to make educated guesses.
We know what the skeletal structure and the nature of the bones were like in dinosaurs, and from the structure and markings on the bones alongside comparisons to real life animals we can make good guess on what their muscular systems and their overall weight and movement was like. While its not conclusive, there is also evidence to suggest at least some dinosaurs were partially or fully warm-blooded or something comparable, which also effects your ability to move.
Bones generally retain the scars where muscles attached in life, which gives us a pretty good idea of how big/strong the muscles were and how they were arranged compared to modern animals. You could compare the muscle scars on a Velociraptor with those on an Ostrich, for example. Or a Triceratops to Bison. You can also compare range of movement, probably lung and heart sizes, estimate how the animal cooled itself (which defines how long it can run), and so on.
It’s a bit more involved than that, but you get the general idea.
This field of study builds along many of the same principles that are used to understand crime scenes and do anthropology & archeology work, the animal equivalents obviously build on an extension that is a bit more difficult because we can’t ask an animal the way we can ask a human about some detail — but a surprising number of scientifically useful data points can be collected from bones that retain these scars of muscles & joining tissues!
Can I just say that the term ‘dinosaur philosophers’ concurred me for a bit, but I’ve decided it’s an absolutely delightful term.
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