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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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!
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