Using an advanced computer modeling technique, researchers from UK and Argentina recreated walking and running movements of the 130-feet-long Argentinosaurus huinculensis and tested its locomotion ability.
Argentinosaurus huinculensis.
Argentinosaurus was a giant, long-necked plant-eating dinosaur that lived in what is now South America during the Cretaceous period, between 97 and 94 million years ago.
The study, published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, provides the first ever virtual trackway of Argentinosaurus and disproves previous suggestions that the prehistoric creature was inflated in size and could not have walked.
“If you want to work out how dinosaurs walked, the best approach is computer simulation. This is the only way of bringing together all the different strands of information we have on this dinosaur, so we can reconstruct how it once moved,” said lead author Dr Bill Sellers from the University of Manchester.
“We used the equivalent of 30,000 desktop computers to allow Agentinosaurus to take its first steps in over 94 million years,” added co-author Dr Lee Margetts, also from the University of Manchester.
“The new study clearly demonstrates the dinosaur was more than capable of strolling across the Cretaceous planes of what is now Patagonia, South America.”
The reconstructed specimen weighed 80 tones and the study shows that it would have reached just over 2 m/s – about 5 mph.
“It is frustrating there was so little of the original dinosaur fossilized, making any reconstruction difficult. The digitization of such vast dinosaur skeletons using laser scanners brings Walking with Dinosaurs to life…this is science not just animation,” said senior author Dr Phil Manning from the University of Manchester.
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Bibliographic information: Sellers WI et al. 2013. March of the Titans: The Locomotor Capabilities of Sauropod Dinosaurs. PLoS ONE 8 (10): e78733; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0078733
