Posted on 06/05/2012 7:39:30 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
...University of Manchester biologists used lasers to measure the minimum amount of skin required to wrap around the skeletons of modern-day mammals, including reindeer, polar bears, giraffes and elephants.
They discovered that the animals had almost exactly 21% more body mass than the minimum skeletal 'skin and bone' wrap volume, and applied this to a giant Brachiosaur skeleton in Berlin's Museum für Naturkunde.
Previous estimates of this Brachiosaur's weight have varied, with estimates as high as 80 tonnes, but the Manchester team's calculations -- published in the journal Biology Letters -- reduced that figure to just 23 tonnes. The team says the new technique will apply to all dinosaur weight measurements.
Lead author Dr Bill Sellers said: "One of the most important things palaeobiologists need to know about fossilised animals is how much they weighed. This is surprisingly difficult, so we have been testing a new approach. We laser scanned various large mammal skeletons, including polar bear, giraffe and elephant, and calculated the minimum wrapping volume of the main skeletal sections...
Dr Sellers, based in Manchester's Faculty of Life Sciences, explained that body mass was a critical parameter used to constrain biomechanical and physiological traits of organisms.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
Good news!
Michael Moore is still the heaviest land creature ever to walk the face of the earth.
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Now wait a sec -- we've all *seen* Fred Flintstone's car tip over... |
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I’ll have a brontosaurus burger light please
Making the assumption that mammal rules apply to non-mammals...
Oh, but don’t you know that dinosaurs are not reptiles and every bit as advanced as mammals? In fact, birds are really dinosaurs, so surely dinosaurs are just like birds.
Seriously, I would like to see them measure some serious reptiles for comparison, such as crocs and turtles (discounting the shells, I suppose). But then, maybe they’d also have to measure birds.
Ketchup, mayo, mustard, onions, lettuce and tomato, or just plain?
What fries with that?
An ostrich, an emu and a rhea walked into a bar, um, I mean, measuring an ostrich, an emu and a rhea and determining if they have the same 21% metric would give me a lot more confidence in the dinosaur numbers.
The works please- Hmmm- tastes just like chicken
This article is just an ongoing ‘evolving’ story that melds and molds itself to an evolutionary diatribe- They need to make dinosaurs ‘lighter’ becasue ‘birds are light, and dinos ‘evolved into birds’, so they needed to come up with a narrative that shows dinos were ‘klighter than originally thiouihgt’ in order to link them to light-boned birds (although they still haqven’t linked a sea creature to a land dweller- of course they throw some deceitful drawings of cynodonts out there making htem look almost hte same size as the next creature i nthe evolutionary tree- but the FACT was that the gulf between them is severe- the two animals were the size of a rat, and a hippo- Yet we’re told the ‘transitional record is ‘nearly’ complete”?
Egads! Dino feathers that aren’t feathers- not even close-, slow moving dinos are now warm blooded and moved fast ‘like birds’, now dinos losing weight thanks to ‘new calculating methods’ (based on current live species which are wholly unrelated)- on and on it goes- the story/fairy-tale just keeps evolving-
It is chicken, only a bigger variety, and one that can eat you. Life was rough back in those days. No McDonald’s. No Burger King. No Wendy’s.
Oh the horror of it all.
What? Brontosaurus stew, again?
Barney. Calling Barney. You’re wanted for dinner.
Jeez, how many years in college and loads ‘o’ dough to say, “Dinosaurs were pretty darn big!’’.
Uh, would it not make MORE sense to WEIGH the reindeer, polar bears, giraffes and elephants? and then calculate the skeletal ratios and apply that to dinosaurs? This approach seems to mean that all dinosaurs would have to look like Twiggy!
That's how they did it. Take a modern skeleton, determine the minimum wrap volume, take known body density figures, that gives a minimum body weight for the animal. But actual measured animals in the natural state weigh in at 20% more than this.
Do the same for a dino skeleton to get the minimum weight. Now assume wild dinos were more like modern animals than roly-poly butterballs, so use the same 20% addition to get natural weight.
They should also weigh emus and ostriches by way of comparison.
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