Some dinosaurs may have swung their tails to walk

New 3D simulations of dinosaur movement suggest that some animals may have swung their tails to help them move, the same way we humans swing our arms. Looking at the simulated movements of a Triassic theropod, Coelophysis bauri, an interdisciplinary team of researchers suggests that side-to-side tail movements may have helped some dinosaurs regulate their angular momentum and reduces the strain on the muscles.

The team put their simulation of the dinosaur, which lived about 200 million years ago, in the movement of the elegant crested tinamou, a life South American bird that prefers to walk and run rather than fly. The observation that C. bauriThe body of may have moved with a little less rigidity than previously thought could be extended to other dinosaurs, helping to nuance how the extinction displaced animals. The team’s results were published today in Science Advances.

Discovery means’ there was also greater diversity in dinosaur movement patterns–that some dinosaurs would have moved differently from others, and we shouldn’t just classify all theropods (for example) as moving in exactly the same way, ”said Peter Bishop, evolutionary biomechanist at Harvard University and lead author of the study, in an email to Gizmodo. Bishop said that “this shouldn’t be surprising, considering they’ve been on the move for over 160 million years – they’ve had plenty of time to tinker with the way they work.”

Once they have determined that their model for dino locomotion looked like the way the tinamou moves in real life life, the team applied the model to a musculoskeletal recreation of the dinosaur. They found that the dinosaur’s speed was comparable to previous estimates, but that its neck and tail moved at the same rate, helping the animal maintain its angular momentum as it ran, much like us, them. humans, let’s swing our arms when we run or walk.

“It’s always good to see robust computational biomechanical approaches applied to dinosaur locomotion,” Nizar Ibrahim, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Portsmouth who is not affiliated with Gizmodo, told Gizmodo in an email. recent research. “I think many of us strongly suspected that dinosaur tails were more dynamic and complex than previously assumed, but what we really needed was robust quantitative approaches.”

In 2020, a team led by Ibrahim published their analysis of the well-preserved tail of a spinosaurus, a carnivorous dinosaur known to prowl around waterways. Based on the tail structure, Ibrahim’s team postulated it was a swimming dinosaur. Although questions remain on the strength of a swimmer spinosaurus was, these kinds of models are help paleontologists bring fossils to life by articulating the skeleton in three dimensions, striking certain muscles and using modern analogs to reveal new and better guesses about the movement of dinosaurs.

“Now that we have implemented this simulation framework and the simulations themselves are solved very quickly, it means that we are now ready to explore locomotion and other behaviors in a multitude of other extinct creatures, and not just dinosaurs, ”Bishop said. “Pretty much everything is a fair game. That’s the great power of simulations – that they allow us to explore anatomies that have no modern equivalent, and thus test questions that are otherwise impossible to answer.

Swaying would have been different depending on the length and size of the tail, Bishop wrote, and some may not have used the ability at all for movement reasons. For some dinosaurs, courtship displays may have required tail movement, and the structure of ornithopod dinosaur tails may have made the appendages more rigid. When Bishop’s team pulled the tail in their simulations, the dinosaur had to apply 18% more muscle effort when moving.

“Like all models, there are areas where reality is much more complex than simulation. Things like the foot’s interaction with the ground and actually controlling the non-member parts of the skeleton are all things we can do better in the future, ”Bill Sellers, a computational zoologist at the University of Manchester which is not affiliated with Recent Research, Gizmodo said in an email. “The ultimate goal is a digital twin of the fossil ecosystem so that we can really understand what these animals did and how they lived.”

The research is the last work of a five-year project understand how the first dinosaurs functioned in relation to other reptiles of their time. With their upright posture and bipedalism, theropods are an excellent resource for understanding how different means of locomotion have evolved over time.

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