Scientists: T-Rex couldn't move fast

CNN ^

[dennisw]

Baalbek Lebanon figures big in the Zacharia Stitchin books. A spaceport for alien visitors? Annunaki? Mid_East is very prone to energy vortexes I think.

[medved]

What's wrong medved, you are the one that claimed mans' muscles and animals' muscles generated the same amount of strength?

You say you don't like apple and orange comparisons?

The whole thing of comparing human and monkey strength is an apple/orange thing altogether. A monkey/ape's arms are his major limbs. You can't compare an ape's arms to ours; the natural comparison is the ape's arms to our legs. Want to see how lame a chimp really is? Have him try to run a competetive 440. I once saw Kazmaier pick up an upright freezer and RUN up a hill with it; it's far from obvious, to me at any rate, that a gorilla could do that.

Likewise there used to be a guy with an orangutan who would show up with the carnival around where I live offering $50 to anybody who could stay in a ring with the orang for two minutes; the SPCA made the guy drop the act after some karate artist all but killed the orang without getting touched.

But the real comparison here is between human weightlifters and pure herbivores such as the sauropod dinosaurs, horses, cows etc. If animal muscle were 10 times better than ours as the one person cllaimed, than it should be no problem to demonstrate some 360-lb herbivore lifting the same 1000-lb. weight which Kazmaier used to do squats and deadlifts with. In real life, the first time you get to a herbivore which can do anything at all with a 1000-lb. load other than get mashed flat by it, you're talking about elephants.

[mcook4]

It has nothing to do with muscle mass. It is bone structure of the legs that determines speed.

[null and void]

Horse power n. 1.the power exerted by a horse in pulling. 2. a unit for measuring the power of motors or engines, equal to 746 watts, or to a rate of 33,000 foot pounds per minute (the force required to raise 33,000 pounds at the rate of one foot per minute)

[cracker]

Wow medved, I'm impressed. Some of those books and articles were actually less than 15 years old. Just a few months shy of ten years, even! Getting better....

[medved]

I'm still waiting for some sort of an apology for the stupid statement about human muscle being weaker by a factor of ten than any other mammalian muscle. Has it dawned on you yet that "all higher vertibrates" includes humans? Or perhaps you regard Cambridge University as a bunch of rednecks who wouldn't know anything about mammalian physiology??

[null and void]

An appology? You jest! As I said, I have not found the relevent paper, I am in job transition and it's packed away. I will freepmail you when I do.

BTW you DID see the dictionary definition of "horsepower" didn't you? 33,000 pounds is a wee bit more than the 1,000 that you said would collapse anything short of an elephant, isn't it?

[null and void]

I wonder how much a knight in shining armor, with his arms, and the saddle, and the armor for the horse weights? Anyone?

[medved]

I take it you have a horse which can actually lift 33,000 lbs.?

[stanz]

No, but living reptiles display those scary-looking orbs.

[TigerLikesRooster]

RE #30

Is it possible that these T-Rex lived in the water just like crocodiles or hippos, partially submerged in the water. This way, water can support T-Rex's weight, and T-Rex can get around using less powerful legs. Is there any reason believe that T-Rex is only a dry land creature ?

[general_re]

I wonder how much a knight in shining armor, with his arms, and the saddle, and the armor for the horse weights?

Honestly? Not as much as most people think. From about 1000-1300 AD, the standard chain-mail rig in use ran about 60 pounds or so - partly because people, on the average, were smaller back then than they are now. The full-blown plate armor, a la "Excalibur", that came into use around 1400 would have been slightly heavier, but not much more so - here's a modern maker who makes plate armor in the 50-70 pound range. That style armor didn't really last long, anyway - around the time it was introduced, firearms were being introduced also.

All told, a fully-equipped warhorse of the day would have carried not much more than about 300 pounds, which would have been relatively easy for a horse approximately the same size as a modern Clydesdale. The real reason for having such a big horse was because of the way the saddle was set up - when you hit something, the force of impact was transferred from lance to knight to saddle to horse. A bigger horse means a bigger blow to your enemy.

[medved]

That's a good question and in the particular case of the trex I couldn't rule it out on first principles. Some scientists still think sauropods lived in water since the square/cube problem is insurmountable, but that doesn't work for numerous reasons. A sauropod might get floatation in the center of a lake but there'd be nothing to eat there; he'd have to come to the edge of the lake to try to browse on vegetation growing there and, the first minute he did, his feet would go straight into the muddy lake bottom around the edge and he'd be stuck there for the rest of his life, which would be about two days starting from then.

Moreover, an adult elephant requires about 25 square miles of vegetation to eat on a yearly basis and a sauropod would require much more than that, and browsing around the edge of a lake wouldn't provide that kind of square mileage even if you forget about the problem with not having snowshoe feet.

[medved]

You got those Belgians and Clydesdales in jousts but it's never been clear to me whether or not Europeans ever made extensive use of anything like that in real wars. The real armies of the day such as those of Chengis Khan and Tamerlane used lamalar armor, and eliminating weight while covering significant distances was certainly the major factor.

[Barnacle]

Beats me, but I'm convinced the cave drawings were done by kids skipping school ... smoking dope.

Your theory would explain the empty spray paint cans found there.

[TigerLikesRooster]

Re #14

The picture of sauropod I saw has a long tail. Could this tail be used as swimming aid ? Besides, if the animal lowers both its tail and neck on the surface level of water, it can get good buoyancy in shallow water too. That way, sauropod can slither out of muddy shore like a semi-snake with fat mid-section. By the way, another possibility is that sauropod eats not leaves and trees but algae-like micro organism on lake surface. It is like one of those large whales or giant sharks which suck in huge amount of water and eats micro-organisms. If sauropod have similiar diet, all it has to do is sucking water and filter algae all day. I am not sure how well its teeth were develop. If they are not well-developed, we can say sauropod is scum-sucking all day and does not have to worry about navigating lake or land with that inconveniently shaped body. Sauropod looks to me an animal who do not want to go anywhere in a hurry, stays in one location most of the time.

[null and void]

I take it you have a horse which can actually lift 33,000 lbs.?

Not quite, but I know a jacka$$ that has that much BS in his head...

[null and void]

Excellent! Thank you. FR is the best way to tap into the smartest people on earth! So, saddle, rider, knight, knight's armor, arms, horse's armor totals say <500 pounds. Good piece of trivia to know.

[goldstategop]

I have that one. The special effects are so realistic. The same team made the sequel, Walking With Prehistoric Beasts. Its out now. Anyway, even T-Rex didn't move that fast, it likely moved fast enough to take a prey animal by surprise. T-Rex in the Cretaceous food chain was more analogous to a cat than a dog. The smaller theropods probably ran in packs and hunted their prey down like modern canids do. Then again paleontology is guesswork, for one has ever seen a living T-Rex in action and the scientists would concede they don't know exactly how fast T-Rex did move over the prehistoric world's landscape.