Posted on 02/27/2002 10:29:03 AM PST by RoughDobermann
Edited on 04/29/2004 2:00:10 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
STANFORD, California (CNN) -- New models of the leg muscles of Tyrannosaurus Rex suggest that a real T-Rex might not have passed the screen test for "Jurassic Park." Stanford University researchers writing in the British journal Nature this week suggest that a T-Rex could not have been able to run as fast as the one in the movie -- and might not have been able to run at all.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
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.
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?
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 ?
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.
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.
Your theory would explain the empty spray paint cans found there.
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.
Not quite, but I know a jacka$$ that has that much BS in his head...
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