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T-Rex A Slow Mover
Ant writes "Link: 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.
"There is no way you could fit enough
muscle into its body for that kind of
locomotion," said John Hutchinson,
co-author of the Nature article. "You
wouldn't have enough room left over for
all the other body parts.""
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Although marathoners are fast: being able to string together a series of miles at near world class pace, over the traditional sprinting distances of 400m or less they are not competitive. Athletes who are better at the sprints tend to be of the mesomorphic body type like Maurice Green, Carl Lewis, Ato Boldon, Michael Johnson. Ectomorphic types like Bikila tend to excel at the distance events where a high rate of speed is maintained for a long period, like a deer, not at maximum speed dashes like a cheetah.
Furthermore, attempting to extrapolate between such radically different body plans as a human; who in the larger scheme of things is a poor runner in all regimes, an ostrich, whose body is essentially all leg and neck and a T-Rex, with a much different torso to leg length ratio from both ostriches and humans is an exercise fraught with difficulty.
It seems the current problem is to attempt to determine the maximum speeds of which T-Rexes and their prey are capable. That could give one a clue as to the T-Rex's hunting style: if a T-Rex is much faster than its prey it may hunt like a cheetah, if its about the same speed it may hunt like a tiger; cornering its prey then making a very short rush, or if it has good endurance it may hunt like a wolf by running its prey to exhaustion.
Whatever the final probable outcome, attempting to intuit the result from the performance of human athletes is probably not going to give any useful information. I am not an expert but I believe that if anything at this point paleontology is only beginning to realize how little information we have about the living habits of dinosaurs. All we really have is a decent idea about the variety of body plans of dinosaurs, and as far as I know even the warm blooded versus cold blooded debate is not completely settled yet either. Similarly biomechanics is still an infant science, we have only recently come to understand the aerodynamic principles that allow a bumblebee to fly and still don't have a very good idea about the possible range of movement of the giant saurapods.