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Scientists Using Supercomputers To Puzzle Out Dinosaur Movement
Nerval's Lobster writes "Scientists at the University of Manchester in England figured out how the largest animal ever to walk on Earth, the 80-ton Argentinosaurus, actually walked on earth. Researchers led by Bill Sellers, Rudolfo Coria and Lee Margetts at the N8 High Performance Computing facility in northern England used a 320 gigaflop/second SGI High Performance Computing Cluster supercomputer called Polaris to model the skeleton and movements of Argentinosaurus. The animal was able to reach a top speed of about 5 mph, with 'a slow, steady gait,' according to the team (PDF). Extrapolating from a few feet of bone, paleontologists were able to estimate the beast weighed between 80 and 100 tons and grew up to 115 feet in length. Polaris not only allowed the team to model the missing parts of the dinosaur and make them move, it did so quickly enough to beat the deadline for PLOS ONE Special Collection on Sauropods, a special edition of the site focusing on new research on sauropods that 'is likely to be the "de facto" international reference for Sauropods for decades to come,' according to a statement from the N8 HPC center. The really exciting thing, according to Coria, was how well Polaris was able to fill in the gaps left by the fossil records. 'It is frustrating there was so little of the original dinosaur fossilized, making any reconstruction difficult,' he said, despite previous research that established some rules of weight distribution, movement and the limits of dinosaurs' biological strength."
You don't understand. Gigaflops per second is an acceleration unit.
Run the sim for a while and you get a very very fast cluster indeed...
I am always amazed at how much under-estimation of dinosaurs there is. Remember when we thought Tyranosaurus Rex was slow? Now, we estimate that it runs at what? up to 35 mph?
Now, I wonder what their model would predict the top speed of an Elephant to be? If you look at an Elephant and it's gait you'd think it slow. But it can reach top speeds of 25 mph. Guess what, if you compare an elephant to most other animals in a simulation. You would not conclude that they could hit 25mph. Why? Because elephants don't really run as other animals. They always have one foot on the ground. Their movement doesn't match. So if you said, take an elephant and model it to see if it can run. It would return back that it was incapable of running. When in fact, elephants have a modified gait that they use for higher speeds.
I'd wager the movement is akin to pogo'ing affect. If you've ever run with your knees locked, you'll understand what I mean. It's clearly not as fast as "running" but it can be faster than walking. But whatever, however, you want to describe it. An elephant exceeds the speeds a typical model would show it capable of.
Now, if you take these premises, and create a model. Your conclusions are going to be "fail". Why? Because you have limited knowledge. Take a large saurapod and model it after a running gait. It will show negative results. So you say, hey, let's see how it does with a more elephant like gait. Cause elephants don't really run, but they can charge at up to 25mph. Results fail. You now conclude that said giant beastie is only capable of 5mph walk.
YOU ARE WRONG!!!! Because you've predicted based on a model without understanding other forms of movement. Would 5mph be sustainable for the achievement of accessing food? avoiding predators? etc. In other words, can a 5mph speed sustain a giant saurapod's lifestyle?
Consider for a moment that many lizards when they run seem to not just use their legs, but rather bend their elongated bodies left and right creating a wiggle affect. Rather similar to what a snake does. It is not just the reach of the legs, but the shortening of the torso that affects the speed and movement of some lizards.
And it may very well be likely that a similar body function would allow greater speed. Most extremely slow moving creatures such as turtles, have a tendency to be armored and protected.
My gutt feels like they're missing an unknown aspect of mechanics. And that such creatures could probably reach at least 8-12mph