Study finds T-rex had a swing in her step

Study finds T-rex had a swing in her step

Humans and animals have a preferred walking speed. This is, in part, influenced by the amount of energy required: they prefer to walk at the speed at which they use the lowest possible amount of energy. One of the ways to achieve this is using something called resonance.

You already know how it works: when you are on a swing, you can’t just swing at any speed. If you want to do it properly, you have to get the timing right, and swing in the rhythm of the swing. In other words: you have to resonate with it. And when you’re on a nice relaxing walk, the parts of your body resonate, too. Walking slightly slower doesn’t require less energy: you notice that it’s actually harder.

This works for animals that walk on four feet, and for two-legged animals like humans and ostriches. Pasha van Bijlert, student Human Movement Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam (VU), applied the idea to an animal that walked differently from anything walking the earth right now: Tyrannosaurus rex. These carnivorous dinosaurs didn’t just have two legs, they also had an enormous tail that helped them move around.

Like the bones in our necks, the bones in tails are held together by ligaments. “You could compare it with a suspension bridge”, Van Bijlert explains. “A suspension bridge with a ton of muscle in it.” Every step the tail swings up and down. That means that like the swing, it has a natural frequency at which it resonates.

To find out what that frequency is, Van Bijlert and his professors Anne Schulp (Naturalis/Utrecht University) and Knoek van Soest (VU) built a 3D model of Trix, the Tyrannosaurus rex on display at the Dutch National Museum of Natural History, Naturalis. They added digital muscles to the famous skeleton, and on this muscular model they could perform biomechanical analyses. From these, they derived the natural frequency and a prefered walking speed: 4.6 km/h (2.9 mph). So, when Trix was out on a stroll, she walked at roughly the same speed as you do. If you had a pet T. rex, you would have no problem walking it – in terms of speed, at least.

Van Bijlert, Van Soest and Schulp published their findings in the journal Royal Society Open Science this Wednesday. “There were already some studies investigating dinosaur walking speed, but they mostly looked at the legs and ignored the tail – which is what makes dinos so unique”, Van Bijlert says. “They usually found much higher walking speeds. The one we calculated is lower, but it’s similar to that of other animals.”



from ScienceBlog.com https://ift.tt/3dDTlJ6

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular

Words Matter When Discussing Alcohol Issues: A New Stigma-Free Vocabulary for Better AUD Outcomes

Image
Word choice may seem out of place among the myriad factors that can influence outcomes for a complex condition like alcohol use disorder (AUD). In fact, the stigma created by the language that is used to describe alcohol problems can decrease many people’s willingness to seek help for alcohol problems. It also can affect how people with AUD are treated in all aspects of life. “Stigmas are the negative attitudes toward people that are based on certain distinguishing characteristics,” says National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) Director George F. Koob, Ph.D. “More than a decade of research has shown that stigma contributes significantly to negative health outcomes and can pose a barrier to seeking treatment for mental illness or substance use disorders.” In the United States, nearly 90 percent of people with substance use disorders and 35 percent of people with serious mental illness do not receive treatment. In a recent article published in  Neuropsychopharmacolo
Read more

‘Massive-scale mobilization’ necessary for addressing climate change, scientists say

Image
A year after a global coalition of more than 11,000 scientists declared a climate emergency, Oregon State University researchers who initiated the declaration released an update today that points to a handful of hopeful signs, but shares continued alarm regarding an overall lack of progress in addressing climate risks. “Young people in more than 3,500 locations around the world have organized to push for urgent action,” said Oregon State University’s William Ripple, who co-authored “The Climate Emergency: 2020 in Review,” published today in Scientific American. “And the Black Lives Matter movement has elevated social injustice and equality to the top of our consciousness. “Rapid progress in each of the climate action steps we outline is possible if framed from the outset in the context of climate justice – climate change is a deeply moral issue. We desperately need those who face the most severe climate risks to help shape the response.” One year ago, Ripple, distinguished profess
Read more

Researchers advance science behind gut health and prebiotics

Image
When it comes to improving human gut health, approaches and the success of these approaches are based largely on an individual’s gut ecosystem: the bacteria present, its diversity and other factors. Therefore, trying to improve gut health through application of prebiotics or probiotics can have wildly variable results based on gut flora composition. Bruce Hamaker , director of the Whistler Center for Carbohydrate Research and Distinguished Professor of Food Science, and Thaisa Moro Cantu-Jungles, his postdoctoral research associate, recently discovered a way to select prebiotic fibers that have the potential to provide improvement of gut health where everyone would benefit. Their study, conducted in vitro, showed an increase in butyrate-producing bacteria with a selected fiber using this new approach. Butyrate is a short-chain fatty acid that supports many of the body’s essential functions from regulating the immune system to digestive health. In donors’ gut flora where these bacter
Read more