T. rex Might Have Been a Slow Mover
Posted March 1st, 2002
You shouldn’t always believe everything you see in the movies. In the Jurassic Park films, audiences saw the king of the dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex,
racing after its prey at speeds up to 45 miles per hour. In the first film, he chases a jeep at full speed. In the second film, we see it running through the streets of San Diego.
In reality, T. rex may have not been that fast of a mover. Researchers at Stanford University have performed studies based on the how fast animals can run,
and it turns out that T. rex may not even have been able to run at all.
The research involved comparing the size of the animal to the amount of leg muscle needed for movement. The more muscle in the legs, the faster an animal can move.
However, in order for a creature the size of T. rex to run, 86 percent of its mass would have to be devoted to its leg muscles. This would be physically impossible.
The researchers used a computer model to analyze the amount of muscle needed to power the legs of different sized animals. The basic principle, represented by these
models, showed that the amount of force exerted by muscles does not increase as fast as an animal’s body weight. Once animals grow large enough, they will lose their ability to run.
Much of this research is related to animals much smaller than the T. rex. In fact, the largest animal studied with this computer model was the horse. Currently,
Hutchinson and his colleagues are working on models for an elephant, which is the largest land animal alive today. Of course, elephants can run. However, T. rex was much larger
than an elephant and had a completely different body structure.
The Jurassic Park movies have been known for helping dispel earlier misconceptions of dinosaurs. Until about ten or fifteen years ago, it was thought that
dinosaurs were cold-blooded. However, recent research suggests that dinosaurs were exothermic.
In fact, some of the new research on T. rex has even made it into the later Jurassic Park films. In the third installment, the T. rex was replaced
by a different superpredator. Also, the T. rex was portrayed more as a scavenger instead of a hunter, another recent revision in the theory of how these animals lived.
Activity
Use the Internet to research how the theory of how T. rex moved and lived has changed over the years. Create a timeline chronicling how this change
has happened.
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