The technique they used works via a digital musculoskeletal model that mathematically relates the size and shape of various body segments, accounting for forces exerted on the bones by muscles during movement and the pushing force generated by interactions between the feet and the ground. bauri moved about, Bishop and colleagues drew from new advances in computational biomechanics to develop gait 3-D simulations, borrowing from methods originally developed for applications in medicine and aeronautics, including NASA.
bauri is also better known than other early bipedal dinosaurs, with numerous skeletons to inform scientists about its anatomy. The species, which lived about 210 million years ago, has features such as long hindlimbs and a long, heavy tail that more or less represent a body shape and size ancestral for dinosaurs as a whole. The team decided to focus their research around Coelophysis bauri, one of the earliest theropod dinosaurs, which were carnivorous and walked on two legs. "But we saw some very intriguing results with our simulations early on, revolving around the tail, and so decided to focus more on that to see what was going on." "When we began our study we were more interested in understanding the animal as a whole, and how different anatomies relate to different performance abilities, such as maximum running speed," said Bishop. They wanted to know whether the different ways that dinosaurs and other species moved was correlated with how well they survived the end-Triassic mass extinction. Bishop and colleagues began their own simulation-based research as part of a larger project led by John Hutchinson, a professor of evolutionary biomechanics at Royal Veterinary College. Previous simulations of walking and running in non-avian dinosaurs have usually treated the tail as a rigid extension of the pelvis. Scientists have found it challenging to piece together how extinct species moved based on fossilized bones and footprints.
" and bipedal dinosaurs may offer new hints for how to improve things further." Beyond Fossils and Footprints "For example, engineers are now looking at how adding a tail to your robot can improve its maneuverability or stability, looking to the swinging tails of the modern cheetah for inspiration," said Bishop. The findings may also help engineers solve biomechanical challenges as they develop bioinspired robotics. "People had previously pontificated about what dinosaur tails were used for, but for the first time we have moved beyond mere speculation and have rigorously demonstrated how the tail functioned and what benefit it conferred to the dinosaur," said Peter Bishop, a postdoctoral researcher in evolutionary biomechanics at Royal Veterinary College in London at the time of this research and the first author of the study.īishop suggests that the team's simulations may pave the way for developing simulations of other extinct species and could help animators create more accurate portrayals of dinosaurs in movies and television documentaries. The authors infer that this mechanism may have existed in many other bipedal, non-avian dinosaurs. The findings suggest that the tail of Coelophysis bauri, a well-known Triassic species, regulated the creature's angular momentum and efficiency by "wagging" to the side as the dinosaur walked and ran - similar to how humans swing their arms as they stroll. Contrary to the notion that bipedal dinosaurs' tails simply counterbalanced the weight of their heads, novel 3-D gait simulations reveal that the tail likely played a more dynamic role in dinosaur locomotion, according to a new study published in the September 24 issue of Science Advances.