Scientific Illustration

rhamphotheca:

Dinosaur Biomechanics

by R. McNeill Alexander

Were large dinosaurs lumbering monsters, barely able to support their huge weight, or could they have moved with reasonable speed and agility? How could the long, horizontal necks of some sauropods have been supported and how could blood have been pumped to the brains of others that apparently carried their heads 8 m above their hearts? How strong a bite could be inflicted by the huge jaws of tyrannosaurs and what was the chewing action of herbivores such as the hadrosaurs? Can we reconstruct the sounds that some dinosaurs may have made and the possible fighting behaviour of others? Light has been shed on all these questions by application of the principles of mechanics, as this review will show.

This is not a general review of dinosaur locomotion, jaw action, sound production, etc. Many valuable contributions to functional morphology are omitted because they do not make explicit use of physical mechanics. Topics such as heat balance, which depend mainly on aspects of physics other than mechanics, have no place in this review. The possibility of flight by feathered dinosaurs is also omitted, although it raises interesting aerodynamic questions…

(read more: Proceeding of the Royal Society)    

(image: Camarasaurus supremus by Dmitry Bogdanov)