Facts about dinosaurs’ legs you didn’t know
Scientists have long believed that dinosaurs’ long legs were necessary for animals to develop speed while catching prey. This and several other surprising facts about dinosaur limbs you didn’t know.
How did dinosaurs move? Scientists are still searching for the answer to this question, and this is aided by the regularly appearing new skeletons: both dinosaurs on two legs and on four. Limbs in these prehistoric animals played a slightly different role than initially thought.
What kind of legs did the giant dinosaurs have?
Enormous dinosaurs had long legs, according to a new analysis. Scientists believe that large body sizes can limit speed, and the study found that large dinosaur species with longer legs were not faster than their short-legged counterparts, which was important for survival. But they did move more “efficiently.”
By calculating how much energy each dinosaur expended moving at walking speed, the researchers found that those with longer legs needed less energy to move among the largest.
The new study suggests that long legs in the largest dinosaurs also helped the animals conserve energy and travel greater distances in search of food. “Large animals, need ‘adaptations’ that can target endurance and efficiency,” the authors commented.
What the number of legs in dinosaurs depends on
Scientists analyzed various indicators, such as limb proportions, size ratios, body weight, and gait, to estimate the maximum speed of more than 70 species of theropod dinosaurs. Their sizes ranged from 200 grams to nine tons. They included Tyrannosaurus rex and many other bipedal predators that dominated for 180 million years
Thus, scientists have concluded that the number of legs in dinosaurs was determined by the proportion of limbs and the way they fed.
Dinosaurs could move on their front legs
Scientists at Purdue University and the Houston Museum of Natural Science explained that traces of large sauropods about 110 million years old were found in Texas in the 2018-19s. Scientists determined from the skeletal structure that these dinosaurs moved exclusively on their front legs.
The scientific world has drawn the following conclusion: the front legs of dinosaurs were much more powerful than hind legs, so they could push off with them when moving. At the same time, scientists explained the absence of traces of hind limbs by the fact that they accounted for a small mass of the body. Similar prints were also found by scientists in 1940.
