Dinosaurs smaller than believed?
Dinosaurs, the largest animals ever to have walked the face of the earth and which went extinct about 65 million years ago may not have been as big as previously thought, according to the latest research.
Scientists have found that the original statistical model used to calculate dinosaur mass is flawed, which means that dinosaurs have been possibly oversized.
Gary Packard from Colorado State University said: “Palaeontologists have for 25 years used a published statistical model to estimate body weight of giant dinosaurs and other extraordinarily large animals in extinct lineages.
By re-examining data in the original reference sample, we show that the statistical model is seriously flawed and that the giant dinosaurs probably were only about half as heavy as is generally believed.”
According to the new research, these predictions have implications for a number of theories about the biology of dinosaurs, ranging from their energy metabolism, the amount of food consumed and their modes of locomotion.
These findings were published in the Journal of Zoology this month.
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