re:tucking

["Cunningham, Betty" <bcunning@nssi.com>]

     >The talk of arm positioning caused me to wonder whether any tracks 
     >have been discovered indicating whether quadrupedal dinos ran like 
     >horses front legs, back legs or camels left or right.  Am I even 
     >remotely making sense here? 
     
     You are pretty clear, you're just not using the right words.
     If you said "quadropedal dinos ran", do you mean a gallop like a 
     "running horse"?  Or perhaps an amble, like a "running elephant"?
     
     Horse gaits have been studied since Eadweard Muybridge.  So far, just 
     to describe what a horse does to move forwards, we have:
     Gallop
     Transverse Gallop
     Trot (in various forms, such as collected, extended, and a wierd one   
     just Paso Fino Horses do which has 2 feet touching the ground at all 
     times, etc)
     Pace (which is what camels do)
     Canter
     Walk
     -and the various things horses do to get to one from the other
     
     
     
     -Elephants (for comparison)
     Amble (same movements as a walk, just sped up in time)
     Walk
     Trot (only seen in juveniles)
     
     -Humans (for comparison as Bipeds)
     Walk
     Skip (a series of short jumps swapping legs at the end of each stride)
     Canter (a series of jumps that do not swap legs at the end of each 
     stride)
     Run
     
     most of the many other things humans do to move forward are based on 
     variations on these three modes (skip and canter not being used much)
     For example, 
     Tiptoing is a walk just on the toes, not the whole foot
     Jog is a collected run
     
     Footprints aren't something I've studied, but from what I have seen, 
     quadrapedal dinosaurs walked a lot
     
     Betty Cunningham   (Flyinggoat@aol.com)
                        (bcunning@nssi.com)
     illustrator, animator, and likes to collect dead things