Dinosaur weights

[Helen Anderson <redledger@cableinet.co.uk>]

This one interested me quite a lot a couple of years ago because it was
pretty common to see palaeontologists (like Alexander McNeill) dunking
dinosaur models from the British Museum of Natural History in vats of
water to see how much was displaced.  These models were used as it was
thought that they were the most realistic and were made to a definite
scale.  Therefore, the experiment allowed the model to be scaled up by
40 times, I think.  It was also assumed that (and this is where my
?physics is not so good) the mass of the dinosaur was equal to water, I
think.  Does water have mass?  Sorry to digress - if you really want to
know all about this experiment, I'll look out the reference to
Alexander's book.  Anyway, weights were worked out for the dinosaurs on
this basis but no-one (except me) tried a control experiment to see if
the hypothesis worked.  I went out and bought three 'Brittans' model
animals - a carthorse, an African elephant and a rhino.  I wrote to the
company who told me the scale was 1/33, I think, and I tried the
experiment again.  I mean, we know what elephants and carthorses weigh,
more or less.

Sadly, the chemistry lab at the University of Bath was not the best
place to conduct this and I could'nt get a suitably marked beaker or get
the horrid models to sink properly.  And, they kept falling off the
cotton.  The water kept wicking down the side of the jar and it was all
a complete disaster.  We all went off to the pub for lunch and I have
never gotten around to doing it again.  Anyone with access to proper
equipment could certainly try it and check dino weights in the process. 
I'd be really interested to hear the results.

Helen