Re: Athletic Performances

["Thomas R. Holtz, Jr." <th81@umail.umd.edu>]

At 07:51 PM 6/13/97 -0400, you wrote:
><And can you give me an estimation of maximum speed for the following
>dinosaurs, please?>

This is EXCEEDINGLY difficult.  We have very little good data on the maximum
speed of modern animals (despite references in zoology texts, very, very few
animals have been accurately timed: humans, horses, greyhounds, cheetahs
(but only *THIS YEAR*), and perhaps a few others.  The other "estimates"
you've seen are guesstimates).

>I'll try.
>
>(major snippage)
>
>Coelophysis-  About 65 or 70 MPH.

Not without bionics...  Best estimate: check the speeds of modern
contemporary birds of similar limb proportions.

>Compsognathus-  Somewhere between 40 and 50 MPH.

Very unlikely.  Can anyone think of a turkey-sized animal today which
reaches these speeds?

>Tyrannosaurus-  About thirty MPH.

(I'd go for 30 km/h, and perhaps 30 mph for young Tyrannosaurus or smaller
tyrannosaurids, but see Farlow et al.'s paper for some of the possible side
effects of running in an adult T. rex).

>Ornithomimus-  About 45 MPH.

Wouldn't be terribly surprised, but we need data to back this up.

>Velociraptor-  About eighty MPH.

Not unless it was a Kryptonian.  Dromaeosaurids have shorter and stockier
legs for a given body size than most other non-avian theropods.  Certain
movies to the contrary, raptors were almost certainly not cheetah-speed
animals.  In fact, they were probably slower than most comparable-sized
theropods.  (However, their counterbalancing tail would have been very
useful in rapid turns).

>Unenlagia-  He's too new.

Agreed.

>Hypsilophodon-  I think he was the best jumper, but he probably didn't run
all that fast.

Best jumper based on... Bakker pictures?  Hypsilophodontid hips don't seem
to show specializations for jumping.  (Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if
dromaeosaurids were excellent jumpers, but that's a topic for another time).

>Triceratops-  About forty MPH.

See Dodson's The Horned Dinosaurs for a different point of view.

Anyway, as stated before, we have very little good data on the maximum
running speed of modern animals, much less the means to calculate maximum
running speed of extinct forms.  It would be nice to find some simple
calculation that allows us to figure this out (I have tried to find
something along those lines, but no luck so far...).  Much as we might like
to know these data, they are not available, and I don't expect them to be
anytime soon.

What we *do* have good evidence for is running speeds in the footprint
record.  Of course, being in mud, they might not represent maximum running
speeds (who among us runs faster in mud than on other surfaces?), and fixing
the identity of tracks to skeleton-based genera or species is difficult, but
at least these represent data we can analyse.

Hope this helps.

Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
Vertebrate Paleontologist     Webpage: http://www.geol.umd.edu
Dept. of Geology              Email:th81@umail.umd.edu
University of Maryland        Phone:301-405-4084
College Park, MD  20742       Fax:  301-314-9661