Re: Horner on NBC Nightly News

[John R Hutchinson <jrhutch@socrates.Berkeley.EDU>]

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Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 11:02:15 CDT
From: "Demetrios M. Vital" <vita0015@umn.edu>
To: dinosaur@usc.edu
Subject: Re: Horner on NBC Nightly News
Message-ID: <200107181602.LAA00680@www7.mail.umn.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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On 18 Jul 2001, Chris Collinson wrote:
[snip]
> It had the biomechanics of a bird
> not an elephant and so had pneaumatitized bone making the beast much
lighter
> and nimbler, than would be expected for such a large animal.
But if it had no aerial phase, as recently suggested by John Hutchinson and
Matthew Carrano, then it moved more like an elephant, another animal with
no aerial phase. Heck, Hutchinson recently speculated that T. rex couldn't
move faster than 9 mph! Matthew Carrano gave me fifteen or twenty mph top
speed for T. rex and eight to twelve mph for Anatotitan in a personal
correspondence.
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I'm not sure where I supposedly speculated that.  I certainly did not ever
say that in a paper.  I'd like to say here that I'd rather not speculate at
all on the precise maximum speed of a tyrannosaur or any other extinct
animal.  I can't say for sure whether an adult tyrannosaur could move a
maximum of 5, 9, 15, or 25 mph, but I can rule out some of the faster
speeds.  It's hard enough to get the maximum, or near-maximum, speed of any
living animal, as my collaborative work on elephant locomotion has shown
me.  Assigning a number to a maximum speed for an extinct animal,
especially one that has some very different anatomy from from any living
bird, ungulate, or elephant, is too imprecise for me to attempt right now,
given current knowledge.  In my work on elephants I've seen how
quantitative speed estimates that get cited in the literature can too
easily be taken as fact, cited repeatedly, then eventually become data in
someone's bivariate plot and least squares regression... of dubious value
if the speeds themselves are erroneous.  I think we're better off right now
using quantitative approaches mainly to test for qualitative differences in
locomotor function in extinct dinosaurs.  And doing more work with living
animals, so we can better understand the basic mechanisms that underlie
maximum speed.
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John R Hutchinson
Department of Integrative Biology
University of California                                                        
                        phone:  (510) 643-2109
Berkeley, CA  94720-3140                                                        
                fax:    (510) 642-1822

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/people/jrh/homepage.html
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