RE: Definitions of running (was RE: RE: Complaining)

[Jaime Headden <qi_leong@hotmail.com>]

Ah, so now you need a "bounce" (elephants have this), and a "suspension phase" 
(elephants lack this, but gallopers have this). Gosh, your argument is JUST AS 
ARBITRARY as theirs. However, unlike yours, their use of the definition is 
founded on kinematic and biomechanical forces entirely. Yours required a slam 
on Muybridge (deserved or otherwise) to make -- in your ineffable manner.

It's becoming clear that whatever the needs, here, what the bounce describes 
(which alters how mass is moved even in a stable movement pattern such as a 
walk) and what the suspension phase describes are two entirely different 
things. In a biomechanical sense, these are two separate things, but you are 
trying to conflate them. You fail to consider a neat, useful and generally 
elegant pattern because it allows an animal you don't like to think about as 
"running" to be classified as a runner. What you seem to want is that an animal 
has to "gallop" to "run," and this is an unshakable premise. Nothing runs 
unless it "gallops."

Cheers,

  Jaime A. Headden
  The Bite Stuff (site v2)
  http://qilong.wordpress.com/

"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969)


"Ever since man first left his cave and met a stranger with a
different language and a new way of looking at things, the human race
has had a dream: to kill him, so we don't have to learn his language or
his new way of looking at things." --- Zapp Brannigan (Beast With a Billion 
Backs)


----------------------------------------
> Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:46:08 -0400
> From: GSP1954@aol.com
> To: dinosaur@usc.edu
> Subject: Re: Definitions of running (was RE: RE: Complaining)
>
> "We do find evidence that elephants run in a sense,"
>
> said first author John Hutchinson, a Stanford
>
> postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of
>
> Mechanical Engineering. "It's an intermediate
>
> sort of gait, but it looks like what we
>
> biomechanically would call running. They don't leave
>
> the ground, which is the classical definition, but
>
> they do seem to bounce
>
> definition."
>
> The problem with saying that elephants can run is that elephants cannot
> really run the way most mammals can. Saying animals can either just walk or 
> can
> run is to simplistic, there are as above notes transitional forms like
> elephants that have barely some running attributes, but are much slower than
> most mammals and cannot even trot like hippos much less gallop like rhinos 
> (not
> a simple size thing, an adult horse the same mass as a juvenile elephant is
> almost three times faster, its the flexed limbs and perhaps mass dedicated
> to locomotion that makes the difference).
>
> The way it should work is this.
>
> If an animal cannot achieve "a bounce" nor a suspended phase then it cannot
> run and is only walking (fits salamanders I think, turtles, maybe the
> biggest sauropods since even just walking their long strides could have gotten
> them to the elephant max of 15 mph).
>
> If it can achieve a bounce in a least one set of limbs but cannot bounce
> enough to get all feet off the ground at the same time then it is semirunning
> or ambling (elephants, unitatheres, most sauropods, derived stegosaurs).
>
> If it can achieve enough bounce to get all feet off the ground then it is
> achieving a full or true run (bipedal run, hopping, trot, pace, canter,
> gallop) (most limbed reptiles, most all dinosaurs including giant theropods,
> giant ornithopods, giant ceratopsid, big ankylosaurs [albeit barely], many
> birds, most mammals including hippos [they can really haul all that fat 
> around on
> those dinky limbs, no point in trying to outrun one], brontotheres,
> indricotheres).
>
> GSPaul
>
> </HTML>