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Like many (most?) of us, I was a huge dinosaur fan as a kid. I read every horrible, outdated book I could get my hands on. I read Robert Bakker’s book The Dinosaur Heresies not long after it was published, with its often-wrong but very provocative reimagining of how dinosaurs lived, moved, and interacted with their environments. My primary scientific love was space, and so I pursued physics as a career, but I never completely forgot my dinosaur obsession. Now in the February 2017 issue of Physics World, I get to combine the two interests!

Deducing how dinosaurs moved

How did dinosaurs dash and their cousins the pterosaurs take flight? Physics-based modelling is helping to solve these mysteries of movement

For Physics World:

Jurassic Park and its sequels are best thought of as monster movies. But they do make dinosaurs look and act like real animals – which, of course, they were. For more than 100 million years, various groups of dinosaur were the largest predators and herbivores on the planet. There were many smaller species too, though we only know about a fraction of them, since fossils of them are rare, and we’re aware of many only through fragments.

Scientists have been able to answer the biggest scientific question posed by Jurassic Park in one of its most tense chase scenes: could a Tyrannosaurus rex outrun a Jeep? (Answer: no.) Knowing the top speed of an apex predator is vital as it tells us what sorts of prey it could catch. To better understand these creatures, scientists also want to know if a Stegosaurus’ fearsome spike-wielding tail could be used as a weapon, and what damage it could do. Another question is how pterosaurs (cousins of the dinosaurs) could evolve to become the largest flying animals.

Answering all of these questions involves understanding what forces and torques these creatures’ skeletons could withstand. [Read the rest at Physics World…]