Dinosaur Speed Demon
22nd October 2011
Carnotaurus
You’ve probably heard of the tremendous Tyrannosaurus Rex, or the amazing Albertosaurus, but have you heard of the road runner of the dinosaurs, the Carnotaurus? On one episode of Quirks and Quarks, the host Bob McDonald interviews Scott Persons, a PhD student at the University of Alberta, about this fantastic beast. Persons was studying the Carnotaurus, and he noticed that its tail bones looked very strange. They tilted steeply upward, overlapping each other. This bone structure would cause a very stiff tail, restricting quick turns. But why? In dinosaurs’ tails, there was a muscle called the codothimeralis. This muscle, when it constricted, would pull back the leg, helping the dinosaur run. In the Carnotaurus’ tail, the bones tilting upward gave more space for the codothimeralis, allowing it to expand. So this dinosaur gave up quick turns for sheer speed. It could probably run 30-35 mph, as fast as a racehorse. That is really fast for a dinosaur.
My thoughts
Finding out about this dinosaur and how it was structured was really interesting for me. I think that learning about past life forms is very important, because it helps us understand how we and our Earth as we know it came to be. It’s also really cool to learn about. =D
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