One of Earth's Largest Dinosaurs Walks Again (Inside a Computer)

One of the largest known dinosaurs to ever walk the Earth is walking again, albeit inside a computer simulation, after a research team modeled what the enormous sauropod's gait would have looked like.

Researchers from University of Manchester, working alongside scientists from Argentina, scanned the 35-meter-long skeleton of the Argentinosaurus, a Cretaceous-era behemoth that lived in what is present-day South America. Creating the simulation required an advanced modeling technique that required the processing power of 30,000 computers to render.

The result was a recreation of the Argentinosaurus' walking and running movements, the very first computer recreation to be done of the dinosaur's locomotion.

"If you want to work out how dinosaurs walked, the best approach is computer simulation," said Manchester's Bill Sellers, lead researcher on the project. "This is the only way of bringing together all the different strands of information we have on this dinosaur, so we can reconstruct how it once moved."

Sellers and his colleagues have published a research paper on their model in the journal PLOS ONE, contending it proves wrong previous theories that the dinosaur was so large it could not walk.

"The new study clearly demonstrates the dinosaur was more than capable of strolling across the Cretaceous planes of what is now Patagonia, South America," said Lee Margetts, who also worked on the project.

By using software of his own design, Sellers was able to map the skeleton of the Argentinosaur in 3-D.

"The important thing is that these animals are not like any animal alive today and so we can't just copy a modern animal," he explained. "Our machine learning system works purely from the information we have on the dinosaur and predicts the best possible movement patterns."

The researchers estimate that the Argentinosaur weighed 80 metric tons and would have had a top speed of 5 mph.

Sellers said this sort of research is important for understanding about musculoskeletal systems and for developing robots.

"All vertebrates from humans to fish share the same basic muscles, bones and joints," he said. "To understand how these function we can compare how they are used in different animals, and the most interesting are often those at extremes. Argentinosaurus is the biggest animal that ever walked on the surface of the earth and understanding how it did this will tell us a lot about the maximum performance of the vertebrate musculoskeletal system. We need to know more about this to help understand how it functions in ourselves.

"Similarly if we want to build better legged robots then we need to know more about the mechanics of legs in a whole range of animals and nothing has bigger, more powerful legs than Argentinosaurus."

In the future the research team plans to recreate the locomotion of other dinosaur including Triceratops, Brachiosaurus and Tyranosaurus rex.