Originally Posted: August 19, 2020
Some dinosaurs were so big the ground would have shaken while they walked. But how did they carry such massive loads?
Dinosaurs likely had a different bone structure to mammals and birds that was uniquely capable of supporting huge weights, a new study has found.
A team of paleontologists, mechanical and biomedical engineers examined the upper and lower leg bones of duck-billed hadrosaurs and sauropods, long-necked and big-bodied plant eaters, whose fossils have been found on every continent.
“The structure of the trabecular, or spongy bone that forms in the interior of (the)bones we studied is unique within dinosaurs,” said AnthonyFiorillo, a Southern Methodist University paleontologist and one of the authors of the study that published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One. READ MORE