What a 130-Foot, 80-Ton Dinosaur Looks Like When It Walks

As a kid I remember finding old dinosaur books in the public library that said that the sauropods—the long-necked Apatosaurus or brontosaurus, depending on the book’s age—must’ve been limited to lumbering through swamps, because there was just no way for something that big to walk the Earth.

But paleontology kept rolling, and by the time I spoke to Mark Norell, chairman of the paleontology division at the American Museum of Natural History, in March 2012, he told me he doubted that sauropods ever went into the water—they were too busy eating to bother with aquatic sports. What’s more, their bodies were full of air.

But still, the question of dinolocomotion remains compelling, just due to the sheer immensity of the whole thing, and the seeming impossibility of ever witnessing it. How do you make something that’s been dead for almost 100 million years walk again?

Lasers, naturally.

A team from the University of Manchester traveled to Argentina to laser-scan a 40-meter long skeleton of the sauropod Argentinosaurus huinculensis. And then, according to Dr Lee Margetts, who worked on the project, "We used the equivalent of 30,000 desktop computers to allow Argentinosaurus to take its first steps in over 94 million years.”

After generating "a number of plausible locomotor patterns" and "testing them for their efficacy in terms of biologically and mechanically meaningful measures such as skeleton and joint loading, metabolic energy cost, speed and acceleration," the researchers were able to model the long-extinct, 80-ton dinosaur and determined it moved at a gait of about 5 miles per hour, taking, what seem to be, dainty little steps, with just a little bounce and sway. I could watch it go all day.

The study, which was published in PLOS ONE yesterday, provides the first ever 'virtual' trackway of the dinosaur, and puts those rumors of sauropods being forced to stay in the swamp to rest. The researchers concluded, however, that any land animal larger than the Argentinosaurus would have to have a really different body shape or behavior to prevent collapse from muscular strain.

The University of Manchester plans to use this tech on more popular dinosaurs like the tyrannosaurus rex and triceratops next. I hope they amble so charmingly.