In the footsteps of dinosaurs: they reveal how they walked and why no current creature does it the same

All animals that circulate on land have a pattern of movement of their legs that are not always the same. For example, dogs walk by first supporting one hind leg by moving it forward, then the front one on the same side; continue with the other back foot forward, then the front one on that side. But this pet is a species that, due to its small body mass, cannot be compared to the walking of dinosaurs, which had bodies of dimensions that complicated their needs for balance, energy and movement. Some paleontologists still think that, because of their size, dinosaurs walked like elephants, but scientists have confronted them and had to rule it out: the footprints and their patterns don't match. The different species of elephants walk two steps on one side, then two steps on the other, again and again.

Paleontologists Jens Lallensack and Peter Falkingham of John Moores University in Liverpool, UK, published on March 2 in the journal Current Biology the article “A new method for calculating limb phase from footprints reveals the gait of sauropod dinosaurs.”

Scientists call sauropods (Sauropoda) the species of quadruped sauropodomorphic dinosaurs that inhabited the planet from the Upper Triassic to the Late Cretaceous, that is, from about 210 million years ago to about 66 million years ago. There is multiple evidence of its presence in America, Asia, Europe, Africa, Oceania and Antarctica.

In their work Lallensack and Falkingham described a new method used to study dinosaur footprints, by which they discovered that sauropods walked with a different gait than any living creature today.

British experts observed that previous research on dinosaur tracks done as a conventional method of footprint analysis did not provide a complete picture of how a given dinosaur could have walked. They also noticed that due to the enormous size of larger dinosaurs, such as sauropods, walking like an elephant would have required a lot of energy just to avoid falling.

This is how they created the new method of studying footprints that involves taking into account variations in footprints and time as an animal progresses. They analyzed the marks left by three sauropods by measuring the distance between the tracks and observing whether they were made by a front or rear foot and whether it was left or right. They then calculated how the limb phases fit with the tracks they were measuring, and that allowed them to extrapolate the gait.

With this new method, scientists tested their new approach to measuring the footprints of various types of animals today, including elephants. Convinced that it offered a better representation of the gait of a given animal, they used it to study the traces left by several sauropods.

It was thus that they discovered that a front leg touched the ground just before a hind leg was raised on the opposite side. This gait suggests that the giant creatures did not stagger while walking, thus preserving energy.

The findings about the life and characteristics of dinosaurs are numerous and in many cases curious. Last December, a study was released by a scientific team in Germany that claimed that a tyrannosaurus rex that wandered the Earth 68 million years ago seems to have had a bone disease that would have caused severe toothache.

In the study, presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), experts said that the serious infection, called tumefactive osteomyelitis, originated in the medulla of the dinosaur's left jaw. He probably would have given the animal, which scientists nicknamed “Tristan Otto”, an agonizing toothache, turning it into a particularly moody predator. The fossilized remains of the creature are almost completely intact, making it one of the best-preserved specimens ever discovered.

Other recent scientific findings described that in Santa Cruz the first dinosaurs lived in packs and had complex social behaviors. In Rio Negro, fossil remains of a long-necked dinosaur were found indicating that the species could live together peacefully. In Neuquén, dinosaurs have also been identified from a time in the Cretaceous Period, 140 million years ago, which were completely unknown.

According to all studies, the impact of an asteroid that crashed into Earth 66 million years ago killed dinosaurs. According to a study of fish fossils published in Nature in early 2022, it was possible to determine that this happened in spring. Melanie Durante and a group of colleagues from the Department of Earth Sciences of the Faculty of that discipline at Vrije University in Amsterdam, studied fossils excavated at the Tanis site in North Dakota. Spring was the beginning of the end for all non-avian dinosaurs and many other prehistoric reptiles, the study suggested.

“It was unimaginable to pinpoint the timing of the event,” said Durante, who led the project. If we are extremely fortunate as paleontologists, perhaps we will reach the millennium time scale, but far from this high resolution. This study has shown that yes, you can read bones and infer the seasonality of them.”

The evidence presented in the study supported the idea that fish disappeared in spring, noted Kate Trinajstic, a fish paleontologist at Curtin University who was not involved in the research. “To say that the asteroid hit in spring is really a surprising accuracy,” he said. But other scientists were wary of the findings about fossils excavated at the controversial site.

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