Now this is awesome!
I love this kind of stuff: in 1999, a 16-year old kid named Tyler Lyson found a fossilized hadrosaur of the kind called Edmontosaurus in Hell Creek, North Dakota. (How great a name is Hell Creek, anyway?)
To start with, you go, Tyler! But it gets better. Turns out the fossil includes not just bones but what scientists somewhat creepily call its skin envelope. Which in turn means science can derive a pretty good idea of the actual size of its hindquarters and tail.
In the past they’ve had to “[infer] from skeleton structure,” which seems to be academic-speak for, “make a scientific wild-ass guess.”
It turns out that Big Eddie’s scientific name should probably be something like E. steatopygous, or whatever the appropriate word-ending would be - “steatopygous” being a fancy way of saying fat-assed.
Turns out this duckbill had a big ol’ butt. What is additionally incredibly cool is that one of the researchers “has now reconstructed its gait and bio-mechanics, concluding that it had a top speed of about 28mph (45km/h), making it swifter than one of its most fearsome predators, Tyrannosaurus rex.”
Ahem.
This is the sort of thing that keeps me terrifically excited about science: the clever application of technology to derive ever-more detailed information about the past, whether it’s reconstructing an ancient British war-chariot to see how they were likely put together or, as in this case, determining what these endlessly fascinating animals looked and behaved like from bits of bone and skin. (Okay, in this case evidently big bits.)
I should mention that it’s appropriate that it turns out hadros can apparently run at a good clip, since as every schoolchild knows, on the world Paradise various species of duckbills serve as the war-mounts of choice for Dinosaur Knights.
You didn’t know that? Well, stick with me, kids, and you’ll learn that any many more wonderful things, once The Dinosaur Lords is done!
(Soon. Really!)