A giant dinosaur took its first steps in millions of years, but it walked across a computer screen rather than on ancient terrain.
Researchers working with scientists in Argentina digitally scanned a 130-foot-long (40 meters) Cretaceous Argentinosaurus dinosaur skeleton and were able to recreate its movement, a University of Manchester news release reported. The team used a complex computer system equivalent to 30,000 desktop computers.
The dinosaur weighed a whopping 80 tons and was able to walk at a pace of about five miles per hour.
The creation is considered to be the dinosaur's first "virtual trackway." The digital recreation disproves a theory that the dinosaur was too large to walk.
"If you want to work out how dinosaurs walked, the best approach is computer simulation. 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," Doctor Bill Sellers, lead researcher on the project from the University's Faculty of Life Sciences, said.
"We used the equivalent of 30,000 desktop computers to allow Argentinosaurus to take its first steps in over 94 million years. The new study clearly demonstrates the dinosaur was more than capable of strolling across the Cretaceous planes of what is now Patagonia, South America," Doctor Lee Margetts, who participated in the projects, said.
The dinosaur was so large it was named after an entire country, which is where it was found.
"It is frustrating there was so little of the original dinosaur fossilized, making any reconstruction difficult. The digitization of such vast dinosaur skeletons using laser scanners brings Walking with Dinosaurs to life...this is science not just animation," Doctor Phil Manning, who contributed to the paper, said.
Sellers invented the software that was used to recreate the ancient behemoths movement.
"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 said. "Our machine learning system works purely from the information we have on the dinosaur and predicts the best possible movement patterns."
The findings could help develop robots in the future, and also allowed the researchers to gain insight into the musculoskeletal systems.
"All vertebrates from humans to fish share the same basic muscles, bones and joints. 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," Sellers said.
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