So, what they proved is that they do not know how to model a bullwhip,” said Myhrvold, who told CNN he plans to respond to Conti’s paper with an updated model of his own.Ĭurrie maintains it’s still possible that a dinosaur tail could have moved at sound barrier-breaking speeds, perhaps thanks to stronger skin or other soft tissues at the tip of the tail that paleontologists have yet to discover. Their model was not driven properly to demonstrate a cracking whip. “Tails in general for dinosaurs have been somehow neglected in the biomechanical studies,” she said, and with the analyses in Conti’s paper, “now we have something more experimental.”Īsteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs also triggered a global tsunami Verónica Díez Díaz, a paleontologist at Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde who was not involved with either Currie’s or Conti’s studies, said the new research is “amazing,” especially as it pertains to her work in dinosaur biomechanics. “They have built this amazing metallic model of aluminum and steel, but the real problem is that organic materials are not able to sustain the same stresses that aluminum or even steel are able to sustain.”ĭespite not being able to produce a sonic boom, Conti said it’s still plausible that a diplodocid’s tail would have been a useful tool in a fight and may have been used defensively. Ultimately, Conti concluded in the new paper that the problem was the previous models, both metallic and computer-simulated, didn’t reflect the realities of what a dinosaur’s body could achieve, or withstand. Neither did playing with the size of the tail or adding more tissue to its base. Simone Conti's model of a diplodocid tail.Ĭonti and his colleagues also examined the possibility of adding the fringed “popper” hypothesized by Myrhvold and Currie at the tip of the tail, even though no fossil evidence of such a tail tip has been found. He was surprised to see that it didn’t work. Using open-source software, he tried to simulate a diplodocid tail moving at the speed of sound and included hypothetical constraints for the biomechanical properties of the dinosaur’s skin, bone, and flesh. As proof of concept, Conti looked to Currie and Myhrvold’s sound barrier-breaking dinosaur tails. Conti’s model was digital he wanted to practice multibody simulation, a method for studying how different materials move. Their model, which they unveiled in 2015, was indeed able to make a whip-cracking sound: a sonic boom.īut the new research has a bone to pick with this model: namely, that metal behaves differently than bone (and flesh and skin).Ī few years after Currie and Myhrvold unveiled their metal model, Simone Conti, a doctoral student in a joint paleontology-engineering program with Portugal’s Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Italy’s Politecnico di Milano, began building his own. To go along with the computer model published in 1997, Myhrvold and Currie built a 12-foot-long working model of a diplodocid tail out of steel and aluminum, and added a fringed “popper” from the tip of a bullwhip, which helps a whip attain its sound barrier-breaking speeds. And ultimately, it showed, certainly to my satisfaction, that these things almost certainly broke the sound barrier.” “He started computer modeling it to see what he could do with it. “I gave him all kinds of information on measurements for sauropod tails,” said Currie. Sabah Ahmed/Carnegie Museum of Natural History This compression produces a shock wave, and when that shock wave reaches an observer’s ear, they will hear all the compressed pressure waves associated with the object’s movement at once: a sonic boom.ĭiplodocus skeletons at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. If the moving object is traveling faster than the speed of sound, around 767 miles (or roughly 1,235 kilometers) per hour, then the pressure waves can’t keep up with the object, and they are compressed together like water in the wake of a speedboat. When something - a whip, a plane, or a dinosaur tail, for example - moves through the air, it creates pressure waves. The sound of a cracking whip is actually a sonic boom. They were wide-ranging, but especially flourished in what’s now the western US around 152 million years ago.įor decades, scientists have debated whether these dinosaurs could whip their tails faster than the speed of sound, creating a sonic boom. Diplodocids were a family of dinosaurs with long necks and, often, even longer tails - some species’ tails reached 50 feet in length.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |