Walking With Dinosaurs: Scientist Reconstruct Argentinosaurus Steps With Powerful Computer Models

A Argentinosaurus huinculensis skeleton at the Museo Municipal Carmen Funes in Argentina Bill Sellers, The University of Manchester

For the first time in more than 94 million years, Argentinosaurus is walking again.

Granted, the 131-foot-long, 83-ton dinosaur is tramping around on a computer screen, not down the street. But scientists are excited to have resurrected one of the biggest sauropods ever to walk the Earth – even if it’s only a digital simulation.

"If you want to work out how dinosaurs walked, the best approach is computer simulation,” University of Manchester researcher Bill Sellers said in a statement on Wednesday. “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."

Sellers and his team took a laser scan of an Argentinosaurus skeleton and plugged it into a computer modeling program. With the help of a powerful computer system – equivalent to the working power of 30,000 desktop computers – the scientists put the ancient beast through its paces on a virtual “trackway.” A paper on their reconstruction of the dinosaur’s gait appears in the online open-access journal PLoS ONE.

source:IBTimes