How to Weigh a Dinosaur
It’s pretty cool to have a conversation with a kid halfway through the dinosaur phase. They almost certainly know more facts and statistics about dinosaurs than you do, but they also have many unanswered questions about what happened to the creatures before they went extinct. This makes sense: it’s hard to imagine that something of this size is running around.
But how big are they? Thanks to a new research project , we have a much better idea, although this in turn raises the age-old question: How can you weigh a long-extinct dinosaur? Here’s what we know.
Dinosaur Weighing Basics
While you may never have really thought about how much dinosaurs weighed, paleobiologists have been trying to figure it out for over a century. So it was a big deal when researchers from the University of New England and the Royal Ontario Museum published their findings on the subject in Biological Reviews .
And as much as we want to communicate that their methodology includes time travel and gigantic proportions, this is not the case. In fact, no scales – or actual weighing – were used at all. Instead, the researchers looked at methods for estimating the body weight of dinosaurs, used since 1905, and found that, despite using different approaches, many of these methods produce strikingly similar results. This means that our current concept of dinosaur size is probably relatively accurate.
If you’re wondering what’s actually involved in these techniques, here’s some additional information from the Royal Ontario Museum :
Although a number of different methods for assessing body weight have been tried over the years, they all boil down to two fundamental approaches. Scientists have measured and scaled bones in living animals, such as the circumference of the bones of the arm (humerus) and legs (thigh), and compared them to dinosaurs; or they calculated the volume of three-dimensional reconstructions that roughly correspond to what the animal might look like in real life. In the literature, controversy has flared up about which method is “better.”
The researchers found that once large scale and reconstruction methods are compared en masse, most estimates agree. The obvious differences are the exception, not the rule.
Weight is just a number, why is it so important?
In short, because it gives us a clearer picture of what dinosaurs looked like and how they behaved. “Body size, in particular body weight, determines almost every aspect of an animal’s life, including its diet, reproduction and movement,” said Dr. Nicholas Campione, a member of the University of New England’s Paleoscience Research Center, in a statement . “If we know that we have a good estimate of the body weight of a dinosaur, then we have a solid basis for looking back and understanding their lives.”
That being said, the researchers behind this study emphasize that, like humans, every dinosaur is unique in size, shape, and mass, so it’s impossible to determine the exact weight for each type of dinosaur. “Only by using these methods together and understanding their limitations and uncertainties,” explains Campione, “can we begin to uncover the lives of these and other long-extinct animals.”