We know a lot about dinosaurs, right? I mean, we all know which dinosaurs were huge, which ones were tiny, and we know all about the various in-between size dinosaurs. However, some long-standing thoughts about estimated dinosaur size might not be true. Thanks to the fact that dinosaur joints were mostly cartilage and not bone, dinosaurs might be 10 percent taller than once thought.
“Bones can’t always speak for themselves,” said Lawrence Witmer, an anatomist at Ohio University. “To understand how dinosaurs moved, we need to analyze the bones as they were inside their bodies, including their cartilage.” Cartilage, of course, is the one thing we don’t have available as it deteriorates, rather than fossilizes like bones and horns. Explained Casey Holliday, an evolutionary anatomist at the University of Missouri, this cartilage “would have added significant height to certain dinosaurs.”
Their findings will be released in the online journal PLoS ONE later this month; until then, assume everything you know about everything is probably wrong.
Tags: dinosaurs, paleontology, dinosaurs were larger than thought, dinosaurs might have been 10 percent larger than estimated, cartilage, PLoS ONE, Lawrence Witmer, Casey Holliday, unusual animals, weird science
