Hangzhou, May 6 (Xinhua) -- About 100 million years ago, in the early Late Cretaceous, a dinosaur lived in a hot, humid, lush water network. It stepped on a string of 9 footprints and turned into precious dinosaur footprint fossils.
Recently, the team of Jin Xingsheng of the Zhejiang Natural History Museum and his colleagues at the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum in Japan published the results of the research on this fossil online in the international professional geological journal Cretaceous Research. One of their jobs was to "measure the speed" of the dinosaur.
"The traffic police can infer the speed from the friction marks of the tires when braking, the criminal police can infer the height of the suspect from the footprints, and we can also calculate whether the dinosaurs were running or walking according to the footprints of the dinosaurs, and how fast they were." Researcher Kim Said.
Jin Xingsheng's team found this fossil in Yiwu, Zhejiang Province in 2019, and its footprints coincide with the footprints of Sichuan Linglong. " Thornosaurus " belonged to the class of dinosaurs , and the claws of the second toe of their hind feet were particularly large , raised high , and generally did not touch the ground. Therefore, when the dinosaur walks, the hind feet only have the third and fourth toes to land on the ground, and the footprints are very typical of the two-toed structure.
The researchers measured the length and width of dinosaur footprints, the angle between the toes, the length of single steps, and the length of multiple steps. Jin Xingsheng said that although dinosaurs cannot be resurrected, through the study of the walking style of living animals, the academic community has a more mature set of mathematical models: using the length of the footprint to calculate the height of the birth, and then using the height and the length of the multiple steps to calculate the walking speed.
To answer the "application question" of the speed measurement, you must first do the "multiple choice question". Dinosaurs are divided into two categories: Chilongosaurus and Wounded Toothosaurus. The proportion of the hind limbs and the body is different, and the estimated height is also different. Although the footprints are consistent with those of the dragons, the "Buddha-figures" cannot simply be characterized as "dragons", and scientists should fully consider the known conditions.
If it is a chilong, the estimated height is 51.8 cm and the walking speed is 6.1 km/ h; if it is a wounded toothed dragon, the estimated height is 65.6 cm and the walking speed is 4.6 km/h. In short, it was idle at the time, neither preying nor fleeing for its life.
In recent years, the Zhejiang Natural History Museum, together with the prefectural and municipal museums in the province and the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum in Japan, has carried out a large number of field expeditions in Zhejiang and discovered and protected a number of paleontological fossils. Jin Xingsheng said that Zhejiang has previously found footprint fossils such as sauropods, birds, non-dinosaurs and pterosaurs, which is the first time that dinosaur footprint fossils such as dinosaurs have been found in Zhejiang. (End)
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