Lasers Establish the Weight of Dinosaurs

Over the years, researchers trying to get an estimate of how much dinosaurs weighed have always come across the same obstacle, and namely the fact that the beasts have been dead for about 65 million years. Up to this point, no suitable instrument has been available for such measurements, but now experts have invented a new laser tool to do just that, and it's currently used to estimate the weight of Tyrannosaurus Rex, as well as that of other duckbill dinosaurs. The bad part about this new machine is that there's no way for anyone to dispute the results, since this is the most accurate technique yet invented.

“Our technique allows people to see and decide for themselves how fat or thin the dinosaurs might have been in life. You can see the skeleton with a belly. Anyone from a 5-year-old to a professor can see it and say, 'I think this reconstruction is too fat or too thin,'” University of Manchester biomechanics researcher Karl Bates from the United Kingdom explained.

The main innovation behind the new technique is a relatively new application for lasers known as LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging). Basically, this is nothing more than an optical remote sensing technology, which can measure properties of scattered light in order to find the range and/or other information of a distant target. Thus, it's able to create maps, establish speed, or determine heights. For the first time in its existence, the new system will be used to create 3D models of five species of dinosaurs, after which paleontologists will establish the animals' actual weight.

“Dinosaurs probably had about 30 percent of their mass in their hind limbs, with the plausible range somewhere between 20 to 40 percent. It has been shown in previous studies that giants like T. Rex would have needed much more muscle than this in their hind limbs to be the kind of fast runners that are sometimes portrayed as in the media (e.g. Jurassic Park),” Bates told LiveScience in an interview.

“Reconstructing more dinosaurs in such detail will allow us to examine changes in body mass and particularly center of mass as they evolved. As we know, dinosaurs evolved into birds. As they did so, the center of mass moved forward and different walking styles evolved,” he concluded.