A study by an international team of researchers from universities and centers in Brazil, the United States, Argentina and Spain showed that the fossil footprints of carnivorous dinosaurs not only allow us to calculate the speed at which they ran, but also to reconstruct how they did so.
The work was led by Ignacio Díaz Martínez, researcher at the Department of Earth Sciences and Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Cantabria (northern Spain).
It reveals that the three-dimensional shape of footprints preserves information about different running strategies, foot posture, force distribution and the position of the center of mass during movement.
The analysis focuses on two traces of theropod dinosaurs from the Early Cretaceous, preserved at the La Torre site, in Igea (La Rioja, also in northern Spain), with an approximate age of 120 million years.
According to the University of Cantabria in a press release, the footprints belong to some of the fastest carnivorous dinosaurs documented in the fossil record.
Previous studies had already estimated that these animals reached speeds of between 35 and 40 kilometers per hour, which places them among the three fastest dinosaurs known worldwide.
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The new research goes beyond that estimate and links extreme speed to the way the foot contacted the ground during the race.
The study is the result of a broad international collaboration in which researchers from universities and research centers in Spain, Brazil, the United States and Argentina have participated.
In addition, it is based on decades of field work in the Cameros basin, one of the regions with the highest concentration of dinosaur footprints in the world, where more than 250 sites and tens of thousands of ichnites have been documented.
The team from the University of Cantabria is collaborating on a project that will use pressure platforms to analyze how modern animals such as ostriches, considered functional analogues of theropod dinosaurs, walk and run to compare pressure distributions measured in living animals with those inferred from fossil footprints.
According to the authors, the study shows that the locomotion strategies of carnivorous dinosaurs were more complex and variable than previously thought and confirms that fossil footprints constitute a direct record of the behavior and biomechanics of animals extinct millions of years ago.
With information from EFE
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