Genuinely, my all-time favourite image: Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis
svpow.com102 points by surprisetalk 4 days ago
102 points by surprisetalk 4 days ago
I've got to wonder how realistic this pose is.
Even if it could rear up and balance like that, the energy expenditure vs calorific gain seems like a losing proposition. You're talking about raising the center of gravity of it's 40-ton body mass by 10-20 feet just to grab a very small mouthful of low calorific leaves.
I'd guess the reason the sauropods had an extra long neck was rather so they could AVOID moving as much as possible - stand in one place and just swivel neck around to graze a large area.
I thought the same thing, which sent me down a bit of an unexpected rabbit hole in the topic. Greg Paul argued that thr chevron shape of the bones in the bottom of the tail point to sauropods rearing and using their tails as support . Heinrich Mallison did some biomechanical modeling and found that some of the anatomical features previously thought to support rearing might actually hinder it. And last year, a study on larger sauropods (Dreadnoughtus and Giraffatitan) showed that their femurs most likely couldn’t handle sustained stress of resting.
So it looks like this pose is based on anatomy, not biomechanics, and the one rigorous biomechanical sauropod-rearing study that exists didn’t even test this genus - which means the rearing question Mamenchisaurus is unresolved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamenchisaurus
https://reptilis.net/DML/2009Apr/msg00036.html
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pala.70019
ALSO, consider how stiff their neck was, it could very well have spent most of the time grazing on the ground, like you said!
That’s an ongoing debate within paleontology that often takes place on a species by species basis. The argument goes that since diplodocids (which this species is not) had heavy muscular tails, their center of gravity was near their hips, making it easy to rear up since they were effectively already a balanced seesaw and could use the tail as a third point of contact to balance. Species in Mamenchisaurus share similar pelvic and tail features and M. youngi was show to have a stiff neck that couldn’t lift very easily, so it’s inferred that these may have reared as well. There are center of mass and skeletal models and stuff to determine whether rearing is possible but one hasn’t been made for this species specifically.
Sidenote: you underestimate the cardiovascular cost of pumping blood up a 5-15 meter neck. It’s not at all clear that a rearing strategy is more expensive energy wise. In their case it’s less spending energy to standup than just leaning back to let their skeletal structure and center of mass do the work.
Mostly I think this pose is a matter of logistics. They probably just had more vertical space than horizontal to work with for this exhibit. Even though they’re fiberglass, the casts for these guys run well into the tons per skeleton so it can be challenging to mount the armatures in an existing structure and it turns into a game of fossil tetris balanced by the cost of structural support modifications needed (there almost always are for a fossil of this size).
I suppose these animals all must have had some ability to use this type of hip pivot to get their front legs off the ground, if for no other reason than mating!
It'd be interesting to see an accurate energy analysis of the calories needed to do this. Even if the animal can position itself into a teeter-totter position with center of mass over the pivot/legs, it would still be using muscular energy to straighten up and extend, and then coming back down can hardly have been lossless - it'd be a combination of again using muscles to come down in a controlled manner (and not destroy it's front joints!), and then a final plop down which would transfer kinetic energy into compressing the landing spot... all for a mouthful of leaves.
> Even if the animal can position itself into a teeter-totter position with center of mass over the pivot/legs, it would still be using muscular energy to straighten up and extend, and then coming back down can hardly have been lossless
The idea is that they don’t position themselves into a teeter-totter position, they always are in that state (at least the species with very heavy tails). When they’re on their front feet, they’re essentially leaning forward. By bringing their tail down, they lean back into a rearing position.
That said I think most paleontologists think neck-feeding is far more likely than rearing because of the energy argument. There are relatively strong arguments for the latter along other axes but we don’t have any fossils locked in that position to prove it.
> it'd be a combination of again using muscles to come down in a controlled manner (and not destroy it's front joints!), and then a final plop down which would transfer kinetic energy into compressing the landing spot...
These dinosaurs were so heavy these were all problems already. Just supporting the mass of the skeleton required a bunch of special adaptations, some of which we see in elephants. The problem is that there aren’t many extant megafauna analogues and for many of these animals we’re not even sure how their metabolisms worked, let alone the intricacies of their musculoskeletal adaptations.
> all for a mouthful of leaves.
Vast majority of the giant necked herbivores didn’t chew at all to keep their heads light, their teeth designed instead to cut and strip entire branches at a time into their gut where they likely fermented. Regardless of the feeding method, they didn’t work a mouthful at a time.
Apparently there's a population of African elephants which rear up and balance to feed higher.[1]
[1] nature video starts with example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XzQ4BQe4fM short clip: https://www.reddit.com/r/NatureIsFuckingLit/comments/19bge4y... longer clip with two: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jpxgqu_Cfkg
Cool videos, but just because you can doesn't mean you should!
At least an elephant, having a trunk, can pull down a whole branch and make the effort worthwhile as that first video shows. It seems that a sauropod with only its tiny mouth for grabbing wouldn't be able to do that, so the outcome would be more like in that last video where the elephant was only able to grab a couple of leaves, which I assume can't have been a calorific win!
Hmm. Wouldn't a long neck permit amortizing the body lift across a lot of foliage?
I suppose in theory they could stay reared up browsing for a while, but every mouthful that needed to be chewed and swallowed in that position would be expending at least some muscular energy in stabilizing itself and maintaining leg extension.
If it was swinging it's neck from side to side while upright, then it would also need to be expending energy not only to do that but also to shift it's weight to counterbalance.
My intuition says it wouldn't be worth it, and the size some of these dinosaurs grew to suggests that easy (e.g. ground level) food was plentiful back then. I've always supposed that evolution bred gigantism out of most DNA lineages as a hard won lesson that food won't always be plentiful, and that in times of shortage being smaller is an advantage.
If they could eat from higher branches than others, they could avoid competition for resources.
Sure, but they wouldn't routinely be doing it unless a) it was possible, and b) there was an actual benefit - they gained more calories per rear than they expended doing it.
How can an animal even have a neck that long? Was it clear from the fossils that it is this long because I am skeptical.
This video [0] tries to answer the question of how we know what we know for a different species but I imagine the methods are similar.
No, there's no way to tell—the paleontologists probably just took a bunch of bones from the site and threw them together in a way that looked cool. /s
Now that is an idea for a The Far Side cartoon
Life imitates art imitating life: The story [1] of the Brontosaurus is an interesting one...
[1] https://obscuredinosaurfacts.com/blog/post/2019/08/31/bronto...
I find the post mostly notable for its dry humour. :) The picture itself... let's just say, my smartphone as of 2017 could have produced this vertical panorama all by itself in much less time than nine years, and without the help of an Emmy-award-winning SE specialist - albeit at lower resolution, meaning it wouldn't make a good print. So it was worth it in the end!
It’s really bugging me that whatever software was used to assemble this did some weird AI-ey blending from the lower jaw into the crown moulding.
How many parts is this skeleton disassembled into in transit? Each bone? Crazy project!
if the head falls of, they'll have to take everything apart just to put the head back on
meh just put the head on the end of the tail, a lot less effort and no one will be any the wiser.
See also perhaps recent Odd Lots podcast episode "Inside the Booming Market for Dinosaur Fossils":
> Two years ago, Citadel's Ken Griffin paid almost $45 million for a stegosaurus skeleton, making it the most expensive fossil ever sold at auction. So why are dinosaur bones joining the collections of millionaires instead of museums? How does the private market for fossils actually work? And how similar is it to the market for art and other antiquities? In this episode, we speak with Salomon Aaron, a director at London-based gallery David Aaron, where he is the gallery's in-house broker for dinosaur fossils. We talk about how fossils are found and priced, what it's like to work alongside dinosaur hunters, how his gallery identifies potential buyers, and why Joe thinks something about the birds-to-dinosaurs evolutionary pipeline is off.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf4nv3ggdqE
* https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/inside-the-booming-mar...
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/why-dinosaur-fossils-are-sell...
He's got some neck!
this statement is literally true: this dinosaur has a soar throat.
“Genuinely”. Did you have to write the headline with an LLM? Or you genuinely chose to use the most abused-by-LLMs adverb in the entire English vocabulary?
The blog post is clearly human written. One minor signal in the title is nothing and should not, I think, offend anyone to the point it seems to have offended you.
Besides, I refuse to accept that we are now meant to police ourselves and our use of language because AI copies it. Write the way you write, it will be apparent in your text (as it is for the author), and we'll deal with the unfortunate few cases in which a false-positive signal (like 'genuinely' in this title) the correct way: completely ignoring it