The Truth About Killer Dinosaurs Page #3

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by T. rex while it was alive.

Triceratops must have survived for long enough

for the wound to heal.

It's the first time scientists can say

for certain that T rex

wasn't simply a scavenger -

because they know that,

at least on one occasion,

it did attack Triceratops.

They know that T rex grabbed its horn.....

and broke it...

They also know that T rex grabbed the frill

of the same animal

with enough force to crunch through bone.

But there is still much more to discover about

the relationship between these two heavyweights.

If T rex ambushed Triceratops

he would have had to been quick.

So how fast could T rex run?

He's been depicted as everything from a lumbering

hulk to an animal that can out pace a jeep.

Some have even speculated that these legs

could power him up to 45 mph.

So what's the truth. ?

Jim Farlow of Indiana University

is investigating

one of the world's finest collections

of footprints of meat-eating dinosaurs.

Here's a real nice one right here,

starts out here with a left footprint and then

we go here to the next right footprint

and beyond here is another left footprint

of the same animal.

By measuring the distance between the footprints,

Jim can calculate

how fast this dinosaur was moving...

Well judging from the length of the stride,

l, d guess that this beast

is moving at a fast walk...

maybe 7-8 mph which is sort

of a fast jog for a human being.

So can these footprints help scientists

to work out the top speed of T. Rex?

Well there's a problem because T rex was much

larger than the dinosaurs that left these prints.

Now if we had a tyrannosaurus stride....

and if we start at about

where that footprint is...

the same foot would now come down....

going to be about here.

And that's just a walking stride...

So you can see in order to encompass the entire

length of stride of a running tyrannosaurus -

you're going to have to have a very big surface

and it might be hard to get one that large.

In fact no footprints of a running

T. Rex have ever been found...

So to consider how fast a tyrannosaurus could run,

we may have to use something

other than footprints.

John Hutchinson is studying the way animals run

at the Royal Veterinary College

in Hertfordshire, England.

He's trained Sharon the ostrich

to work-out on a running machine.

And she's helping him work out

how fast T rex might have run.

Ostrichs, legs are very similar to T rex, s...

pretty skinny with long tendons

stretching down to the toes

and all the muscles piled up at the top.

Look at this ostrich....

an ostrich can run faster than any human.

How does it do that?

Well it has huge leg muscles about 15%

of the body weight in this ostrich.

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