These dinosaur bones were made for walking! But how?!
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
It’s not enough to just eye-ball some fossils and guess how a creature moved. For that, we need bone-on-bone mapping.
Armita Manafzadeh and team at Yale University built 3D models of joints and scored how well each pose fit together.
They tested their puzzle piece method in living birds during walking and running. Those real poses scored the highest!
Then they applied the method to the extinct raptor Deinonychus and re-animated its walking stride. Instead of guessing, they let the bones rule out what poses don’t work.
No more guesswork. Just joint work. And that’s a WRAP-tor.
Reference: Manafzadeh, A. R., Gatesy, S. M., & Bhullar, B.-A. S. (2024). Articular surface interactions distinguish dinosaurian locomotor joint poses. Nature Communications, 15, 854. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-44832-z