Like this, but with teensy arms and bigger teeth.
Instead of a loping, lunging Tyrannosaurus rex, imagine the thunder lizard doing more of a power-walk: the clenched bum, the stiff legs, the whole shebang. Pretty evocative mental image, right? For that, you have a recent presentation at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting to thank. Dinosaur gaits are right up there with "how did flight evolve?" and "what makes us human?" on the list of fascinating, but intangible, things scientists wish we understood, and this particular scientist, Heinrich Mallison, a palaeontologist at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, was leveling a criticism at traditional efforts to figure out how dinosaurs perambulated. Basically, he says that dinosaurs had such big butts that our usual method of comparing dinosaurs to small-cheeked modern animals is doomed to failure. Dinosaurs, unfortunately, are not available for gait analysis today, and scientists have to depend ...
