Every scientific discipline has its defining challenges, the ones that mark the field’s outer limits. Astronomers feeling plucky might try to describe what it’s like to fall into a black hole. Particle physicists might attempt to see the guts of a quark. And biomechanists, who study how physical forces affect and direct the ways animals move, might reconstruct the biggest creatures ever to live on land: the sauropods, the long-necked, long-tailed, plant-eating behemoths of the age of dinosaurs. During their 160 million years on Earth, the sauropods produced species that grew over 130 feet long and that weighed in at 100 tons--animals that, biomechanically, defy comprehension. The problem is not only conceptual-- yes, sauropods were much, much bigger than any land-treading animal available for inspection today, and so it is hard to imagine them as living, gracefully moving creatures--it is also physical.
The great extinct giants left behind nothing but their fossils as testament to their lives. And while paleontologists can easily toy with the slender bones of an extinct bat or fish to get a handle on how its body worked, the sheer size of sauropod bones makes such hands-on playtime impossible.
Technology, though, has created a way to twirl a sauropod on your fingertips, and dinosaur-obsessed computer scientists are showing the paleontologists how: put the ghost of the beast inside a machine--create a virtual sauropod that can be used to test ideas about how these animals threw around their spectacular weight.
One of these helpful outsiders is the chief technology officer at Microsoft, a brilliant polymath named Nathan Myhrvold. Myhrvold graduated high school at age 14; by 23 he had a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Princeton. Within three more years he had set up a software company that was bought by Bill Gates, who later put him in charge of basic research at Microsoft. Now, at 38, Myhrvold advises Gates on what computers will be like in the future.
As a boy, Myhrvold had a typical, visceral affection for dinosaurs; these days, while his appreciation of the beasts is undiminished, it is changed in character. Now they represent for him an intriguingly difficult intellectual problem. The total evidence you have to look at for these animals is shockingly small, he explains, because they are so different in terms of their scale and their habits. You’re able to extrapolate less well than you could if you found a giant turtle. There’s an enormous amount of debate about just about everything. For several years Myhrvold has been doing his part to further these debates through a long volley of dinosaurian e-mail with Phil Currie, a paleontologist at Canada’s Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta. Not long ago, their exchanges convinced Myhrvold that he could use computers to test some of the more hotly argued ideas making the rounds.
