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randomdinos — Some non-avian dinosaur speed estimates
#albertosaurus #apatosaurus #carnotaurus #ceratosaurus #coelophysis #deinonychus #dilophosaurus #dinosaur #diplodocus #gallimimus #giganotosaurus #herrerasaurus #homalocephale #hypsilophodon #muttaburrasaurus #parasaurolophus #protoceratops #stegosaurus #styracosaurus #triceratops #tyrannosaurus #argentinosaurus #parksosaurus #dinosaurspeed
Published: 2018-11-14 20:17:26 +0000 UTC; Views: 35830; Favourites: 210; Downloads: 335
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This is gonna be a long one. Since at least the Dinosaur Renaissance (and likely before, as evidenced by the existance of papers dating to the 70s), the maximum speed of non-avian dinosaurs is a curious topic for most people. It has been theorized that dinosaurs like stegosaurs could run as fast as wild horses (47 km/h; Coombs 1978), and the same for Giganotosaurus and Tyrannosaurus in separate occasions, but biomechanical studies eventually concluded that these were not possible. On the other hand, exceptionally slow speeds have also been suggested, like Tyrannosaurus around 20 km/h; slower than elephants, which are far less adapted for high speeds than the tyrannosaurid skeleton.Here is a compilation of estimates from various methods on various dinosaur clades; unfortunately the vast majority of estimates are made on theropods, leaving other clades behind. In general, it seems that dinosaurs for the most part would've been similarly fast as mammals of similar size; some exceptions are species or breeds with extremely well developed running specializations, such as racehorses and cheetahs. Most of the estimates made by the multispecies papers could not fit into the chart, as they tend to cluster in the same range; as a result, I included many more below. Surely other papers that I'm not aware of also have plausible estimates (one thing to keep in mind is that even within the same estimation method, unknown masses and incomplete limbs allow for leeway in the total speed).
The methods used here are a combination of two papers on biomechanics from vastly different times (Thulborn, 1982 and Hutchinson, 2002), and a formula derived from the one in the Eofauna team's book (Records y curiosidades de los dinosaurios terópodos y otros dinosauromorfos, 2016; still no English version AFAIK). A third paper, Sellers et al. 2007, came to some overlapping conclusions with the latter, as well as presenting estimates for a couple of modern cursorial birds. Another study (Sellers et al, 2013) looks at the mechanical competence of a (sadly very inaccurate, but it's the only one available) skeletal mount of Argentinosaurus, and a 3d model of Diplodocus carnegii was used by Heinrich Mallison to estimate maximum speed.
Estimates using Thulborn (1982):
Euoplocephalus: 6.7-9.7 km/h
Sauropelta and Panoplosaurus: 7.8-11.3 km/h
Ammosaurus: 10.8 km/h
Diplodocus: 11.5 km/h
Anchisaurus: 14.6 km/h
Efraasia: 16.2 km/h
Abrictosaurus: 14-19 km/h
Podokesaurus: 15-20 km/h
Brachiosaurus: 17.6 km/h
Compsognathus: 19-26 km/h
Fabrosaurus: 21-27 km/h
Pisanosaurus: 22-29 km/h
Nanosaurus: 24-32 km/h
Leptoceratops: 28.2 km/h
Psittacosaurus: 25-33 km/h
Ornitholestes: 26-34 km/h
Stegoceras: 26-32 km/h
Dryosaurus: 33-43 km/h
Struthiomimus: 38-50 km/h
Dromiceiomimus: 38-51 km/h
Gallimimus: 42-56 km/h
Estimates using Larramendi (2016, modified):
Sanjuansaurus: 28.1 km/h
Leshansaurus: 29.3 km/h
Acrocanthosaurus: 30.7 km/h
Tethyshadros: 30.8 km/h
---Homo sapiens: 31 km/h
Australovenator: 31.4 km/h
Neovenator: 32.1 km/h
Afrovenator: 32.3 km/h
Allosaurus maximus and Deinonychus antirrhopus: 32.7 km/h
Suchomimus: 33.2 km/h
Yutyrannus: 33.4 km/h
Daspletosaurus torosus: 35.5 km/h
Chilantaisaurus: 35.6 km/h
Sinraptor hepingensis: 36.2 km/h
Tyrannosaurus and Tarbosaurus: 37 km/h
Austroraptor: 37.8 km/h
Deinocheirus: 38.2 km/h
Estimates in Sellers et al (2007):
---Homo sapiens: 28.4 km/h
Tyrannosaurus: 28.8 km/h
Allosaurus fragilis: 33.8 km/h
Dilophosaurus: 37.8 km/h
Velociraptor: 38.9 km/h
---Dromaius novaehollandiae: 47.9 km/h
---Struthio: 55.4 km/h
References (+details on the methods):
-Thulborn, R.A. (1982). ''Speeds and gaits of dinosaurs.''
-Hutchinson J.R, Garcia M. Tyrannosaurus was not a fast runner. Nature. 2002;415:1018–1021. doi:10.1038/4151018a
-Sellers WI, Manning PL. 2007. Estimating dinosaur maximum running speeds using evolutionary robotics . Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 274:2711-2716
-dinosaurpalaeo.wordpress.com/2…
-Sellers, W. I.; Margetts, L.; Coria, R. A. B.; Manning, P. L. (2013). Carrier, David, ed. "March of the Titans: The Locomotor Capabilities of Sauropod Dinosaurs" . PLoS ONE. 8 (10): e78733.
-Larramendi, A. & Molina, R. (2016). ''Records y curiosidades de los dinosaurios terópodos y otros dinosauromorfos.''
Skeletal reconstructions used:
Stegosaurus, Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, Styracosaurus, Coelophysis, Protoceratops, Hypsilophodon, Ceratosaurus, Parasaurolophus, Herrerasaurus, Parksosaurus, Dilophosaurus, Carnotaurus, Gallimimus, Tyrannosaurus by ScottHartman
Patagotitan, Tyrannosaurus, Albertosaurus by me
Heterodontosaurus, Homalocephale by GetAwayTrike
Giganotosaurus by Franoys
Orthomerus by Batavotyrannus
Deinonychus by bricksmashtv
Muttaburrasaurus by PLASTOSPLEEN
Human silhouette from www.onlygfx.com/20-woman-silho…
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Comments: 83
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An adult T.rex probably couldn't move much faster than 30 km/h, but juveniles were much lighter and had legs well adapted for running, so 50km/h is a rather conservative estimate for them, I think.
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The Eofauna book has been translated in english though www.amazon.com/Dinosaur-Facts-…
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Indeed, now to wait for the sauropodomorph-based sequel in June.
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Wait a minute...I thought it was Hirt et al. (2017) the one who estimated a speed of 17 mph (27 km/h).
Didn't Sellers et al. (2017) estimate that speeds above 11 mph (18 km/h) would have probably been impossibile forTyrannosaurus?
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No, Sellers et al. models a maximum speed of 27.7 km/h (17 mph). Popular news articles that only skimmed the paper are responsible for spreading the myth that they achieved only 17 km/h, probably based on a misinterpretation of the units.
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Yeah sorry, I took miles for meters, and apparently many other people on the internet did the same...
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Seems like it using the methods that're available, but I could see future studies saying otherwise.
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"In general, it seems that dinosaurs for the most part would've been similarly fast as mammals of similar size"
What are some comparative mammal speeds, especially for smaller animals?
(I wasn't able to read Hutchinson or Larramendi, Thulborn said "mammals would usually have outstripped dinosaurs on a weight for weight basis," and the rest I couldn't find mention of mammals other than elephants ).
Most mammal speeds I've come across (especially for things smaller than or comparable to zebra-sized) are usually faster than dinosaurs of similar size.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ab…
www.academia.edu/1544506/The_I…
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I was thinking more about larger animals (1+t) with that comment, though admittedly that's an unfair comparison, since relatively few dinosaurs and even fewer mammals reach that size. Looking at Christiansen (2002) it looks like I was wrong when it comes to medium-sized species.
It's worth noting the formula modified from Larramendi's book yielded about 55 km/h for the common ostrich IIRC, while estimates of ~70 km/h are common in the literature and even up to 96 km/h has been claimed; if these estimates are reputable, the formula would be underestimating the speed of medium-sized and smaller dinosaurs (not as relevant as the ostrich case, but plotting a human also turned out with a lower speed than the peak of Olympic sprinters). I don't think that change would bridge the gap between them and say, antelopes and gazelles or big cats, though; I assume the limb structure and the flexible spines in those cases, among other things make them better adapted for speed than theropods and small ornithischians.
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Is there any estimate to Baryonyx speed?
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Not that I know of, but I'd guess between 25-35 kmh.
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Damn I thought Ornithomimidae would be faster considering Ostriches can peak at 96.6 km/h with a average of 70 km/h. The fastes dinosaurs would be just average runners in todays world.
Hyena: 60 km/h
Grizzly Bear: 56 km/h
Black Rhinoceros: 55 km/h
Gallimimus: 42-56 km/h
White Rhinoceros: 50 km/h
Dromiceiomimus: 38-51 km/h
Wild Boa: 40 km/h
Hippopotamus: 30 km/h
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Remember the Sellers 2007 estimate gets 55 km/h for ostriches, and Larramendi's method gets 62.5 km/h. I have doubts about many top speeds reported for modern day animals, since they can be twice as fast as the fastest scientifically recorded, like with elephants (40 vs 21 kmh), but if ostriches run faster than 70 kmh, then these methods could be underestimating ornithomimid speed.
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How fast would you wager a Camarasaurus supremus could run if we were to smudge it into the comparison here?
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Between the Apatosaurus and Diplodocus estimates is where I think most adult sauropods would fall, including C.supremus.
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how fast would an adult t.rex be?
some say only up to 12 mph. is this accurate?
i know t.rex whent through a big growth spurt but does it impact the animal that much?
normally they would get faster the older they grow as they get stronger and bigger, atleast when looking at modern day predators(of cousre there are some exeptions i assume)
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Modern estimates for adults go from 17-18 mph to 25 mph. They get slower after Jane's age because as adults they weigh more than 1000x as much as when they're born (and more than 10x as much as the "Jane" stage), so gravity affects them differently (that also makes it so that an adult T.rex can't jump, for example)
The 12 mph was never actually estimated, it was a typo of 17.2 mph that a lot of media articles copied because they didn't read the entire paper.
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Was the typo from the paper that came out in 2017?
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I still can't believe smaller theropods like Velociraptor and Coelophysis and ornithischeans like protoceratops Hypsilophodon were slow. I thought for sure most dinosaurs would be faster than humans, especially small ones like ornithopods and raptors, or even big ones like hadrosaurs or some ceratopsians.
I mean T.rex running 20 mph with Triceratops running just a bit slower, sure I can get behind that, but I didn't think they'd all be slower.
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Humans (that is, healthy, athletic humans) are better runners than many people think: they have long legs for their size, compared to most larger animals, and we're in a size range where we aren't so small that our strides are insignificant, but also aren't so big that we need less flexible legs just to sustain our weight. We spent a good part of our evolution as bipeds in open environments without advanced weapons, so even if a person can't run faster than a lion or a leopard, it still pays to evolve speed.
Edit: also Velociraptor is not slow, 38.9 km/h is faster than any human can sustain for more than a few hundred meters.
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That I do know, that humans (at least athletes anyway) can run longer than other animals, it's just that for a time I thought most dinosaurs could've ran faster than humans.
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Most of these ARE faster than humans.
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Given that I often see average human maximum run speed listed as ~16 - 24 kph then most of these would be faster than humans.
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Interesting, I'm surprised by some of these.
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I'm trying to write a fact sheet on adaptations of Tyrannosaurus and I've read a lot of articles on its speed. Most recent entries have said it could only run about 12mph (19.3kmh), but your post here (which looks awesome by the way) says something about 'Larramendi' and its estimate for the speed of T.rex was around 37 km/h. So what is Larramendi? is it more recent and up to date that whatever system estimated a 12mph speed? Are there any other articles I can read about it?
(Also on an interesting note, the faster speed estimate kinda made sense looking back at some things I read about T.rex. Correct me if anything I am saying here is wrong or outdated, but Tyrannosaurids generally had significantly longer shin, foot, and toe bones relative to the femur than most other theropods. Tyrannosaurus particularly had large cnemial crests and ilium bones that supported attachment for large leg muscles, and the foot bones were tightly locked and more effectively transferred locomotory forces and elastic energy from the foot to the lower leg like deceleration, lateral acceleration, and torsion thanks to the arctometatarsals and elastic ligaments of the foot. A lot of this sounds like an animal adapted for the chase, and I read this recent entry regarding Tyrannosaurus having found to have lower rotational inertia (resistance of an object to turning), greater torque (turning force), and ultimately greater agility than most other large dinosaurs, which sounds to me like something an active hunter would need. Again, if there is something off about any of this, it would be great to be corrected).
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Note that while the T. rex speed estimate is indeed higher than the oft-misquoted 12mph estimate, this also applies to other large predatory theropods (they generally seem to top out at between 30-35kmh). It’s faster by only a few kilometres per hour.
T. rex was likely capable of more efficient endurance running, however, thanks to the arctometatarsus. (Though other, leggier tyrannosaurids like Gorgosaurus would probably be even better at it)
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12mph is based on people misciting Sellers et al (2017), who made a biomechanical model of T.rex and concluded that it could run at 17.2 mph or 27.7 km/h. None of those entries have actually read the paper; they just copied off somebody who cited it, otherwise they'd have noticed their mistake. Asier Larramendi in his 2016 book (the last reference in the description) uses a formula to estimate biped speed using the length of the hindlimb, femur/tibia+metatarsal ratio, body mass, etc. So it's less recent than the Sellers 2017 model (which did not estimate 12mph, but 17.2), but since Larramendi's allows us to compare many different taxa while the model works only for T.rex, I prefer the modified Larramendi formula.
You can read Sellers 2017 here: peerj.com/articles/3420/
And right, the leg proportions of tyrannosaurids are important for giving them higher speed than other theropods of the same size. Being more agile would also help them hunt ceratopsids, which among the giant herbivores are probably the fastest at turning, according to a SVP 2015 abstract:
vertpaleo.org/PDFS/SVP-2015-Pr…
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Well, Sellers et al. (2017) state "This finding may well generalise to other long-limbed giants such as Giganotosaurus, Mapusaurus, and Acrocanthosaurus but this idea should be tested alongside experimental validation work on extant bipedal species.".
But yes Molina-Pérez & Larramendi (2016) offer more comparison.
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I'm sorry but as a ceratopsid fan, which page mentions their turning?
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This is some helpful stuff, thanks man ^^
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Would you also know any sources that discuss Tyrannosaurus' environment? I'm trying to draw one and knowing what kind of habitat the animal lived in would help me figure out the the most appropriate color scheme. I do have a small idea that its definitely not going to be something bright and flashy, as most large predators are, and that males could only have colorful ornamentation on the head and or throat.
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I don't exactly know its environment either, but modest coloration with one or two bright areas works practically anywhere.
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Randomdinos, how fast can A Sue-sized Tyrannosaurus run?
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Using the same formula as that of the 32.7 kmh Giganotosaurus, Sue would run at 35.5 km/h. Other methodologies would probably make it ~28 kmh, I'm guessing.
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