“Understanding the mechanics of the trabecular architecture of dinosaurs may help us better understand the design of other lightweight and dense structures,” said Trevor Aguirre, lead author of the paper and a recent mechanical engineering Ph.D. They compared their findings to scans of living animals, such as Asian elephants and extinct mammals such as mammoths. The team, funded by the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs and the National Geographic Society, is the first to use these tools to better understand the bone structure of extinct species and the first to assess the relationship between bone architecture and movement in dinosaurs. The interdisciplinary team of researchers used engineering failure theories and allometry scaling, which describes how the characteristics of a living creature change with size, to analyze CT scans of the distal femur and proximal tibia of dinosaur fossils. Without this weight-saving adaptation, the skeletal structure needed to support the hadrosaurs would be so heavy, the dinosaurs would have had great difficulty moving.” “Instead it increases in density of the occurrence of spongy bone. “Unlike in mammals and birds, the trabecular bone does not increase in thickness as the body size of dinosaurs increase,” he says. The trabecular bone tissue surrounds the tiny spaces or holes in the interior part of the bone, Fiorillo says, such as what you might see in a ham or steak bone. ![]() ![]() “The structure of the trabecular, or spongy bone that forms in the interior of bones we studied is unique within dinosaurs,” said Tony Fiorillo, SMU paleontologist and one of the study authors.
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