T. rex could have caught us.

New Scientist strikes fear into the hearts of time travelers everywhere with a report that T. rex could have caught humans. Easily.

Which is kind of a “No, duh,” observation, but they have video:

“Such calculations can accurately predict the top speed of a six-tonne chicken, but dinosaurs are not built like chickens, nor do they run like them,” he says.

Instead, Sellers and colleague Phillip Manning used an approach they dub “evolutionary robotics” to generate new estimates of the top speed of several two-legged dinosaurs. They built computer models featuring the leg bones, muscles, and skeletal structures of five groups of dinosaur: Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor, Allosaurus (which looks like a miniature Tyrannosaurus), the slightly smaller Dilophosaurus, and the chicken-sized Compsognathus.

…

After hundreds of generations, this simulated evolution arrived at an efficient, workable gait for each dinosaur.

They used humans, emus and ostriches as controls, and yep, the simulation was accurate.

We would’ve been toast. No matter what they say at the Creation Museum.

Entered on 27 August 2007 at 18:27 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? | Print Print

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