The Science of Why by Jay Ingram

Author:Jay Ingram
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

TRY THIS: Straighten your arm in front of you, then touch your shoulder. That one movement takes your elbow through 165 degrees. Because of all the muscle on its forearm, the T. rex could manage only 45 degrees, with very little side-to-side movement. It just wasn’t built to do anything more than simple flexing.

Osborn speculated that the muscle on the arms might have been involved in sex—but don’t forget, he didn’t know how incredibly short those arms were. So what exactly did these powerful but apparently undersized pieces of machinery do? Some scientists used the shortness of the arms as evidence that the T. rex didn’t run very fast. If a T. rex had tripped, its little arms wouldn’t have been able to break its descent, and such a fall for a beast that size would likely have been fatal: given its weight, it would have slammed into the ground with six times the force of gravity and broken bones in the process. But this theory was questioned by referencing other animals. Giraffes can sprint 30 miles per hour (50 kilometers an hour) and would likely break a leg if they fell. Ostriches move very fast, too. Neither animal has arms to break a fall, and so there’s really no reason to think T. rex was any different.

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