Comment by Glant
4 days ago
They say it "could have weighed up to 200 pounds". How do they know? Are they just guestimating based on modern animals about the same size? Or maybe weighing/measuring a modern beaver and scaling up size and weight?
4 days ago
They say it "could have weighed up to 200 pounds". How do they know? Are they just guestimating based on modern animals about the same size? Or maybe weighing/measuring a modern beaver and scaling up size and weight?
It's not perfect, but there's a very close correlation to the size of the femur with overall body mass in modern animals we use to extrapolate.
See the chart in https://phys.org/news/2020-08-dinosaur.html
There's some debate over how useful this is for dinosaurs, but something that died out 10k years ago with closely related existing species is probably easier.
Allometry, its a whole field of study.
It's 2025, chatgpt confidently told them the answer