15/11/2017

How fast could dinosaurs move?

A new pedagogical and communicative tool for the youngest audience

How fast could dinosaurs move? How can we know the size of sauropods with the measurements of their femur? What methods are there to calculate the weight of dinosaurs? These are some of the doubts that can be solved with an app for mobile devices designed by the lecturer Antonio Monleón-Getino, from the Department of Genetics, Microbiology and Statistics of the University of Barcelona, in collaboration with Biel Stela from the PharmacoInformatics group of GRIB (IMIM-UPF).

This app will be a new pedagogical and communicative tool to help the youngest audience to discover some of the hidden secrets of the fossilized skeleton of one of the most known dinosaurs which created great inspiration in the field of cinema and contributed to create its legend: the Tyrannosaurus rex. Discovered in Montana (United States) in September in 2013, this skeleton from 67 million years ago was rebuilt under the supervision of the palaeontologist Anne Schulp and the biologist Freek Vonk, and was moved to the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, the National Museum of Natural History of Leiden. It corresponds to one of the biggest predators that lived in the planet, with sharp teeth and a deathly bit, which was the terror of the animals in the Cretaceous. The fossilized skeleton presents the 80 % of volume of the original bone, which places this model in the first positions of the ranking of the most complete and well preserved skeletons of Tyrannosaurus rex worldwide. This good level of preservation results from the fact that, when it died, a thick layer of sand covered the skeleton.  

This collaboration with the researchers Antoni Monleón-Getino and Biel Stela is part of the scientific advice promoted by the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont for the exhibition "T. Rex. La Trix, el tiranosaure més ben conservat del món", in CosmoCaixa (Barcelona).