(20 kilograms) model, which is attached to a "dinosaur butt" stand-in: a camera tripod. It took nine months to design, build and test the 44-lb. So, Myhrvold and his colleagues built a model, and presented it at the 75th annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference in Dallas on Thursday (Oct. " kind of bristled a little bit, but I said I would be more willing to accept it if a scale model were to be built and prove that it could be done," Carpenter said. "When the paper came out, my comment to him was 'garbage in, garbage out,'" said Kenneth Carpenter, the director and curator of paleontology at Utah State University Eastern Prehistoric Museum, who was not involved with the study. In 1997, he co-wrote a study with Canadian paleontologist Philip Currie in the journal Paleobiology suggesting that, based on a computer model, the tail of Apatosaurus louisae could have reached supersonic speeds, "producing a noise analogous to the 'crack' of a bullwhip," he wrote in the abstract.Īpatosaurus, and other sauropod dinosaurs with incredibly long tails, may have supersonically whipped their tails for purposes of defense, communication, same-species rivalry or courtship, Myhrvold said. Myhrvold focused on the Apatosaurus genus, a group of enormous dinosaurs that lived from about 155.7 million to 150.8 million years ago during the Late Jurassic. Sauropods are the large, herbivorous dinosaurs famous for their long necks and long tails. " wondered if the tails of the Diplodocid sauropods acted like a bullwhip to make a big noise," Myhrvold said. One sentence in the book caught Myhrvold's attention. In the mid-1990s, when he worked as the chief strategist and chief technology officer of Microsoft Corp., he came across a book by Robert McNeill Alexander, a renowned zoologist known for his studies in dinosaur locomotion. Myhrvold has tinkered with the tail for nearly 20 years.
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