Scientists Digitally Reconstruct Movements of Largest Dinosaur in the World (Video)

Dinosaurs once roamed the Earth, traversing forests and plains and seas. Yet exactly how these creatures moved has long remained a mystery to scientists. Now, researchers have managed to use an advanced computer model to recreate the walking and running movements of the vast Cretaceous Argentinosaurus dinosaur, revealing its locomotion for the first time.

"If you want to work out how dinosaurs walked, the best approach is computer simulation," said Bill Sellers, one of the researchers, in a news release. "This is the only way of bringing together all the different strands of information we have on this dinosaur, so we can reconstruct how it once moved."

In order to create this computer model, the researchers laser scanned a 40 meter-long skeleton of Argentinosaurus. Then, they used the equivalent of 30,000 desktop computers to allow the dinosaur to take its first steps in over 94 million years. This gave researchers further insight into exactly how these creatures moved in the past.

"It is frustrating there was so little of the original dinosaur fossilized, making any reconstruction difficult," said Phil Manning, one of the researchers, in a news release. "The digitization of such vast dinosaur skeletons using laser scanners brings Walking with Dinosaurs to life...this is science not just animation."

So what did this walking motion look like? The dinosaur weight about 80 tons and the model showed that it would have reached about 5 mph when it walked across the Earth. The relatively slow-moving creature was probably inhibited by its size when it came to locomotion.

"All vertebrates from humans to fish share the same basic muscles, bones and joints. To understand how these function we can compare how they are used in different animals, and the most interesting are often those at extremes," said Sellers. "Argentinosaurus is the biggest animal that ever walked on the surface of the Earth and understanding how it did this will tell us a lot about the maximum performance of the vertebrate musculoskeletal system. We need to know more about this to help understand how it functions in ourselves."

Currently, the researchers plan to use this same computer technique in order to model the steps of other dinosaurs. Next on their list are the Triceratops, Brachiosaurus and T. rex.

The findings are published in the journal PLOS One.

Want to see the dinosaur walk for yourself? Check out the video below, courtesy of YouTube.