Original Article: https://blog.theanimalrescuesite.greatergood.com/sauropod-gait/

“Everybody always assumed that sauropods walked like modern elephants, but they didn’t, and we think that’s because the sauropods were just so much broader,” said Jens Lallensack, member of the Peter Falkingham Lab at Liverpool John Moores University.

The Mystery of How the Dinosaurs Walked on Earth

For many years, even with the discovery of dinosaur tracks, paleontologists have been mystified with how the many kinds of dinosaurs walked. They have learned that fossil tracks could not provide accurate information since dinosaurs with similar body lengths produced similar footfall patterns even though they moved with different gaits such as walking, running, cantering, and trotting.

To resolve the mystery, Peter Falkingham and Jens Lallensack developed a new approach in determining the gaits of extinct dinosaurs, in this instance the sauropods.

Adopting a measurement that is called gleno-acetabular distance (GAD), the two paleontologists validated the methodology by testing it on 32 trackways and trackway sections of modern four-legged mammals which included horses, dogs, an elephant, a camel, a raccoon, and a red fox.

Then, they employed the GAD measurement along with additional approaches in the study that they conducted at the Lower Cretaceous De Queen Formation, Arkansas where there are three long trackways of sauropod dinosaurs. They calculated the sauropods’ limb phase based on the hypothetical projection of the animals’ shoulder and hip joints onto the respective trackway.

Sauropod Dinosaurs Walked like a Hippo

What Falkingham and Lallensack discovered was sauropods did not walk like any of the modern quadruped animals they had tested. Not even like elephants which have a lateral gait, moving one foot after another but both feet belonging to the same side.

Instead, sauropods walked more like a hippopotamus which uses a hind leg and a foreleg from opposite sides when trotting. However, with the sauropod dinosaurs, it’s not a trotting gait but a diagonal couplet walk.

Since sauropods were so big and wide-gauged, the largest of them measuring up to 30 meters in length and weighing as much as 80 metric tons, this type of gait suited them. They were able to maintain balance with each step cycle.

Lallensackn explained that if the sauropods had a lateral gait like an elephant, they would be swaying side to side. “And if you’re a really high animal, which is really, really heavy, then it’s really unstable and causes immense stress on muscles and bones. This would be a huge problem.”

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Source: The Animal Rescue Site Blog