Die Fortbewegung sauropoder Dinosaurier: Gangarten und Einschränkungen durch Körpergröße
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
During this project, the first method to calculate gaits from trackways was developed, culminating in a publication in the high-impact journal “Current Biology”. This new method is a significant advance in both vertebrate palaeontology and the study of modern animal locomotion, as it allows, for the first time, to study gait selection from an evolutionary perspective, which will help to understand gait selection in modern animals. Sauropod dinosaurs, the largest land animals of all time, employed a lateral-sequence diagonal-couplets gait. This result is surprising as such a gait had never been proposed for sauropods before, and because it is different from the lateral-couplets gaits used by the largest modern land animals, elephants. The project showed that stability is key at giant body sizes (i.e., each side of the body has to be supported by at least one limb at all times). It also demonstrates the significance of wide gauges (i.e., feet placed away from the trackway midline) for gait selection, showing that wider gauges are associated with higher limb phases. Besides this core research, additional papers on related questions were published that did feed into the main objective. This includes the refutation of the long-standing hypotheses of a plantigrade locomotion (where the entire foot including the metacarpus is placed on the ground) in different groups of dinosaurs; criteria for the verification of tetrapod tracks; and the first use of machine/deep learning method to study fossil tracks. The latter study was conducted to test machine learning approaches on tracks, with the outlook to use this method to improve the gait analysis method published in “Current Biology”. However, I decided that this method is not suitable for this particular application. While the project goals remained the same (and have been reached),we switched from an empirical to a theoretical approach. Fortunately, this theoretical approach proved to be far superior to what could be expected from the empirical approach.Parts of this project sparkled widespread media attention. The main paper (published in “Current Biology”) resulted in news coverage in Science.org, NewScientist, The Conservation (20,000 views), and Spiegel Online, amongst others. An animation showing the reconstructed limb motions of a sauropod dinosaur reached 41,000 views on YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ypz_QvxMx4). The paper summarising the machine learning results (published in “Royal Society Interface”) reached broad attention by both the media and the social networks and reached 2,771 downloads of the paper pdf one month after publication. The publication on the first dinosaur tracksite from Palestine (published in “Historical Biology”) was covered by Davidson Online, the largest science website in Hebrew.
Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)
- A machine learning approach for the discrimination of theropod and ornithischian dinosaur tracks. Journal of The Royal Society Interface. 19(196):20220588.
Lallensack JN, Romilio A, Falkingham PL.
(Siehe online unter https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2022.0588) - A new method to calculate limb phase from trackways reveals gaits of sauropod dinosaurs. Current Biology. 32(7):1635-1640.E4.
Lallensack JN, Falkingham PL.
(Siehe online unter https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.02.012) - A new solution to an old riddle: elongate dinosaur tracks explained as deep penetration of the foot, not plantigrade locomotion. Palaeontology. 65(Part 1):1–17.
Lallensack JN, Farlow JO, Falkingham PL.
(Siehe online unter https://doi.org/10.1111/pala.12584) - How to verify fossil tracks: the first record of dinosaurs from Palestine. Historical Biology. 0(0):1–11.
Lallensack JN, Owais A, Falkingham PL, Breithaupt BH, Sander PM.
(Siehe online unter https://doi.org/10.1080/08912963.2022.2069020) - Relaunching the TY tracksite: tridactyl dinosaur footprints from the Lower Jurassic of southern Africa. Historical Biology.:1–12.
Lallensack JN, Bordy EM, Lockley M, Wings O.
(Siehe online unter https://doi.org/10.1080/08912963.2022.2117042)
