This early sauropod went from walking on four legs to two as it grew
Center of mass shifts led to a rare change in walking style for a long-necked dinosaur relative
Most long-necked sauropods lumbered on four legs all their lives to support their titanic bulk. But an early relative of such behemoths as Brachiosaurus made the unusual transition from walking on four legs to two as it grew, a new study shows.
Diminutive at hatching, Mussaurus patagonicus (which means “mouse lizard”) began life walking on all fours. But by the time the 200-million-year-old plant eater reached its 6-meter-long adult size, it roamed what’s now Argentina on two legs.
The changing length of M. patagonicus’s arm bones relative to its body and its inward facing-palms as an adult had hinted at the transition. But for the first time, computer simulations based on a rich fossil record show how a shift in the creature’s center of gravity as it grew enabled a change to bipedal walking, researchers report May 20 in Scientific Reports.
Researchers took CT scans of fossil bones from six individual M. patagonicus — covering different stages of the species’ development, from 60-gram hatchlings the size of baby chickens to 1.5 metric ton adults the size of rhinoceroses. The researchers added virtual flesh to digitized bones to create 3-D models that allowed them to estimate both the weight and center of gravity of M. patagonicus at many different stages of its life.