For centuries now, if
paleontologists wanted to figure out how extinct animals
moved, they had to pick up fossil bones move them with their hands,
and try to get a sense of how they would fit together
at the joints of the animal. But they were just kind of
going on intuition. They had to say
whether things looked right or looked wrong, and they had no data to back up
that intuition. So what we have done here is we have taken X-ray
videos of birds walking We've looked inside their joints
to see h
ow the shapes of their bones fit together and we've used the information
we've gotten there to come up with a way to calculate
a mathematical score for how
joint surfaces fit together. We then took what we learned
from the living dinosaurs and applied them to the extinct
dinosaur Deinonychus Deinonychus is one of the key
moments in Yale paleontology history. It's really helped us reshape the way we think about
what dinosaurs are because it helped us solidify
our understanding that birds are livi
ng dinosaurs. And so studying Deinonychus
helps us get at that transition from extinct dinosaurs
to living birds. By applying our score
and computer animation software we were able to take the bones
of Deinonychus from the museum drawer where
they sit and reanimate them on our computer screens in 3D. And in doing that, we're able to
see how this animal would have moved when it was
alive, how it would have lifted its big
terrible claw off the ground while it was moving, and we've gotten a sense o
f how
it might have used that claw and its terrible
kick to kill animals as well. Now that we have this system
built up we understand how to study how joints
fit together we can apply this
to extinct animals from across the vertebrate
family tree. So everything from how extinct
animals would have flew to how they would have eaten,
to how other things would have run around. This is applicable to virtually
any animal. It's extremely exciting
to be able to take this data that's been sitting in our
museum drawers for so long to be able to harness it in a
new way and to bring it into the
21st century and get it on our
computer screens.
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