Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Khisanth the Ancient" data-source="post: 4971317" data-attributes="member: 11368">That's ... highly questionable. Sauropods were perfectly competent, nowhere close to "could barely walk" - they were incredibly successful animals.I don't think he's right, though.  Remember the history of pterosaur sizes. "Oh, nothing bigger than a condor could fly."  Then they discovered Pteranodon ingens, with a 7-meter wingspan (bigger species of Pteranodon have been found since). "Oh, this is the biggest animal that could ever fly." Then they discovered 11-12-meter wingspan Quetzalcoatlus. "Oh, this is the biggest... etc, etc." - and at first, apparently due to incredulity at the thought of a 250kg flying animal, ludicrously low mass estimates were suggested. Then they discovered Hatzegopteryx which probably massed nearly 500kg (and even that puts its density below 0.6 g/cu cm!).Anyway, doing the math, normal bone *is* strong enough if allometric scaling and pneumaticity is used right. It just needs thick legs, and lots of air sacs.  A 500 ton AmeriZilla's cartilage can maybe survive (look at how thick its legs are!), and if its cartilage can, bones aren't even at risk.I concede that its ludicrous athletic ability requires tougher-than-normal tissue; but its size alone probably does not. Most of the improvement would need to be in cartilage. The bone would need to be stronger, but not by high-tech-alloy levels. Anyway, no large animal in Earth's history has ever had *reason* to be athletic. If there was sufficient selection pressure, you could probably end up with a lot more agility in big animals than Earth's ever seen. The only group of land animals ever to exceed 20-25 tons were the sauropods, and they were locked into slow-moving body forms long before they got that large. The other essays in really big (10+ tons) land animals in Earth's history were the proboscideans (elephants, mammoths, etc.), rhinoceroses (specifically the indricotheres), and the hadrosaurs.  The first two again were slow-moving long before they got big; the hadrosaurs' body plans didn't get particularly 'elephantine' even at 20+ tons. (One carnivorous dinosaur, Spinosaurus, may have exceeded 10 tons, and it was actually fairly lightly built.)...But I think we're a bit off the original topic of the thread. I'll put up my idea of AmeriZilla stats in General Monster Talk, though, when I get the chance.</blockquote>

Verification