mollwollfumble said:
PermeateFree said:
>>By analyzing measurements of its front and rear limb bones, an international team of scientists has determined that Ledumahadi mafube walked on all fours, although it didn’t go about doing so in the same fashion as the sauropods. Whereas they had legs that extended straight down from their bodies (like elephants do), Ledumahadi’s front legs were more crouched, protruding out to either side. This suggests that it represents an early experiment in giant body size, having itself evolved from bipedal ancestors.<<
https://newatlas.com/ledumahadi-mafube-dinosaur/56561
Full Text:
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)30993-X?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS096098221830993X%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
I did a bit of anaysis on Sauropod and Prosauropod sizes a few years ago. Let’s see if wiki still has it. Yes.
200 Ma ago is prosauropod time, with largest being Yunnanosaurus. Let’s see how that compares.
“Ledumahadi mafube estimated weight of 12 tonnes (13 US tons) and height of 4 meters (13 ft) at the hips”.
Yunnanosaurus also managed close to 4 metres at the hips. Up to 13 metres long.
>>The end-Triassic extinction killed off the basal sauropodomorphs like Thecodontosaurus, Riojasaurus and species more closely related to sauropods such as Melanorosaurs and Blikanasaurus. However, ‘prosauropod’ species such as Anchisaurus survived, as did true sauropods. While the first sauropods diversified, the early Jurassic prosauropods radiated out in a number of medium sized megaherbivores like Massospondylus, Lufengosaurus and Yunnanosaurus and were as successful as their Late Triassic predecessors.
The prosauropod reign came to an end in the late Early Jurassic. Although three genera of prosauropods survived into the Middle Jurassic, they were no longer the dominate terrestrial megaherbivores, as the sauropods had continued their massive growth.<<
http://dinopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Prosauropoda
>>Finally, whereas previous work has implied a gradual transition characterized by intermediate, or “facultative” behaviors , we find that most sauropodomorph taxa can be classified unambiguously as either quadrupeds or bipeds, the only exception being Anchisaurus (Table S3; 68.9% likelihood of quadrupedality). This suggests that the transition between bipedality and quadrupedality during travel was evolutionarily rapid, with few clear intermediate stages observed in their fossil record so far. This does not preclude a role for the forelimb during foraging or other slow-speed behaviors in otherwise quadrupedal sauropodiforms, and it is possible that Ledumahadi represents the maximum size threshold in which a browsing strategy that entailed regular rearing remained viable . Indeed, we find evidence for substantial experimentation in locomotory style among early sauropodomorphs: semi-crouched quadrupedality did not preclude subsequent evolutionary reversals to bipedality (whereas no reversals occur from the columnar-limbed condition of Sauropoda).<<
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)30993-X?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS096098221830993X%3Fshowall%3Dtrue