Aug. 22, 2007 — While Tyrannosaurus rex would not have been able to chase down speeding vehicles, as "Jurassic Park" suggested, the 43-foot-long, 6-ton dino could comfortably reach a running speed of 18 miles per hour, according to new research in this week's Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Co-author Phil Manning told Discovery News that this speed was "conservative," and indicated future research by his team would show how the toothsome predator probably could run even faster "if pushed to the limit."
The current study, he claimed, is the world's most accurate analysis yet of dinosaur running speeds.
"We are not scaling a modern species to behave like a dinosaur (as other research has done), but we are actually bringing animals back to life using science," said Manning, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester in northwest England.
Manning explained that he and his colleagues used powerful computing involving 256 processors and specially designed software to make the calculations for T. rex and other animals.
Watch an exciting foot race among T.Rex, several other dinos and a human. With race commentary.
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The researchers began by plugging in skeletal, musculature, weight and other data for three living animals: humans, emus and ostriches. Since maximum running speeds were already known for these species, the entries tested the computer's accuracy.
