To calculate the speed of dinos, scientists got some help from the extinct animals’ modern-day relatives, birds. Here, two guinea fowl walk on mud (shown in slow motion), sometimes being chased by a glove on a stick, leaving behind a trail of footprints that scientists used to estimate the bird’s speed. That same technique is used to calculate how fast dinosaurs moved. The numbers from these calculations didn’t match the actual speed of the birds, raising questions about the accuracy of past estimates of how fast Tyrannosaurus rex, Velociraptors and other dinosaurs ran.
Video Credit: Peter Falkingham and Stephen Gatesy
