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Museum weighs its Stegosaurus dinosaur (skeleton) using 3D scan

Calculating dinosaur weight

Sophie (a nickname), the world’s most complete Stegosaurus dinosaur, lived about 150 million years ago; her remains were found in Wyoming in 2003 by American paleontologist Bob Simon and sold to the museum in London. Simon discovered 360 of her bones, about 85 percent of all the bones she had, with primarily only her left arm and the base of her tail missing.

With so much of Sophie intact again the scientists were able to do better than simply guesstimate her weight, which is what they normally do with dinosaurs, basing calculations on the number of bones and size of a dinosaur. Now, however, with 3D imaging they can do better than that, and have done with Sophie.

They built a 3D digitized version of her skeleton and calculated the volume of the flesh around her bones, using their data to compare to extant animals of a similar size. Doing all that they came to the conclusion that Sophie, a young adult when she died, weighed 3,527 pounds (1,600 kilograms).

“Now we know the weight, we can start to find out more about its metabolism, feeding requirements and the growth rates of Stegosaurus,” the museum’s chief dinosaur expert, Prof. Paul Barrett said. “We can also use the same techniques on other complete fossils to find out much more about the wider ecology of dinosaurs.”

Stegosaurus: 19 bony back plates

Sophie is the first virtually complete dinosaur skeleton to be assembled at the London museum in 100 years. Because of her youth she was not yet fully grown and so wasn’t all that big, though you wouldn’t say that if she came rumbling down a football field: she was 3 metres (9.8 feet) tall and 5.6 metres in length (18 feet). The plant-eater normally grew up to 9 metres tall.

The Stegosaurus had 19 bony back plates along its back, though Prof. Barrett said it’s not really known what they were for.

“The function of the plates is quite controversial,” he said. “An early idea was that they were a form of armour, but most people don’t believe that anymore because they were quite thin. It’s possible they provided a kind of passive defence because they would have made the dinosaur look a lot bigger from a distance.”

It took about a year to rebuild Sophie and a video included here shows a time-lapse of the process. She’s at the entrance to the museum, greeting visitors as they stroll through the doors.

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