In the unlikely but vividly terrifying event that you ever had to run away from a T-Rex, its awe-inspiring size would be, in fact, your greatest advantage. (From 2020)
The incredibly powerful, long-legged Tyrannosaurus was slow for the same mathematical reason its demise in the mine shaft was so eruptive. Like surface area, bone strength only squares in strength as volume cubes. The result is that as an animal increases in size, it requires proportionally more muscle and leg bone to stand, move, and run. Beyond a certain size, the latter becomes physically impossible.
Three years ago the biologist Myriam Hirt, who studies animal movement at the German Centre for Biodiversity Research, asked a seemingly simple question: Why is it that the biggest, most powerful animals—the whales, elephants, and rhinoceroses—are not the fastest, while the smallest—the mice, minnows, and millipedes—are some of the slowest? Is the implication that there is an optimum size for...
The answer, Hirt found, is yes. If you were designing an animal for speed, that animal should weigh approximately 200 pounds. A bit heavier for a swimmer, and a bit lighter for a flyer. Hirt found a precise parabolic relationship between size and speed that not only suggests you need to fear the midsize dinosaurs most but also that you shouldn’t fear the largest at all. The reason, she tells me, is a result of the interplay between power, acceleration, and the metabolism that fuels both.
An animal’s top speed, Hirt found, is the meeting point of two factors. The first is an animal’s total muscle power, which scales proportionally to its mass. But the second is its ability to accelerate that mass, which does not scale. Acceleration is reliant on the anaerobic muscle power or stored ATP energy in the muscle fibers. These so-called fast-twitch muscles produce the rapid, powerful contractions needed for acceleration, but they quickly deplete.
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