Thanks to the discovery of one of world's most complete Stegosaurus skeleton, scientists were able to determine how much the dinosaur weighed.
According to BBC News, authors of a study published in the journal Biology Letters placed the stegosaurus' weight at about 1.6 tons. The specimen, named Sophie, died some 150 million years ago as a young adult and its skeleton was 80 percent intact when dug up.
Sophie would have been six or seven years of age when she died and her body mass was comparable to a smaller rhinoceros.
"If we want to estimate how fast an animal runs, you need body mass; if you want to say something about their metabolism, you need to know their body mass," study lead author Charlotte Brassey, a paleontologist at the London Natural History Museum (NHM). "So, yes, we're really glad that we've been able to get hold of this very early on, and now what I'm looking to do is begin to strap muscles on to our computer models so that we can get her walking to say something about locomotion."
Sophie was first discovered in Wyoming's Red Canyon Ranch in 2003, the Associated Press reported. The NHM purchased the skeleton in 2013, but scanned all of its 360 bones before putting Sophie on display in 2014.
"Now we know the weight, we can start to find out more about its metabolism, feeding requirements and the growth rates of Stegosaurus," Paul Barrett, NHM chief dinosaur official, told the AP. "We can also use the same techniques on other complete fossils to find out much more about the wider ecology of dinosaurs."
Certain bones - such as the femur and humerus - have been proven to indicate body mass in extinct and modern specimens, BBC News reported. This method is particularly easier when the skeleton is well preserved.
"But Sophie is exceptional in being mostly complete," Brassey said. "I have spent the last year digitizing her whole skeleton, creating 3D models. We can import these into a Computer Aided Design (CAD) package, like those engineers would use, and then just wrap very simple shapes around her body outline, and use that whole volume to predict a body mass."
