Page 39 - Everything You Know About Dinosaurs is Wrong

The best way to work out how fast an animal could run is by thinking about its muscles, but unfortunately dinosaur muscles don’t fossilise.
Instead, palaeontologists look at animals alive today. Then they try
to fill in what the muscles on dinosaurs might have looked like and imagine how powerfully they could pull back on the bones of the legs.
So, could TYRANNOSAURUS run quickly? Well, it had very long legs, which meant that it could stretch them quite far forwards and backwards, and, by working out where muscles would have attached to bones at the base of the tail and comparing this with muscles on modern birds and reptiles, palaeontologists now realise that TYRANNOSAURUS would have been able to walk for a long time.
But, being so big meant that running, or at
least walking very quickly, could be downright dangerous – a TYRANNOSAURUS couldn’t move very fast without the risk of shattering the bones in its feet and legs!
All of this adds up to show us that TYRANNOSAURUS could only move at . . . about 12 miles an hour – which YOU could probably run at, too! But running isn’t everything. By studying their skeletons in museums, palaeontologists recently discovered that TYRANNOSAURUS was amazing at turning and pivoting very quickly, making it an extremely agile hunter!
With a head filled with razor-sharp teeth, jaws capable of smashing through bone, and the spinning skills of a ballerina, T Y R A N N O S A U R U S may not have been the fastest dinosaur, but it was a M E N A C I N G predator and would have been well worth steering clear of.
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