For more than a century, paleontologists have wondered exactly how plesiosaurs swam, but now a team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Wollaston Hall, Nottingham Natural History Museum believe that they have solved this long-standing mystery.
Writing in the latest edition of the journal PLOS Computational Biology, lead author Greg Turk from Georgia Tech and his colleagues ran a series of computer simulations and found that these ancient, four-flippered marine reptiles actually used a technique similar to that of a penguin.
Plesiosaurs were long-necked creatures that lived from the Jurassic to the Late Cretaceous, and had a body shape that was unlike anything else ever to roam the Earth, Sarah Gibson, a Ph D candidate in the Department of Geology and the Biodiversity Institute at the University of Kansas who was not involved with the research, explained in a blog for the Public Library of Science.
Previous research examining their swimming technique compared them to a variety of tetrapods, including sea turtles, and even to the way in which oars are used to row a boat. While all of these methods were plausible based on the plesiosaur’s anatomy and musculature, none of them could fully explain how all four of the creature’s flippers moved in relation to one another.
Rear flippers likely only steered, provided stability
According to Gizmodo, Turk and his colleagues selected one particular pleisosaur species called the Meyerasaurus as the subject of their computer simulations. They found that, in order to swim most efficiently, the reptile likely flapped its two front flippers like a penguin, and that using the rear flippers did not appear to increase the creature’s swimming speed.
“What was unexpected was that no matter what motion we simulated for the back flippers, they could not substantially contribute to the plesiosaur’s forward motion,” Turk told Reuters. Based on their findings, he and his colleagues concluded that the rear flippers were probably used only to help the plesiosaur steer and to keep it stable while it was traveling through the water.
The researchers plan to continue their work by conducting future simulations to determine just how much of an agility boost creatures like the Meyerasaurus received from their back flippers, Gibson said. They may also be able to use the technique in order to gain new insights into the swimming technique of other ancient marine animals.
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Feature Image: Screenshot from YouTube/SciNews
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