These videos would have really helped me when going through university. I'm retired now, but for those just becoming paleontologists, what a great resource!
I realized that Cretaceous Crusader joined the channel since I made the visual skeleton for this video, so I apologize for the lack of a shoutout at the end! This is all for you, CC!
Great video! Love the collaboration. (And that fabulous eyebrow near the middle...and the Tobuscus tribute at the end lol) I think the format works nicely
I'm glad the Top Tier was left blank. People rarely think about just how many assumptions and data points are made in these models! It's the standard, so it makes sense to skip over this _if you're talking to colleagues._ When this data and research makes it to the public, these nuances are lobbed off and people just assume it to be accurate. Then they see the numbers change and hear a vague reason and think shit is just being made up! I enjoyed the mixed facecam/voiceover system! The voice change was a bit jarring, but I know for a fact the extra expressions and jestures help a lot of people in oaying attention and following a train of thought!
Magical Christmas Land is just taking a time machine to weigh the animals with a scale lol Also thank you for including my calculator, it means a lot that you think it’s noteworthy! I’ll definitely be checking out Darius Nau’s GDI tool.
Mighty kind of Madly Mesozoic to give this video a shout-out. I hope you both cook a collaborative video someday. And reach over a hundred thousand subscribers.
@@TheVividen Yes, I have. It was worth it. Great job working on it during the preproduction. No hard feelings from Madly to dunk on Spino with Tyrannosaurus Rex. 😅
I’ve been wondering about using ratios to estimate size or mass. Like how the jaw to gill ratio in fish is pretty consistent which was used to shrink the dunk. I know some studies have been conducted on it but I want to be as thorough as possible. There’s a surprising amount of relation within the physiology of organisms.
I agree, I can see the possibility of there being a ratio that is consistent within the physiology of an organism. But the problem is that individual variation is quite consistent, so the ratio could vary.
@@DreadEnder True. I just think that the possibility of variation could still remain consistent due to large populations. But, some animals have less individual variation than others.
This is your Oppenheimer moment. Lord save us from the awesomebros. But this is an awesome video! Cool to see how the sausage gets made, even if _those_ kinds of paleo fans sorta ruined this topic for me.
@@TheVividen it deserves a positive reception! At the end of the day science is all about sharing and comparing information, isn’t it? So even if I do have my reservations about the whole “mega”theropod size rat race, I really do see this as a net benefit overall. Being transparent about how paleontologists get these numbers is just as if not more important than the numbers themselves.
Amazing, amazing video. I personally love calculating the size of Prehistoric organisms. I found this video very useful and effective when calculating the size of Prehistoric organisms. Furthermore, I even tested one of the methods. I used Persons et al. and Larson's measurements on the femur circumference of FMNH PR 2081, also known as "Sue". I used the Limb Bone Circumference Allometry for bipedal animals, which gave me a body mass of around 8 tonnes. Furthermore, I will mention the fact that this method of estimating body mass in Prehistoric organisms can vary, so it can make estimates different from others. Additionally, "Sue's" femur has been suggested to have different measurements, but I decided to use the specific measurement I chose because it was quite broad. Amazing video, and all the Paleontologists and researchers that helped you are amazing too.
@@TheVividen He is analyzing all possible scenarios to get out alive, but he will play Gojo: nah i'd win They should call him Courage the cowardly elephant, like Courage the cowardly dog
I am very impressed! One question: We Seem to be finding ever bigger dinosaurs, and the weight estimates for a certain length seems to being lowered, at the same time illustrations shows thinner legs, especially for sauropods, is that possible for a 50-80 ton specimen?
Finding an H. Sapiens humerus with only non-human apes as reference points would be... interesting with any of these methods. (Though in reality the fossil record is strongly biased the other direction. There are thousands of fossils humans including decently complete 3D skeletons, while the sum total of Panine ape fossil material is 3 teeth from an extinct subspecies (not species) of relatively modern Chimpanzee.
Convex hulls do not represent even a conservative lower bound on minimum mass because animals are not strictly convex. It is entirely possible and even likely for there to be hyperbolic or even strictly concave parts of an animal.
*insert alxasaurus scream by mario lanzas* *AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA*
GDI seems to be the best from what the video says, the ONLY problem is that I can't understand it well. I don't have a PC, just a mobile phone, so even if I did learn how to do it, I can't. Seems like I wasted some time, I'll have to put my speculative biology project in the back burner for now until I find a more simpler way to size up my animals.
Well, the nice thing about GDI is that you can theoretically do it using a ruler, pencil and a basic calculator. That’s how the method was used originally, back when it was first devised by Jerison in the 1970s. That is actually one of the important advantages it has over 3D modelling, it uses a mathematical representation of the shape that can easily be made simpler (less detail) or more complex (more detail), depending on the available computing power. It won’t be as convenient or as precise as the "pixel-precise" implementation shown in the video (which does the same stuff you would do manually, just a lot more quickly), but it is still a solid way to volumetrically calculate a body volume if you have a reconstruction that you can somehow measure. If you are looking to do serious scientific work, not having a PC is a big impediment no doubt (what do you type stuff on?). I’d really consider getting a cheap, pre-owned computer from somewhere. Those cost a fraction of what a typical smartphone costs (I’ve seen netbooks that were at least claimed to be functional for less than 30 € on ebay, and just barely functional is absolutely sufficient to run R on). Alternatively, there are publicly usable PCs in many places, e.g. libraries, that you might have access to, and which you could run a portable version of R (sourceforge.net/projects/rportable/) on from a flash drive. That being said, I’m fairly sure that even on a phone, there is probably some app out there somewhere that could be used to measure distances in pictures manually so that you can do a manual GDI. Or you could try to install R on your phone. It’s not an ideal solution because it sometimes won’t be able to install the packages you need, but it’s worth a try (I’ve managed to do it before, if you use Android, try installing R using the package management tools in termux), since sometimes it will work fine, at least for some applications. The gdi package is really small and just has two fairly basic dependencies, to the chances it will work on an R implementation on your phone are decent.
@@TheVividen I can't believe I got a reply from you lol. Made my day with that. 13 tonne Spinosaurus Aegyptiacus aka MSNM V4047 or NMC 41852, meet Cope and MUCPV-95 (Nizar release a new paper pls)
@@tyrannotherium7873Not at all haha. That's why it took so long to research this video--I wanted to learn how to do it all myself so I could actually explain the formulas from a perspective of having used them
