Paleontologists Discovered Secrets Of Giant Dinosaurs' Zigzagging Bones

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The larger the body is, the harder it is to support. For many years, scientists are baffled why some dinosaurs are so big but still, they can manage to carry on with their weight and balance themselves normally.

Recently, scientists have discovered an interesting bone from a fossilized sauropod that lives millions of years. Dr. John Fronimos, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan, studied the fossil of Spinophorosaurus nigerensis and he noticed zigzagging lines in the vertebrae in an area where the top backbone touches the bottom half.

According to Daily Mail, Dr. Fronimos explained that the sauropods zigzagging bones fit together like a puzzle to provide a better grip to the bones so one part was not pulled off from the other. He added that "also, the zigzags increase the surface area of contact between the bones."

A vertebra is the series of small bones forming the backbone. It has holes which the spinal cord passes through. Cartilage makes new cells that take place between the two bones and over time, these two bones of the vertebra fuse together housing the spinal cord like a lock.

In human, the two bones of the vertebra fuse by age 6 or 7. However, in sauropods, fusion does not happen until they reach their 20's when they are close to being fully grown.

Per Science Mag, Dr. John Fronimos and his co-author Jeffrey Wilson, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Michigan, believed that the spines give strength to sauropods to withstand their enormous weights. They also added that in this way, the same amount of force is distributed over a larger area, reducing the stress at one in one point.

Other sauropods have complex sutures or zigzagging than others. This suggests different backbones had to deal with relatively more or less stress.

"As you move down the neck, each individual bone must support more and more weight because there's more and more neck out ahead of them that it has to support," Dr. John Fronimos said. "So, there is going to be more stress applied to the bone until you get to the shoulders, which are bearing the whole weight of the neck," Fronimos added.

Dr. John Fronimos' next step is to look for a backbone of the other dinosaurs to see whether they too have a zigzag structure. Sauropods might have been the largest dinosaur, but Tyrannosaurus Rex also weighs 9 metric tons. If these dinosaurs possess similar threads, then this will make scientists formulate a precise interpretation how these animals lived and what kind of stresses their bodies were subjected to.