Re: Rigid dinosaurs?

["Kent A. Stevens" <kent@cs.uoregon.edu>]

Scott Hartman's "stiff as an ostrich neck" analogy is apt.

Furthermore, to equate ligaments with rigidity only disregards their  
roles as passive tensile structural elements and in energy storage/ 
recovery and/or damping.

Race cars and dump trucks (choose your analogy) have stiff springs  
and shocks for reasons relating to dynamics, not just the static  
support of the (vehicular) body.  Importantly, they aren't rigid,  
they are stiff.

It would not do for tyrannosaurids to be flopping all over the place  
as they ran briskly from one carcass to the next in a frenzy of  
competitive scavenging.

Kent