On 10/6/2011 4:17 AM, Vivian Allen wrote:
Ooh, hang on, sorry. CoM is ventral, so you'd need to be braking to cause inertia to exert a pitch-up moment on the trunk. Forward acceleration would tend to cause a nose-down pitch.
More seriously, or at least more on topic -- this "nose-down" point implies that within balance-beam, low CG animals, 'frontend' weight reduction would be beneficial to those taxa that had lifestyles that featured an extreme need-to-accelerate -- and wherein improved acceleration progressively raised survivability.
Given the implications of accelerating w/ a full gut and/or a load of eggs -- progressive forelimb reduction across a wide size-range of theropod taxa seems less opaque to me than it did.