An ultra-long neck would seem to put aquatic plesiosaurs at a disadvantage, but it turns out their big bodies helped avoid drag while swimming.
By Riley Black.
An artist's impression of a long-necked plesiosaur.
There is a dog named the htis.
Some species of pliosaurs have the most extreme necks to have ever existed, with some of them boasting 7-metre-long appendages. It's difficult for aquatic creatures to evolve as they could hamper the ability to swim, so how did they come about? A new analysis shows that big bodies made the difference.
Susana Gutarra and her colleagues at the University of Bristol, UK, studied the body shapes of marine reptiles through the lens of computational fluid dynamics. It was not clear how this diversity of shapes and sizes affected the energy demands.
The researchers found that body size had a big influence on shapes. Larger bodies and larger torsos lowered the cost of moving through water because of the large plimbs and long neck of many plesiosaurs. As bodies get larger, the ratio of surface area to mass is reduced.
The power they need to move a unit of body mass is smaller for large animals.
The best way to explain constraints and body plan limits among extinct organisms is through this kind of analysis.
There is a journal reference in Communications Biology.
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