World's largest dinosaur digitally recreated

In a real-life Jurassic park move, one of the world's largest dinosaurs has been digitally reconstructed by scientists, allowing it to take its first steps in over 94 million years.

The dinosaur weighed 80 tonnes and computer simulation shows that it would have reached just over 2 m/s - about 5 mph, researchers said.

The University of Manchester team, working with scientists in Argentina, were able to laser scan a 40 metre-long skeleton of the vast Cretaceous Argentinosaurus dinosaur.

Then using an advanced computer modelling technique involving the equivalent of 30,000 desktop computers they recreated its walking and running movements and tested its locomotion ability tested for the very first time.

The study provides the first ever 'virtual' track-way of the dinosaur and disproves previous suggestions that the animal was inflated in size and could not have walked.

"If you want to work out how dinosaurs walked, the best approach is computer simulation. This is the only way of bringing together all the different strands of information we have on this dinosaur, so we can reconstruct how it once moved," Dr Bill Sellers, lead researcher on the project from the University's Faculty of Life Sciences, said.

"We used the equivalent of 30,000 desktop computers to allow Argentinosaurus to take its first steps in over 94 million years," Dr Lee Margetts, who also worked on the project, said.

"The new study clearly demonstrates the dinosaur was more than capable of strolling across the Cretaceous planes of what is now Patagonia, South America," said Margetts.

Sellers uses his own software (Gaitsym) to investigate locomotion both living and extinct animals have to overcome.

"The important thing is that these animals are not like any animal alive today and so we can't just copy a modern animal," he said.

"Our machine learning system works purely from the information we have on the dinosaur and predicts the best possible movement patterns," he said.

Sellers said the research was important for understanding more about musculoskeletal systems and for developing robots.

"Argentinosaurus is the biggest animal that ever walked on the surface of the Earth and understanding how it did this will tell us a lot about the maximum performance of the vertebrate musculoskeletal system," Sellers said.

Sellers said the research was important for understanding more about musculoskeletal systems and for developing robots.

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.