NATHAN MYHRVOLD PhD ORAL HISTORY - The Computerworld ...

So the Sauropod dinosaurs were the largest and included Argentinasorus, which was
the heaviest of all dinosaurs. The group my workers were most interested in is a
group called the Diapsids, and includes Apotasaurus, Brontosaurus which is an older
alias for Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, Berasaurus (ph.) which is the one in the American
Museum of Natural History, rearing up on its’ hind legs in the rotunda.
Those dinosaurs were enormously heavy, enormously long, at least 100 feet long
many of them. They had very long thin necks and very long thin tails. The tail
would start off a meter in diameter and end up about this big around, and be 45 or so
feet long. It was huge, so this huge long tail. What was it for? People had
speculated a variety of things, that it was defense, that it would be used like a whip to
hit something, or it was used for swimming. For a long time they felt they were
aquatic. More recently they’ve discovered they lived in semi-arid areas. So it’s like
the aquatic thing was just quite wrong. And the shape of the tail is so outlandish. It
tapers down so. The last three-quarters of the tail I think weigh about five percent
of the mass of the tail. All dinosaurs have a well-developed tail, but why after the
normal size tail, why did it keep going? Most other Sauropod dinosaurs had 40 to 50
colloidal vertebra, that’s a vertebra in the tail. These would have like 80, and the
vertebra at the end were very unusual. They’re thin little bones with a cone at each
end. So you’d have a cone joint, which would be enormously flexible. Why would
you have a joint like this? Well Mcneil Alexander, the British biomechanics guy
speculated that maybe they used their tails like a whip.
So I sent an email to Phil saying this is one of the things we could check. And we
decided we’d start with that. So he managed measurements of the tails of the
dinosaurs from the literature, some things going back almost 100 years when they
first discovered these dinosaurs, as well as more modern measurements. And I set
out to model them in a computer. At first I thought I’d have to write my own
program. Then I discovered that there was a package for Windows that was made
for engineers and was used in product design and it would accurately simulate
physics and friction and air resistance and all this stuff. So I could use a program that
was calibrated by engineers on a daily basis. So the next thing I do is get a whip. I
searched on the Internet under “bull whip,” and you get a very interesting, very
diverse set of pages, you know. Someone watching this 100 years from now, the
Internet may be different by then, but let me tell you, you get a very kinky set of
pages on a bull whip. Not about dinosaurs at all.
Nathan Myhrvold
Oral History
38