In “The Teutonic Diplodocus: A Lesson in Gait and Carriage” author R.T. Bakker discusses the journey that brought him to the conclusion that dinosaurs were able to move at great speeds. As a student at Yale University, Bakker studied the bone structure of many dinosaur species. He made several references to traits that were shared between Triceratops and modern Rhinos aurous. The olecranon, or commonly referred to as the funny bone, allows movement in the elbow. The Rhino and the Triceratops both have very large olecranon in the fore limbs, which suggest flexibility.

It seems that Bakker has not given us enough evidence to completely support the theory that dinosaurs were able to run at fast speeds. Author R.M. Alexander agrees with Bakker about the relative bone structure of dinosaurs, but he feels that speed can be determined within the dinosaur footprints. To measure speed, the stride length must be measured and from one footprint to the next placement of that same foot. Alexander uses the term “relative stride” to describe the rate at which an animal moves by measurement of their stride length to leg length. All animals, Alexander says, move with the same relative stride and therefore it must be assumed that dinosaurs did the same (37). Alexander explored the relationship between speeds in soft ground versus hard earth and discovered that soft ground absorbs more of the thrust of running. Because the animal sinks into the ground it seems likely that top speeds are not ran on soft ground. When I ran cross-country in high school, our coach would train the team very hard by making us run one mile in the deep sand, as opposed to our usual three miles on hard ground. Not only was the soft sand difficult to navigate through, but I ran a mile in nearly double the amount of time that I ran on hard ground. Alexander realizes the flaw with the data available, that most dinosaur footprints are of walking situations and the ground that accepts dinosaur footprint fossils is too soft for the dinosaurs to have been running on. He claims evidence that the fastest Theropod tracks indicate that the biped was running at about twenty-seven miles per hour, which opposes Bakker’s conclusion about the Theropods being able to run at about forty miles per hour (Alexander 40). Alexander also goes on to describe witnessing Zebr

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