Femur

• Despite their public image as torpid, lumbering creatures, many dinosaurs were evidently warm-blooded, highly active animals, capable of prolonged and strenuous aerobic exercise.
• In new research, my colleagues and I determined how much energy minibus-sized dinosaurs called Maiasaura used while growing to adulthood.

How bones heal and grow

• Locomotion and weight-bearing activity cause stresses and strains that result in microfractures in the bones.
• Fortunately, the leg bones of dinosaurs – like those of birds, mammals and varanid lizards such as the Komodo dragon – repair themselves in a process known as bone remodelling.
• The main impediment to this research is the shortage of collections of bones from a single dinosaur species at different stages of growth.

‘Good mother reptile’

• Fossils from this formation have yielded much information about the eggs, hatchlings and early lives of a dinosaur named Maiasaura (meaning “good mother reptile”).
• This herbivorous hadrosaur apparently tended her eggs and raised her offspring for more than a year after hatching.

How to measure blood flow from bones

• A decade ago, I wondered whether the size of the foramen could be an indirect measurement of the rate of blood flow to a bone.
• This turned out to be true, and since then the “foramen technique” has been used on fossils to estimate blood flow rate and hence how much energy and nutrients were used in the bones of adult dinosaurs.

Rapid growth doesn’t come cheap

• Blood flow rates calculated from foramen size were similar in one-year-old dinosaurs weighing between 189kg and 455kg and in six- to 11-year-old adults weighing between 1,680kg and 3,200kg.
• In other words, a one-year-old had about four times as much blood flowing to each gram of its shinbone as a full-grown adult did.
• These differences reveal how much more energy and nutrients it took to build bones in the early rapid growth stages of a Maiasaura’s life than it did to maintain the bones in adulthood.

• JEFFERSON CITY, Mo., Sept. 7, 2023 /PRNewswire/ --  A Jefferson City mother is suing God's Little Tikes Childcare, alleging that overcrowding, improper supervision, and other safety violations led to her 1-year-old son breaking his femur at the daycare center in August 2022.
• "An innocent toddler was seriously hurt because God's Little Tikes Childcare ignored multiple safety laws," says Finney Injury Law attorney Chris Finney , who is representing Scott and her son in the lawsuit.
• The agency substantiated Scott's allegations that God's Little Tikes Childcare violated safety laws, including staff-to-child ratios, appropriate child supervision, play areas, and playgrounds.
• The case is La'Chelle Scott, as next friend and mother of K.A., a minor child, vs. Fountain of Life Family Worship Center d/b/a God's Little Tikes Childcare, Case No.

• They were among the first large terrestrial animals to evolve and did so rapidly, quickly becoming some of the most abundant plant-eating animals worldwide.
• At least 21 separate species evolved before all pareiasaurs were wiped out about 252 million years ago during the Permian-Triassic extinction event.
• One large, abundant species, Bradysaurus, from the middle Permian Period, was found in South Africa and scientifically described in 1892.
• That means both of these pareiasaurs, from different hemispheres and living in different times, weighed in at about the mass of a large adult black rhino or a large domestic bull.

A new method

• These formulas were derived from large sets of measurements of the limb bones of modern animals whose masses can be measured directly.
• These animals often had a sprawling posture and, as a result, thickened bones.
• Read more:
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  We used a new volumetric method to determine a more realistic mass estimate.

• If they were accurate, the density of the animal’s tissues would have been greater than sandstone or concrete.

Body size in herbivores

• Bradysaurus’s large size is best explained by a negative relationship between food digestibility and body mass.
• It predicts the evolution of large body size in herbivores that ingest copious, low-quality plant material.
• Plants are hard to digest, and a plant-based diet typically results in a large body size – herbivores are typically substantially heavier than other dietary groups in living animals.
• Alternatively, or maybe in conjunction with the evolution of herbivory, the large body size of Bradysaurus may also have evolved as protection from co-existing predators.

• This groundbreaking research uses data from the ESO Data Collaborative, one of the nation's largest integrated healthcare research databases, inclusive of EMS data and linked hospital outcomes.
• The findings are based on more than 35,000 patients with long bone fractures transported by 400 EMS agencies between January 1, 2019, and December 31, 2020.
• "Inadequate pain management in prehospital emergency care persists, and this burden is experienced to a greater extent among Black patients," said Dr. Remle Crowe, Director of Clinical and Operational Research at ESO.
• According to the ESO Data Collaborative, EMS administered pain medication to 72% of White patients with severe pain compared to just 59% of Black patients with severe pain.