Estimating body volumes and surface areas of animals from cross-sections

Abstract

Body mass and surface area are among the most important biological properties, but such information are lacking for some extant organisms and all extinct species. Numerous methods have been developed for body size estimation for this reason. There are two main categories of mass-estimating methods: volumetric-density approaches and extant-scaling approaches. In this paper, a new 2D volumetric-density approach named cross-sectional method is presented. Cross-sectional method integrates biological cross-sections to obtain volume and surface area accurately. Unlike all previous 2D methods, cross-sectional method processes true cross-sectional profiles directly rather than approximating. Cross-sectional method also has the advantage over others that it can deal with objects with gradually changing cross-sections. It generates very accurate results, with errors always lower than 2% in all cases tested.