PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Brunner, Norbert
AU  - Kühleitner, Manfred
AU  - Nowak, Werner-Georg
AU  - Renner-Martin, Katharina
AU  - Scheicher, Klaus
TI  - Growth Patterns of birds, dinosaurs and reptiles: Are differences real or apparent?
AID  - 10.1101/597260
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 597260
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/04/02/597260.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/04/02/597260.full
AB  - Systematics of animals was done on their appearance or genetics. One can also ask about similarities or differences in the growth pattern. Quantitative studies of the growth of dinosaurs have made possible comparisons with modern animals, such as the discovery that dinosaurs grew in relation to their size faster than modern reptiles. However, these studies relied on only a few growth models. If these models are false, what about the conclusions? This paper fits growth data to a more comprehensive class of models, defined by the von Bertalanffy-Pütter differential equation. Applied to data about dinosaurs, reptiles and birds, the best fitting models confirmed that dinosaurs may have grown faster than alligators. However, compared to modern broiler chicken, this difference was small.