RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Growth Patterns of birds, dinosaurs and reptiles: Are differences real or apparent?
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 597260
DO 10.1101/597260
A1 Norbert Brunner
A1 Manfred Kühleitner
A1 Werner-Georg Nowak
A1 Katharina Renner-Martin
A1 Klaus Scheicher
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/04/02/597260.abstract
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.