A Question About How Much Weight A Femur Can Support Before Breaking

[tigerluver]

For question one, the goalpost can keep moving depending on the structure of the femur. In simple terms, you can keep widening the bone proportionately and then load more weight. A crude example, but compare the sauropod (Argentinasaurus) femur (top) to a mammoth femur (bottom):

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

I purposely chose an incomplete mammoth femur as the sauropod femur is incomplete but perhaps from the heaviest animal known to history. A mammoth femur is extremely thick, but the Argentinasaurus femur blows it out of water. There is no for certain answer as it seems organisms can keep pushing the limits. If we go from fossil record, that top femur was estimated to be from a 90 metric ton animal.

On the paper, it's almost but not quite a methods paper describing a the accuracy of a model/simulation. The ran simulations with different conditions to determine which model most accurately reflects reality. The conditions that produced the most accurate simulation were then recommended as the standard for future studies. Reply