Dave Hone

So for us, make up the flat of the feet, but these animals walk like birds.

They've got three toes on the ground and then the metatarsals stick nearly vertically.

That overall extends the length of the leg, so you can walk a little bit faster.

You get a slightly bigger stride length.

Don't worry, I've got the right bone here.

But they also have, yeah, there's a good one.

That one's a great one.

But they also have this really neat adaptation in the middle bone.

So you can see it on this one quite well.

And this is actually not a Tyrannosaur.

This is an Ornithomimosaur.

So one of the really ostrich-like ones, Gallimimus from the first Jurassic Park.

It has the same thing.

You can see the normal bones would be really quite long and square and then flat at the top.

And instead, this thing shrinks in the middle and turns into this kind of

flattened diamond shape and what that means is the bones either side kind of lock it in fact at the top end it actually tends to wiggle a bit so actually goes left and then right

And of course, what that really does is then help these things lock together.

And so this is an adaptation to basically lock the foot and make it stable.

And we see it in a whole bunch of things independently evolved.

Early Tyrannosaurs don't have this.