Scientists Put Alligators on a Treadmill

Nov. 22 -- Scientists think they have found the answer to a question that has perplexed biologists for decades: How did dinosaurs run and breathe at the same time?

But finding the answer was a bit tricky. First, they had to train alligators to walk on a treadmill.

Since they couldn't study dinosaurs directly, they turned to the next best thing.

"Alligators are very closely related to dinosaurs," says Colleen Farmer, a research assistant professor of biology at the University of Utah. Modern alligators evolved about 95 million years ago, so they coexisted with dinosaurs, she says.

Breathing on the Move

Farmer and a colleague, David Carrier, an associate professor of biology at the university, discovered that gators are able to breathe while they walk because they use a rocking pubic bone, part of the pelvis, to expand and contract their breathing cavity. It seems likely, the researchers contend, that dinosaurs used a similar mechanism.

Otherwise, they would have suffered from the same limitation as lizards, which have to pause every few steps and take a deep breath because they can't run and breathe at the same time. If that held true for dinosaurs, they would have been very limited in their abilities, forced to wait patiently for dinner to come along instead of chasing it down.

"If you can find ways to run and breathe simultaneously, then you can be active for extended periods of time," says Carrier. Far from being sluggish and slow, the finding indicates that dinosaurs could have been as aggressive and active as modern mammals.

That isn't what the researchers had set out to discover. It's a serendipitous finding that grew out of research into how blood flows to the heart during exercise. To understand how that works in modern animals, Carrier says, you have to look at how animals evolved over millions of years. And where better to start than with dinosaurs?

Training Alligators to Work Out

So the researchers borrowed five young alligators from a wildlife refuge in Florida to see what they could tell them about their distant cousins.