Putting dinosaurs and David Beckham together seems to be a recipe for getting your research into the press. Scientists at the University of Manchester in the UK have worked out how fast various dinosaurs can run – interesting but perhaps not front page news. But put out a press release saying that you’ve proved T. Rex could catch and eat David Beckham and it’s another story (freesheet Metro, Reuters, Scotsman, Times, Fox sports).

The paper involved is in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Biomechanics expert Bill Sellers and palaeontologist Phil Manning crunched the numbers for dinosaur skeletal and muscular structure to work out top speeds for various dinosaurs. They checked their calculations by using their model to estimate the speeds of known beings (such as professional athletes and ostriches). According to their model T. rex ran at a maximum of 18mph. Which is actually pretty lumbering compared to the tiny Compsognathus, which they calculated could run at almost 40mph.

“Previous research has relied on data from extant bipedal models to provide clues as to how fast dinosaurs could run,” said Sellers (press release). “Such calculations can accurately predict the top speed of a six-tonne chicken but dinosaurs are not built like chickens and nor do they run like them.”

As noted in the Times, one of a select few papers not to put the David Beckham angle in their headline, ostriches have been clocked at faster speeds than predicted by the model. But Sellers says this just means some dinosaurs could probably run even faster than predicted.

Whether a T. Rex could actually catch Beckham after it outpaced him is another matter though – earlier this year John Hutchinson of Stanford University published a study showing the beast could only turn very slowly (picked up by Cosmos). Duck and weave David! Duck and weave!

Image: Alamy