Tyrannosaurus Simulation

Everyone wants to know how fast the giant dinosaurs could go. Were these slow, lumbering animals that a human could easily outrun or could they manage high speeds and easily outpace the fastest human sprinter? There has been a lot of research into the is question of the last few decades and there is no concensus so far. We thought we would have a go answering this question and built a Tyrannosaurus rex simulation. With reasonable assumptions for the amount of muscle available and body size we were able to obtain running gaits with speeds from about 7 to 15 m/s (that is 25 to 54 km/h or 16 to 34 mph). These are relatively simple models at the moment but the results certainly suggest that a T. rex could easily outrun a human!