The survival of both the hunter and the hunted often comes down to speed. Yet how fast an animal can run is intricately linked to its size, such that the fastest animals are not the biggest nor the smallest. The ability to maintain high speeds is dependent on the body's capacity to withstand the high stresses involved with locomotion. Yet even when standing still, scaling principles would suggest that the mechanical stress an animal feels will increase in greater demand than its body can support. So if big animals want to be fast, they must find solutions to overcome these high stresses. This article explores the ways in which extant animals mitigate size-related increases in musculoskeletal stress in an effort to help understand where all the giants have gone.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 158. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 07 November 2024.
All research outputs
#327,311
of 34,360,257 outputs
Outputs from PLoS Biology
#560
of 7,797 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#5,465
of 466,767 outputs
Outputs of similar age from PLoS Biology
#10
of 68 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,360,257 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 99th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 7,797 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 56.9. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 92% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 466,767 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 98% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 68 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 85% of its contemporaries.
