Dinosaurs and Olympians: The key to teaching students about Newtonian mechanics?

With a head start, could Usain Bolt outrun a Tyrannosaurus rex?

Scratch that — would he even need a head start?

These types of comparisons can help students understand the difference between velocity and acceleration, where their intuition is often incorrect. Scott Lee and Lisa Walsh developed a set of dinosaur-related classroom activities to help introductory physics students separate these concepts.

Lee introduces the lesson with a question.

“What animal has the biggest acceleration? It must be the cheetah, right? Because it goes the fastest,” he said.

It’s not. A cheetah has a maximum acceleration of about 14 m/s², less than the average roller coaster.

When students realize that the fastest animals don’t have the largest acceleration — in fact, the tiny kangaroo rat does, though its velocity tops off at only about 3.5 m/s — it helps them intuitively decouple the two concepts.

“It’s a huge shock to them, and I think it does help the students realize that acceleration is a different thing than speed,” Lee said.

Lee guides the students through calculating various land animals’ maximum velocities and accelerations and using these to create a fit of their maximum acceleration as a function of their size. Then, they extrapolate this to dinosaurs.

If learning about the cheetah was a shock, imagine realizing that the T. rex had a maximum acceleration only about a quarter that of Usain Bolt — and about the same maximum velocity.

Though the activity was designed to teach students about Newtonian mechanics, the findings can potentially inform paleontological debates on dinosaurs’ social hunting behaviors. Lee says this is just one example of showing students that physics is everywhere.

“Physics is, in some sense, the most fundamental science, so we’re looking at nature at the most fundamental level, and it can be applied to all kinds of different areas,” he said. “Especially for the lay public, the more applications we can make of physics to things people can relate to, the better it is for the people, and for science in general.”

Source: “The maximum acceleration of terrestrial animals including Tyrannosaurus rex,” by Scott A. Lee and Lisa Walsh, The Physics Teacher (2026). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0268325 .