This exercise builds on Size Estimates by Name.
You want to reproduce the analysis determining the distribution of body masses for dinosaurs originally performed by Gorman & Hone
2012. Gorman & Hone (2012) used
femur length (FL; the length of the upper leg bone) to estimate mass based on a
general power law equation Mass = a * FL ^ b and the parameters vary by group:
a = 0.002 and b = 3.0587a = 0.509 and b = 2.3459a = 0.0007 and b = 3.1854Download the data, estimate the mass of each species, and then make a histogram of these masses with a logarithmically scaled size axis to reproduce their Figure 2a.
This should be done in a maximally automated way. The equations listed above
should only need to be entered once and the code should automatically use the right
set of parameters based on the Clade data to estimate the mass of each species.
