The scene: the closing credits of The Flintstones.
Fred, Wilma, Dino, and their cat go to a drive-in restaurant. A waitress brings them an enormous rack of dinosaur (or other large animal) ribs. Once they’ve been placed on the car, however, the car tips over because of their incredible weight.
How much would those ribs have to weigh to tip over a car made primarily of wood and stone?
(This is just one piece of evidence that homo bedrockus was much stronger than modern man – that car gets around at a zippy clip through the courtesy of Fred’s two feet, after all.)
I really have no idea, but I figured there was no better group of people to ask.
Yes, I’m serious. Anyone able to come up with a good guesstimate?
(Mods: I was on the fence about GQ or Cafe Society. Sorry if I chose the wrong door.)
Most of the weight in Fred’s car is going to be in those two big stone rollers in the front and back. I would estimate them to be about 1.5 m long and 80 cm in diameter, which (assuming granite has a density of about 2.7 g/cm[sup]3[/sup]) gives them a mass of about 360 kg each.
I don’t have enough time to do the moment of inertia calculations right now, but given the geometry of the situation I wouldn’t be surprised if the dino ribs weighed over a metric ton.
