This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Waite Gibbs. Got a minute?

It seems the first resident of Earth to break the sound barrier wasn't Chuck Yeager after all.

He was about a hundred million years, too late.

A Patisaurus was a cousin of Brontosaurus, but even bigger,

with a 40 foot tail more than three feet thick at the butt end,

but no wider than your pinky at the tip.

That dainty end made the tail too fragile for clubbing attackers.

So what was it for?

Maybe this.

The idea that a Patasaurus might have used its tail like a bullwhip to scare off

predators, communicate, or even show off her potential mates, gained traction about 20 years ago.

That's when paleontologist Philip Curry of the University of Alberta

teamed with Nathan Mervold to create a computer simulation that showed the

whip-cracking tail was plausible.

Mervold is the founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures, an invention firm in the Seattle Suburbs, where I'm

executive editor. This week at a meeting of the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology,

Mirvold, Curry, and Leipse-avam, also of Intellectual Ventures, unveiled a quarter-scale physical model of an

a Patasaur's tail, made from aluminum vertebrae and steel tendons.

Give the big end of the model a strong push and pull, and it does this.

Our analysis of high-speed video of the tail in action found that the tip moves at more

than 800 miles an hour fast enough to break the sound barrier and create a small Sonic boom.

A full-size of Patasaur whipping its tail in this way could probably have produced a sound loud enough to shatter human eardrums,

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