Inferring the body mass of fossil taxa, such as non‐avian dinosaurs, provides a powerful tool for interpreting physiological and ecological properties, as well as the ability to study these traits through deep time and within a macroevolutionary context. As a result, over the past 100 years a number of studies advanced methods for estimating mass in dinosaurs and other extinct taxa. These methods can be categorized into two major approaches: volumetric‐density (VD) and extant‐scaling (ES). The former receives the most attention in non‐avian dinosaurs and advanced appreciably over the last century: from initial physical scale models to three‐dimensional (3D) virtual techniques that utilize scanned data obtained from entire skeletons. The ES approach is most commonly applied to extinct members of crown clades but some equations are proposed and utilized in non‐avian dinosaurs. Because both approaches share a common goal, they are often viewed in opposition to one another. However, current palaeobiological research problems are often approach specific and, therefore, the decision to utilize a VD or ES approach is largely question dependent. In general, biomechanical and physiological studies benefit from the full‐body reconstruction provided through a VD approach, whereas large‐scale evolutionary and ecological studies require the extensive data sets afforded by an ES approach. This study summarizes both approaches to body mass estimation in stem‐group taxa, specifically non‐avian dinosaurs, and provides a comparative quantitative framework to reciprocally illuminate and corroborate VD and ES approaches. The results indicate that mass estimates are largely consistent between approaches: 73% of VD reconstructions occur within the expected 95% prediction intervals of the ES relationship. However, almost three quarters of outliers occur below the lower 95% prediction interval, indicating that VD mass estimates are, on average, lower than would be expected given their stylopodial circumferences. Inconsistencies (high residual and per cent prediction deviation values) are recovered to a varying degree among all major dinosaurian clades along with an overall tendency for larger deviations between approaches among small‐bodied taxa. Nonetheless, our results indicate a strong corroboration between recent iterations of the VD approach based on 3D specimen scans suggesting that our current understanding of size in dinosaurs, and hence its biological correlates, has improved over time. We advance that VD and ES approaches have fundamentally (metrically) different advantages and, hence, the comparative framework used and advocated here combines the accuracy afforded by ES with the precision provided by VD and permits the rapid identification of discrepancies with the potential to open new areas of discussion.

中文翻译：

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非鸟类恐龙体重估计的准确性和精确度

推断化石类群（如非鸟类恐龙）的体重，为解释生理和生态特性提供了强大的工具，并提供了在深度时间和宏观进化背景下研究这些特征的能力。因此，在过去的 100 年中，许多研究改进了估计恐龙和其他已灭绝分类群质量的方法。这些方法可以分为两种主要方法：体积密度（VD）和现存缩放（ES）。前者在非鸟类恐龙中受到最多的关注，并且在上个世纪取得了明显的进步：从最初的物理比例模型到利用从整个骨骼获得的扫描数据的三维 (3D) 虚拟技术。ES 方法最常用于已灭绝的冠进化枝成员，但在非鸟类恐龙中提出并使用了一些方程。因为这两种方法有一个共同的目标，所以它们经常被视为彼此对立。然而，当前的古生物学研究问题通常是特定于方法的，因此，使用 VD 或 ES 方法的决定在很大程度上取决于问题。一般来说，生物力学和生理学研究受益于通过 VD 方法提供的全身重建，而大规模进化和生态研究需要 ES 方法提供的大量数据集。本研究总结了两种估计茎群分类群体重的方法，特别是非鸟类恐龙，并提供了一个比较定量的框架来相互阐明和证实 VD 和 ES 方法。结果表明质量估计在方法之间基本一致：73% 的 VD 重建发生在 ES 关系的预期 95% 预测区间内。然而，几乎四分之三的异常值出现在较低的 95% 预测区间以下，这表明 VD 质量估计平均低于根据其柱足周长的预期。不一致（高残差和百分比预测偏差值）在所有主要恐龙进化枝中都不同程度地恢复，同时小体类群之间的方法之间存在较大偏差的总体趋势。尽管如此，我们的结果表明，基于 3D 标本扫描的 VD 方法的最近迭代之间有很强的佐证，这表明我们目前对恐龙大小的理解以及其生物学相关性随着时间的推移而有所改善。我们提出 VD 和 ES 方法具有根本（度量）不同的优势，因此，这里使用和提倡的比较框架将 ES 提供的准确性与 VD 提供的精度结合起来，并允许快速识别差异并有可能开辟新的领域讨论的领域。