Table 2.

Extrapolation of organ masses (in kg) of a hypothetical 38 000 kg vertebrate (the estimated mass of Brachiosaurus, a sauropod dinosaur; Gunga et al. 2008) under different assumptions: ‘linear approach’, assuming linear scaling with BM for all clades, i.e. b=1.0, using values for a from table 1; ‘allometric approach’, using the exact equations as given in table 1. (Note that owing to small differences in the exponent b, extrapolations using the exact equations will yield fundamentally different results.)

	linear approach			allometric approach
	reptile	mammal	bird	reptile	mammal	bird
heart	190	228	342	339	185	182
kidney	228	266	342	128	55	132
liver	1254	1254	1254	2515	318	354
GIT tissue	1178	2850	3420	6300	1514	3078