Making Choices

Size Estimates by Name

This is a follow up to Use and Modify.

To make it even easier to work with your dinosaur size estimation functions you decide to create a function that lets you specify which dinosaur group you need to estimate the size of by name and then have the function automatically choose the right parameters.

Create a new function get_mass_from_length_by_name() that takes two arguments, the length and the name of the dinosaur group. Inside this function use if/else if/else statements to check to see if the name is one of the following values and if so set a and b to the appropriate values.

• Stegosauria: a = 10.95 and b = 2.64 (Seebacher 2001).
• Theropoda: a = 0.73 and b = 3.63 (Seebacher 2001).
• Sauropoda: a = 214.44 and b = 1.46 (Seebacher 2001).

Once the function has assigned a and b have it run get_mass_from_length() with the appropriate values and return the estimated mass.

Run the function for:

1. A Stegosauria that is 10 meters long.
2. A Theropoda that is 8 meters long.
3. A Sauropoda that is 12 meters long.

Challenge (optional): If the name doesn’t match any of these values have the function return NA and print out a message that it doesn’t know how to convert that group.