Slashdot Mirror
Velociraptor Bad At Disemboweling
illtron writes "British scientists at the University of Manchester were apparently bored and decided to find out, once and for all, if the Velociraptor was as mean as Jurassic Park would like everyone to think. They created a robotic Velociraptor leg to simulate the effect that leg would have on pig and crocodile skin. It turns out that disemboweling a dino probably would have been out of the question, since the best that big claw could do was usually just to leave a deep puncture." From the article: "I realized that the sick-claw was not a knife, but was rather more like the claw of a cat. Cats use their claws to pierce and hold prey, not to disembowel. Whereas my work was mostly theoretical, Phil took one step farther as he was given the opportunity to mechanically test the disemboweling hypothesis. His work is very important,"
I recall a long time ago seeing one of those "animals attack" shows and it showed some sort of big cat attacking a much larger prey by running alongside it and pouncing on its belly from underneath and using its legs in a manner similar to what is described above. That sucker was disemboweled, that's for sure.
If you saw away at a large chunk of meat with a small but sharp knife you can make a deep wound.
Try "sawing away" at something, anything, with an awl. The whole point here is that a velociraptor claw is not a sharp knife, but a pointy stick.
You can make a wound as deep as the "hilt", but no "longer" than the diameter of the claw.
KFG
For those, or maybe it's just me, that didn't know the definition (for some reason I thought it had to do with digestion)
Disembowelment is evisceration, or the removing of vital organs, usually from the abdomen. The results are invariably fatal. It has historically been used as a form of capital punishment.
So, I'm guessing from that post and the definition, disembowelment is when the velociraptor sliced you in the stomach, so your guts spill out, which they're claiming here is untrue.
HD Trailers
He's obviously never had a catnipped-up cat grab a hold of his forearm with the front claws and use it's back legs to scrape the everlovincrap out of him.
Everyone knows a cat's claw is Piercing+1, Slashing-5 sheesh
Seriously though. Look at the cat scratch, it's not a clean cut, it's similar to if you got scratched by a pointy stick, not a razor. If the claw went deeper it wouldn't move because only the point is sharp, not the edge.
Jurrasic Park misrepresented the Velociraptors.
Velociraptor has a skull length of 249 mm (9.80 in), a total length of 2.7 m (8 ft 10 in), a hip height of 0.5 m (1 ft 8 in), and weighs 20 kg (45 lb). The 'raptors portrayed there were modelled after a larger relative, Deinonychus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinonychus
And another way (which I actually did) is when a dog tries to bite you, make a fist. The dog will bite the fist. When it does that, take yoru closed fist and ram it down the throat of the dog. Then rapidly jerk your whole arm downwards.
The procedure will break the jaw of a dog. Quite easily. I ended up causing a compound fracture on many parts of the jaw bone.
They had to put down the dog I did that to, but the owner didnt complain.. They were happy I didnt sue.
The point of the robot arm is to get the same range of motion as the actual Dinosaur would have had. They can then give each joint a strength proportional to the size of the muscle that would have been attached to it (some guess work here I would assume). Then they can play around with it and see what different movements and would kind of attacks would have been possible and how much damage they would do. Animals use their claws in different ways, and the appendage the claw is attached to gives you just as much information as the size and shape of the claw itself. The expirement isn't what damage can WE do with a velociraptor claw it's what damage the velociraptor could have done.
Well, if you look at the wounds a cat leaves on animals of equivalent size to itself, then yes it *can* disembowel something. Cats don't seem to like eating guts.
That said, a cat catching prey will tend to just jump on it and bite it on the back of the neck, breaking all the vertebrae. You'd be amazed how powerful a cat's jaws are, for their size. If you watch a cat attacking something in a fight, particularly something larger than it, the cat will grab hold with its front paws and kick with its powerful back legs. The claws on their back paws are much thicker and only a little bit blunter than the ones on their front paws.