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,"

Comments

Unconvincing

[geordieboy]

It seems possible their methodology and conclusions are flawed. If you saw away at a large chunk of meat with a small but sharp knife you can make a deep wound. Why do they assume the raptor attacks in a short stabbing motion? What about other modes of attack their "robotic arm" doesn't simulate?

Who care about TFA

[zappepcs]

Just how cool is it to be paid to test "stuff" like that?

Fsck! I need a job like that!

Geek Fight

[eluusive]

"His work is very important,"

I fail to see how it's important what a dinosaur did period. Great it punctured, big deal, they aren't around now anyways. This is about as important as two geeks debating spiderman vs batman who would win?

Evil Disemboweling Kitty Cats

[PresidentEnder]

Has anyone ever been disemboweled by a cat? This thread has several mentions of how a cat scratched the poster, but never of how a cat disemboweled them. My cat has never disemboweled me. If we take this further (anything that can scratch can disebowel), I've had a nasty scratch or two courtesy of a nail (or two), but if you threatened to disembowel me with one, I'd laugh. I may receive a nasty puncture wound or two courtesy of your nail, but I'd laugh.

I remember watching Jurassic Park

[QuantumG]

and thinking I could kick the shit out of one of those Velociraptors. They're short, they have short little arms and these long ineffectual tails and they can't turn their heads more than 80 degrees to the left or right. Not to mention the fact that they have poor peripherial vision and can't recognise stationary objects. In particular, when the kids ran into the computer room and hid, thinking the raptors couldn't open the door, but they did, the kids could have kept low, circled around, jumped on the raptor's tail and kicked it in the spine.. it'd be snappin' at em but as long as you stay behind it you'll be fine.. then you could do a wind choke on its prehistoric neck or just snap it Bruce Lee style.

That's why I really liked Pitch Black. Instead of pitting blood hungry monsters against helpless little kids, they threw in a bad ass human to take em on and, unlike the useless soldiers in Aliens, he actually put up a fight!

Re:I remember watching Jurassic Park

[QuantumG]

Pfft. Those dinosaurs were in a zoo man. All they ever hunted was the domesticated goats and cows that the handlers fed them. It's not like they were part of an actual ecosystem and had parents to teach them how to hunt. I'm sure just stomping on their tail would make them run away like the little girlosaurous they are. As for there being two of em, you gotta split em up, take em out one by one. The first velociraptor would be wonderin' where the second one got to and then BAM! got one of them Sun monitors smashed on its head. Not to mention tripwires.. see how smart they are when they're chasin' you down a hallway and they trip over one of those suckers. When they're tryin' to get to their feet you bash in their head with a fire extinguisher.

Re:I remember watching Jurassic Park

[Weedlekin]

Yeah, large carnivores one or two generations from the wild that haven't had to hunt are real softies. When they rip the odd keeper who gets overconfident, stage magician, or member of the public with a deathwish to bloody shreds, they invariably do it in a gentle, "but of course I've been raised in captivity" way, not like their wild brethren who boorishly leap around and snarl and cover everything in drool.

And it goes without saying that a raised-in-captivity bengal tiger, kodiac bear, or nile crocodile can have the shit totally kicked out of it by a geek who gets nose-bleeds after sliding a 19" monitor three whole inches. Because being raised in captivity and never having hunted means it'll just sit there and take the abuse, just like true domestic animals such as Rottweillers and Spanish fighting bulls do.

So anybody who is planning on visiting a safari park should take a geek with them. Then, if you break down or get a puncture in the lion enclosure, you can get out and fix it in the sure knowledge that your geek can just pick up one of those pesky cats by the tail and use it to club any others into mewling submission, assuming of course that they were all raised in captivity and never had to hunt.

Re:A Prayer to My God

[Scratch-O-Matic]

I haven't studied the issue, but I feel like your generalization of scientists is wrong. Most good scientists welcome the chance to be proven wrong...that's what peer review is all about, and why scientists have such confidence in properly derived conclusions. If they look down on anyone who doesn't "worship science," it's most likely because the conclusions drawn by those people are NOT replicable and have NOT been subjected to real peer review--which is why such conclusions fail to convince those who understand (not "worship") the scientific process.

It's about repeatability

[tepples]

But more generally, I'm not sure exactly why it is useful to build a robot arm to do their demonstration.

Robotics means you get consistent force from trial to trial.

Re:A Prayer to My God

[Scratch-O-Matic]

The key to the process is that anyone should be able to replicate the results obtained by another person, and that if one claims that something is true, then one should be able to demonstrate it. Anything that doesn't fit that framework--that "lies outside their beloved process"--falls into another process that can best be described as "believe it because I say so." How can anyone offer a cogent counter-argument that cannot be replicated and cannot be demonstrated?