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

Re:Unconvincing

[geordieboy]

You're probably right that a sawing motion is not practical in an attack. But more generally, I'm not sure exactly why it is useful to build a robot arm to do their demonstration. Wouldn't a few minutes experimentation with a sharp piece of bone and a lump of meat achieve the same, and probably give you more insight about the specific types of movement you can use to cause damage than just manipulating this simplistic arm? I suspect they used the arm to lend some extra perceived scientific flavor to their observations. It's an experiment with a *robot*, so it must be right.

Yet again scientist realize

[Xiph]

that Hollywood movies don't always get their facts right. It reminds me of the roaring fast-running t-rex which couldn't see stuff when it was standing still. I can understand that Hollywood needs to come up with these things, if something haven't been studied thoroughly. What i don't understand is why we bother reading about whether this uninteresting tidbit of information is true, for the whenever it's been part of a movie.