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

Obligatory Jurrasic Park (the Movie) refference.

[Anonymous Coward]

KSHAAAAAAAAAW!

Aaaaaaaaaaugh!

GNARFGNARF!

Kssssssssssssss!

SPLURT

That's when the attack comes...

[Cruithne]

... from the other two raptors you didnt even know were there. And they DO have disembowling claws, unlike this obvious decoy.

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?

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.

Re:Unconvincing

[kfg]

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

Re:Unconvincing

[Kaboom13]

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.

Re:Unconvincing

[Gordonjcp]

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.

Re:Unconvincing

[jafiwam]

Yeah, I was going to say anybody that thinks cats only make small puncture wounds has never owned one.

Here's an experiment;

- borrow cat
- fill tub while cat watches
- grab cat
- put cat in water

You will note that a) cats can somehow reverse gravity and automatically apply force upward with nothing to work against and b) 6 inches by .5 inch deep wounds are a trivial matter for a cat to produce

This guy (in the article) doesn't know what he's talking about.

It's cool they are using engineering to solve some of these issues instead of stupid speculation though.

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!

Re:I nominate this...

[phasm42]

"His work is very important"
Hmmm...

Cats don't disembowel?

[Matey-O]

"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.

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.

Re:Cats don't disembowel?

[commodoresloat]

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.

Re:Cats don't disembowel?

[prockcore]

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.

Re:Cats don't disembowel?

[cab15625]

OK, so we're talking about the difference between surgically slicing the abdomen open with a scalpel vs. ripping the abdomen open. In the end, what's the difference? Either way, you still end up with guts on the floor.

Someone else pointed out that this isn't generally how cats kill, and I'd have to say they're right, generally. I have, however, witnessed my cat slaughter a teddy-bear in this manner (she'd had a hard day, she'd gotten herself trapped in the closet and then had a bit too much catnip and the bear just looked at her kinda funny that one time too many and something in her just snapped). Doesn't matter how dull those hind claws are, the legs they're attached to are pretty f**king powerful and that kicking is pretty damned effective.

A Prayer to My God

[Seumas]

Dear God,

Today, I read a story about scientists creating a robotic velociraptor leg to see how well it could gut certain animals. What I don't understand is, why do we not know more about dinosaurs without having to go through such extensive research? My pastor told us that the Bible teaches that the world is only a few thousand years old, which must mean that men and dinosaurs lived alongside one another (perhaps Jesus even rode a triceritops?). If that is the case, then why isn't dinosaur behavior and activity a matter of written record?

Yours Truly,

Johnny Christian.

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.

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?

From TFA...

[The Amazing Fish Boy]

"Our study shows that the claw was used as a climbing crampon. It allowed the dromaeosaurs to hook themselves on to the flanks of their prey: when the prey turned, so too was the attacker," Manning told Discovery News. He continued in a puzzlingly forced manner, "Yes. We truly have nothing at all to fear from what I am sure are very friendly dinosaurs. We should trust that any dinosaur attacks are certainly not imminent. Nothing to fear whatsoever."

Questioned on the claw marks in his back, Manning replied, "What? Oh that. Yes. Haha. Silly me, I must have walked into a door. Yes. Nothing to fear whatsoever."

Chaos Theory

[EdwinBoyd]

"Sure your scientists set up this elaborate demonstration because they could but they never stopped to think if they should!!!"

Also why is it every time a paragraph ends with "This is very important" usually isn't at all?

Please pardon my cynicism

[NanoGator]

"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."

Right now I'm sitting here with a 2 inch long scratch on my tum... uh.. stom.. uh.. crap factory because last night my clutzy-ass-cat took a swipe at the cord to my sweat pants.

Re:I nominate this...

[Seumas]

What a waste of scientific effort. This was so obvious in the first place. Of course they suck at disemboweling. Even if they had the strength and accuracy to hurl the ball down the lane and knock all the pins over, how the hell would those tiny little arms hold the ball?

If Edsger W. Dijkstra wrote the headline...

[Saberwind]

"Velociraptor Considered Harmless"

Re:If Edsger W. Dijkstra wrote the headline...

[UserGoogol]

Yes, but a Velociraptor armed with a GOTO? Nothing more dangerous, my lad.

10 STAB
20 GOTO 10

I bet it is!

[Joe Ego]

"His work is very important,"

They must know something we don't: such as when they're planning on turning Euro-Disney into Jurrasic Park.

His Work Is Very Important

[Greyfox]

Because now we all know that the next time we encounter a velociraptor we do not have to fear disemboweling. You would not believe how many nights this has kept me up...

Re:His Work Is Very Important

[Chris Burke]

I hope this doesn't keep you up at night, but all the article means is that the velociraptor would dig his claws deep into your entrails to hold you still while he killed you with his teeth, like a cat killing a mouse. Or like the thing the lives in your closet.

Goodnight!

Re:yeah, um

[The Amazing Fish Boy]

Go cure cancer or something.

Uh huh. Look, I'll be honest with you. I'm not sure paleontologists are able to cure cancer. I know. It comes as a shock to most people. We've all heard the tired old argument that dinosaurs died from cancer, and that the cure to cancer is in their magical dinosaur bones, but I just don't buy it. And frankly until someone proves it, I don't think much effort is going to be put into forcing paleontologists by whip and chain to cure cancer. I'm sorry that you had to hear this from me.

velociraptors suck

[minus_273]

Deinonychus would kick thier ass any day!

shit did i say that out loud..

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.

Re:Evil Disemboweling Kitty Cats

[YttriumOxide]

My cat disembowelled a dog once. She was pretty much a normal housecat. Found in the wild at a young age, but grew up to a normal sized tabby with a bit of a vicious streak.
    Not entirely sure what kind of dog it was, but it wasn't small. Some kind of retriever or similar.

    The dog was on the front lawn, taking a dump. Fishface (for that was the cat's name, and I kid you not), ran outside and swiped it across the nose with her claw. The dog of course was taken by surprise and stood up on three legs while pawing at it's nose with the other. Fishface ran underneath the dog and swiped it through the gut. The dog staggered a bit and fell over dead with various internal mushy things (I can only assume intestines from the look of them) beginning to sag out of the largest of the scratch wounds.

    So, depending on one's definition of "disembowel", I'd say that qualifies...

    (and no, no-one put my cat down for it - we had to explain it to the neighbours, but fortunately they didn't seek legal action and Fishface died of old age a few years later)

Re:Remember, in 2008!

[bersl2]

You need ask yourself only one question:

What Would Raptor Jesus Do?

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]

I learnt ninjutsu when I was a teenager. We learnt how to grapple with dogs. If you pin the front leg of a dog to the ground and yank on the other front leg the chest cavity will split down the middle. It's an instant, although extremely painful, death. I know it's cruel, but when people train dogs to be weapons against you it would be insane not to learn how to defeat them. My Sensei was a partner in a security company. We used to practice on his alsatian. I remember he used to say "anyone hurts my dog, we'll see if they can handle him in attack mode, whilst they're dealing with me."

Re:I remember watching Jurassic Park

[Creepy Crawler]

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.

Re:I remember watching Jurassic Park

[izomiac]

Wait a second, you actually thought you could jump on a raptor and live? Perhaps it MIGHT be possible (if they weren't extinct) with an actual velociraptor (3 feet tall), but not with the ones in Jurassic Pack (Utahraptors I believe). First of all, I don't see where you're getting that they couldn't turn their heads more than 80 degrees, it looks to me more like 180 degrees. The tail is used as a counter-balance, so it's very flexable and heavy, perfect for a whip. In the movie one of them jumped on a T-Rex, so it could easily buck a person off if it needed to (I suspect mounting one would be about as hard as mounting a tiger). They're obviously much faster than a human and much stronger (can you tear a piece of flesh off a dinosaur)? Combined with a tougher bone structure I HIGHLY doubt any human could snap ones neck. The only way I'd think you could kill one without a weapon would be to suffocate it. But that's only if you could find a way to get that close and hold on to it for a couple minutes without getting clawed to death. Plus there's the whole thing about a wild animal that is used to fighting to survive, and the average human that is at a fraction of their potential strength and hasn't ever killed anything to eat. And, there were two in that scene of the movie anyway, so...

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

[Oligonicella]

So, geeks don't only have unrealistic fantasies and expectations about sex?

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:Obligatory Jurrasic Park (the Movie) refference

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean that in a fight, the lawyer might win? Noooooooooo!

Snuggle-Saurus!

[damned_mediocrity]

From TFA: The Velociraptor dinosaur... was not as vicious as portrayed. On the contrary, it embraced its victims before its razor sharp teeth went to work...

Awww, look. He wants to hug me!

Definition of Disembowel

[krunk4ever]

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.

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.

Re:Yet again scientist realize

[Pollardito]

"Yet again scientist realize that Hollywood movies don't always get their facts right."

since it was based on a book, i think you mean that authors don't always get it right. which is interesting, because that same author is testifying to congress right about now, on the other side of the debate from most scientists

Velociraptor is the wuss

[Wyatt Earp]

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

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:yeah, um

[azhyd]

This is indeed a delightful reply. I'd like to know the current job of the grandparent when he's back from hiding in shame.

Re:yeah, um

[Dasher42]

Uh huh. You just make those limp excuses for the paleontologists. Some runner at a marathon is going to totally blow by you and find that cure, and then they're going to be digging up paleontologist bones with their petrified feet planted firmly in their mouths. ;)

Re:Darn you scientists.

[schtum]

What's worse, they refuse to acknowledge my theory of Intelligent Disemboweling.

Re:This is NeWz?!

[PakProtector]

Yes .. we were all so overtaken by the fat kid's response to Dr. Alan Grant's demonstration of the CLAW that we paid no attention to it's clear roundedness and inability to CUT flesh. .

class hollywood Lights. . Camera. . (hey fat kid they outlawed cake) ACTION!! deception.

Long pointy rounded things cannot also slice flesh. . this is NEWS?! I surely hope we're not paying these SCIENTISTS .. MY tax dollars to make these types of discoveries.

I worked at a Humane Society for several months and one of my coworkers there was once given a nearly half-inch deep gash by a cat clawing her. Are you still so sure that a round, pointed object cannot slice flesh?

Re:I nominate this...

[Skater]

What? A velociraptor carrying a bowling ball?

It's not a question of where he grips it! It's a simple question of weight ratios!