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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,"
... from the other two raptors you didnt even know were there. And they DO have disembowling claws, unlike this obvious decoy.
Just how cool is it to be paid to test "stuff" like that?
Fsck! I need a job like that!
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"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
"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."
"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.
"Derp de derp."
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?
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...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
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
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.
Yeah, I was going to say anybody that thinks cats only make small puncture wounds has never owned one.
.5 inch deep wounds are a trivial matter for a cat to produce
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
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.