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,"

Next experiment...

[Anonymous Coward]

make a robotic "Dino" from the Flintstones, and see if it really just licks Fred Flintstone when he comes home, or really tears out a big chunk of his jugular vein.

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.

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: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: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 [homecinemachoice.com]. 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: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?