Leaping lizards! Jurassic Park got it right

[Viva_La_Revolution]

Velociraptor adjusted the angle of its tail to stay stable when jumping.

High-speed video footage of leaping lizards supports a 40-year-old hypothesis1 about how theropod dinosaurs, such as the velociraptors of Jurassic Park fame, used their tails to stay stable while bounding around. The finding could be used to inform the design of more agile search-and-rescue robots.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, filmed red-headed agama lizards (Agama agama) running down a track and vaulting off an obstacle to reach a shelter on a high platform. When the obstacle's surface was made slippery, the lizards skidded and jumped at the wrong angle. But by lifting their tails up or down, the lizards could adjust the tilt of their bodies, and thus land successfully.

Using these observations, the researchers made a computer model of Velociraptor mongoliensis and showed that, muscles willing, the dinosaur could have used its tail in a similar way, “maybe even more effectively than the lizard”, says study leader Robert Full, a biomechanic at Berkeley. The study is published online today in Nature2.

video at link
http://www.nature.com/news/leaping-lizards-jurassic-park-got-it-right-1.9736

[Scuba]

1. Don't all tailed animals do this?

[Warpy]

2. All they had to do was watch cats and squirrels to get that one

Despite their reputation for gracefulness, most cat owners can tell you their cats are clods who under or overestimate distances all the time. That's when the tail comes in. The same can be said for squirrels. Sometimes they hop from branch to branch just fine, the rest of the time that tail is angled strangely and the landing is a little less than graceful, letting us know they goofed.

[Dead_Parrot]

3. I smell an Ignoble. nt

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Except that V. mongoliensis only weighed about 100 pounds

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/saurischia/dromaeosauridae.html

They supersized it in the movie, to make it scarier.

[Odin2005]

5. The raptor in the movie was actually Deinonychus.

Spielberg got his info on dinosaurs from Robert Bakker, and Bakker is a taxonomic lumper, he lumps Deinonychus within the genus Velociraptor.

[DetlefK]

6. Correct. A Velociraptor was just tall enough to reach your nuts, not your chest.

Would have shifted the tone of the movie...

[jmowreader]

7. Wouldn't have shifted it any more than Spielberg already did

The most vicious dinos in the whole series were the compys--they were the size of chickens, but they attacked and ate humans?