I’ve Come Across Many People in My Life Who Use Their Razor-sharp Teeth to Make Slashing Wounds
{ Raptor inflicted death by a thousand bites } The movie Jurassic Park propelled velociraptor to fame, but in real life the dinosaur was an altogether different kind of killer. Far from using its sickle claws to slash and disembowel, the velociraptor was a diminutive beast that used its claws to cling onto prey animals while working over them with its teeth.
Phil Manning at the University of Manchester, UK, and colleagues built a robotic claw based on fossils of velociraptor and deinonychus, a 3-metre-long, 80-kilogram relative, to test its slashing power. They used hydraulics to drive it into a side of pork at different velocities, mimicking a kick, but rather than slashing, the claw only punctured the flesh.
Manning now thinks that velociraptor gripped its herbivorous prey much like a lion grips a buffalo. “Velociraptor wouldn’t be shaken off by the powerful movements of larger prey animals, because the toe claws provided such a firm grip,” says Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum in London. The velociraptor would then use its razor-sharp teeth to make slashing wounds, so that its prey bled to death.
{ What color were dinosaurs? } It is not known with any certainty what color brontosauruses were. No pieces of dinosaur skin have ever been found; like other soft tissue, it decays rapidly.
The vertebrate fossil record is almost entirely in the form of bones and other durable items, and even then the original material has usually been salted out and replaced by various minerals. There have been a couple of skin impressions found, where a dinosaur sat down, one supposes, but these give no clue as to color.
