Thanks Jaime, that was very interesting (if grisly). As for being quick; I have actually done a little bit of training on gurkha, and they are pretty fast, though not appreciably faster than well-weighted straight blades. They do allow for some interesting grips with the off-hand braced on the non-bladed portion. Obviously I was only sparring, so I never found out how the real wounding would work out; now I know.
Cheers, --Mike Habib
On Wednesday, November 2, 2005, at 09:15 PM, Jaime A. Headden wrote:
Michael Habib (mhabib5@jhmi.edu) wrote:
<Also, 'assassins knives' are recurved, not decurved, to the best of my
knowledge, so I don't think they are often claw-shaped. Decurved knives are
produced; I do not know what their purpose is.>
Assassin's blades, such as the gurkha or sikhanese knives of the Indian
subcontinent, are sharpened on their inner edge, and are used with the
edge-side out to puncture laterally into the throat, slicing outward as it
travels from side to side. The curvature of the blade forces the knife to curve
outwards through the initial puncture and in the process of the blade width
increasing, opening the wound wider and eventually slicing open the entire
throat. Grisly, effective, and leaves an ugly corpse. They are also very quick,
I am told.
The action is similar to that proposed for sabretooth cat bites in opening
jugulars and eventually "tearing out" of the neck.
The same may have been true of dromaeosaur sickles, with sharper inner edges
on the unguals, though it was not true of *Baryonyx*, once thought to be a
dromaeosaur of titanic proportions due to the nature of the pollecial ungual.
It was also one of the reasons the pollecial ungual of the holotype of
*Megaraptor namunquaihuii* was considered to belong to the pes of a
dromaeosaur.
Cheers,
Jaime A. Headden
"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969)
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