Re: Claw function in Deinonychus

["Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com>]

Mike Habib <mhabib5@jhmi.edu> wrote:
<The info above makes it appear as if my hunch was wrong (nothing shocking
there);  I am a bit confused, however, because your ratios seem to say the
opposite...>

  Ugh, you're right. That comes from writing the prelim observations (such as
working from memory...) then finding measurements of the unguals (one from a
*Megaraptor* paper and another from a press comparison of Utah's vs. Deino and
Vel claws). At which point, I started to try to go back and fix my earlier
comments to conform to the tables. The inference I wrote under inverted
allometry was based on faulty writing, so I blame myself for rewording that
twice and still getting the parsing wrong. Oh well.

<Thanks for taking the time to gather that prelim data!>

  Sure, no prob. For what it's worth, the measurements for *Adasaurus* and
*Microraptor* follow:

  At an estimated body length of 1.5m, *Adasaurus* has a claw length of 22.5mm,
which is incredibly small, 0.015 of body length. Meanwhile, for the holotype of
*Microraptor gui*, with a body length of .73m, it has a claw length of 15mm, so
0.021. And for the type of *Cryptovolans pauli*, we have a body length of .75m
(estimated with slender proportions and a neck and neck of roughly equal
length,  with a claw length of 14.76mm, so 0.02. I may have gotten the body
length wrong, but used Norell et al's figure from Nature featuring the
specimen.

  Cheers,

Jaime A. Headden

"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969)


                
__________________________________ 
Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click.
http://farechase.yahoo.com