Leaping lizards! - by Nature Video

High-speed video footage of leaping lizards supports a 40-year-old hypothesis about how theropod dinosaurs, like the velociraptors of Jurassic Park fame, adjusted the angle of their tails to stay stable when jumping.

Read the Nature News story http://www.nature.com/news/leaping-li... and the original research paper http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/...

• Category

  Science & Technology

[PuppetXeno]

Scientific study to what film makers intuitively got right.

Fair enough, film makers getting things right is a rarity. That alone is worth scientific study.

[MisakaBiribiriMikoto]

UC Berkeley ftw! :) a very nice synergy of biologists and mechanical engineers to yield a reasonable model. as expected of Berkeley and their amazing engineering department!

[Pam Long]

i am going to get one

[RaptorX863]

This is all really interesting to dino-nerds like me, but I wish they would've talked about the ossified tendons in dromaeosaurid tails which made them more stiff and better at stabalizing.

In fact I should also note that dromaeosaurid tails were very similar to another group of archosaurs, the rhamphorhynchids, in that they both had dynamic stabalizer tails. In rhamphorhynchids though, the tail is used in flight, and that ties in with the idea that dromaeosaurids evolved from flying ancestors.

[Kees de Jong]

I sometimes have a beard, but never had a dragon. True story.

[Imcool57]

ya i have a bearded dragon

[Imcool57]

i love lizards i have 1

[apicewyvern]

I saw the same model of the raptor the guy was holding at FAO shwarts

[zucchina89]

<3 the lizards are so adorable!! :D

[illinois008]

Amazing video. I have always been scared of lizards.

[Emma Comeau]

ILM does EXTENSIVE reasearch to make their films believable. But in the end it all comes down to money. If it's a high budget film, they will have the money to pay researchers. If it's a low budget film, the money is most likely going to go to a different department.