The whopping claws on its feet may look terrifying, but it looks like they were used for climbing rather than disembowelling (Image: Solent News / Rex)

ACCORDING to Jurassic Park, everyone’s favourite fleet-footed predators dispatched their prey by disembowelling them with deadly “killing claws”. Not so, say palaeontologists who have studied the biomechanics of Velociraptor claws. Instead, the notorious dinosaurs used their claws to cling to prey and to climb trees.

Phil Manning of the University of Manchester, UK, and colleagues previously showed that Velociraptor‘s sharp-tipped foot claw could puncture skin and help the dinosaur cling to wounded prey …