"Gaaaar! I'm gonna hold you down and eat you alive! While
flapping!" Photo by Dominique Pipet, via Flickr. What did
Deinonychus really do with its feet? John Ostrom initially
painted the picture of a fleet-footed predator, chasing down
prey animals and slashing at them with the enlarged claw on its
second toe. To take it from Crichton, they were slitting bellies
and dancing in spilled viscera. A few years ago, Phil Manning of
the University of Manchester suggested they were more likely
"climbing crampons," allowing them to cling to the panicky
tenontosaurs they were attacking. In a new PLoS One paper,
Denver Fowler, with Elizabeth Freedman, John Scannella, and
Robert Kambic, puts forward another option: they were grasping
tools for holding down smaller prey (or, in typically colorful
science-speak, prey of "subequal body size"). To come to this
conclusion, Fowler and team compared the feet of Deinonychus to
other animals: a diverse group of extinct theropod genera as
well as living birds. When compared to din