Get ready to come face to face
with some of the most fearsome creatures that ever lived,
as we reveal the world of dinosaurs as you've never seen it before.
In the last programme, we examined the somewhat stormy relationship
between T rex and triceratops.
This time we answer leading questions about another two killer dinosaurs.
Was velociraptor really capable
of disembowelling its victims with its evil-looking claw?
And was this ankylosaur the most impregnably-defended dinosaur
of all time?
To find out the facts, we'll be building life-size biomechanical models.
And we'll be looking at living animals...
to discover exactly who killed who 75 million years ago.
Oh. And most important of all,
everything you're about to see is true.
Aaah... The joys of bird-watching.
Although right now, it's not birds that I'm looking for.
In fact, I'm in pursuit of something a great deal more elusive.
Dinosaurs.
I'm going to investigate the dinosaurs that fought in the Mongolian desert
75 million years ago.
In particular, I'm going to introduce you
to a two-legged meat eater called velociraptor.
In the movie jurassic Park, velociraptor is depicted as six foot tall
and with a vicious claw that can literally tear out its victims'guts.
And from then on, it's been stuck with a pretty evil reputation.
But how much of this is really true?
Well, not very much, as it happens.
Now, the fact that I'm a bird-watcher is appropriate
when it comes to velociraptor,
because, and this might come as a bit of a surprise,
velociraptor had feathers.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, for the first time on British television,
the fierce yet feathered in beautiful plumage, velociraptor.
(# Fanfare )
In fact, velociraptor was only two and a half feet tall.
And it looked very much like a bird.
Which perhaps isn't that surprising
because scientists now agree that birds were descended from dinosaurs.
It all becomes pretty obvious when you look closely at the fossil bones.
As a matter of fact, a complete velociraptor skeleton
has never ever been found and there's only been one that was nearly complete.
Nevertheless, we have assembled our jigsaw and here it is.
Not a single piece missing. The complete velociraptor.
So, what can these bones tell us?
Look at these long front limbs.
Much like wings and it's got hollow bones,
only found on dinosaurs and birds.
And look. A wishbone. Again, only on dinosaurs and birds.
And look at those feet. What about those feet?
They're much more like talons, aren't they? Yeah.
Like you'd see on a bird of prey, which, of course, is also known as a raptor.
As a bird-watcher, I can see quite a few similarities to birds.
But dinosaur experts can spot even more.
Time to visit a scientist.
Phil Manning is in charge of dinosaur fossils at the Museum of Manchester.
Phil and I have something in common -
birds, which is why he's invited me over to his house...
to eat one.
Mmm! My favourite! Roast turkey.
(Phil) A leg? You can have a leg.
Look at the arm. Now notice I didn't say wing,
because long ago in this guy's evolutionary history,
this was in fact its arm, and you can still see the hand here.
What we call a wing on a bird is the hand.
- You can still see a finger there. - Absolutely.
The end of his finger just fell off. There is a claw.
- That goes on the end there. - That goes there. It still has a joint.
But I've got something else that might convince you that this is a dinosaur.
- All right. - Let me get it for you. You'll like this.
- You don't have to eat this bit. - It isn't on here, then?
- What is it, the head? - Forgive me for not cooking these.
- Oh. - Eurgh!
- The best bit. - Well, maybe. Take your foot.
(Phil) Just look at that. It's a dinosaur's foot.
If you look at the structure and number of bones, what they look like,
they are bang on for many types of predatory dinosaur.
Another thing that jumps out at you linking birds and predatory dinosaurs
is when you look at the form of the scales on the feet,
cos they gently change into these downy feathers
before they become the true feathers we all know and love in birds.
Cos feathers are just highly-evolved scales.
So, Phil has confirmed what I actually suspected,
that we can learn a lot about dinosaurs by looking at birds.
But feathery dinosaurs? It still doesn't seem right, does it? Where's the evidence?
It came from China.
In 1986, fossil hunters discovered an extraordinary fossil
of a small predatory dinosaur.
Every detail of its body had been left behind as indentations in the rock.
When they looked closely,
they could see a dark line running along its back.
And the incredible truth dawned on them.
This dinosaur was covered in feathers.
They were only little feathers, like these. Downy would be the right word.
No good for flying, these, but very good for keeping warm.
But even better. Only four years ago, and from China again,
the discovery of Dave, the fuzzy raptor.
And he had feathers which were much more impressive,
more like...
this one.
And he was covered in these much more sophisticated feathers from head to toe.
So it seems the raptor family did have feathers
and that of course includes our star, velociraptor.
From just a few fossils,
scientists can be pretty certain what velociraptor looked like.
Right, then. Let's put the flesh on the bones.
OK. First, the muscles.
Next, the skin.
And now... Ah. What?
Is it gonna be scales? No. The feathers.
And there we are. A dead ringer for an ancient turkey.
Except, er... I wouldn't fancy trying to stuff it.
I think it would stuff me, more like.
It's not a turkey, is it? Come on! This wouldn't go pecking round at seeds.
I mean, look at those teeth. This was obviously a meat eater.
And how did it get its meat?
Phil Manning showed me that it had all the hallmarks of a vicious killer.
The skull is exquisite. Extremely bird-like.
One of the most striking features has to be these backwardly recurved, serrated teeth,
wonderful for slashing into their prey.
These would have been like razor blades as it buried its face into its prey,
using its body weight, hanging back on its hook-like teeth, ripping through flesh.
This would have been a devastating weapon.
Yes, a pretty formidable set of gnashers,
but at the other end was something even more sinister, and I don't mean the tail.
I mean at the end of the foot.
A very unusual and decidedly lethal-looking claw.
To find out more about that claw, I went to talk to an expert, Alan Gishlick.
He told me that the first claw had been discovered as recently as 1969.
Not surprisingly, the dino world was shaken by a frenzy of excitement.
When they discovered this, they forgot about the rest of the animal.
It was different from any type of claw we'd discovered on a dinosaur so far.
And when Hollywood and in particular a certain Steven Spielberg saw the claw,
they jumped to a dramatic conclusion.
Because it was so thin and shaped like a scythe,
it immediately made people think about a slicing action or a cutting action,
and led to the idea that this was used to disembowel prey.
Velociraptor was immediately cast as the quintessential scary villain,
complete with lethal weapon.
You can imagine this animal creeping up on prey and slicing its guts open
and blood everywhere.
It excites the imagination, makes school kids shiver
and looks good on TV and movies.
Ooh, can't argue with that.
Or, um...can we?
I mean, let's face it. Up till now, theories about what that claw could have done
were pretty much just conjecture.
So I decided to do a little detective work.
(# James Bond theme )
To find out what the claw was really used for, I've come to...
Battersea.
I think this is a job for Dave and John. Yes.
Dave Payne and john Pennicott usually make models for movies.
Bond movies, shark movies. Yes, they've done them all.
So we asked them to help us design the world's first experiment
to reveal once and for all the power of the claw.
Welcome to the house of special effects.
We want you to make us...one of these.
- Voila. - Brilliant.
(Dave ) What is it?
This is the limb of a velociraptor.
At the moment, totally harmless, but we want you to make us a fully-working model
as it would have been in real life.
As lithe, as strong and as effective.
And in particular, we want to know what this claw was for.
- Disembowelling? - But was it?
Could it really have disembowelled? That is the point.
It's all yours. Good luck.
Wow. Look at that.
This was quite a challenge.
It would take months for the special effects supremos
to build an accurate working replica.
First, scientists had to advise the team on how strong the leg would have been...
by looking at where the muscles attached on fossil bones,
and the kicking power of the leg.
It had roughly the strength of the human arm.
That doesn't sound a lot, but when you add that up to that being kicked at an animal,
there's immense force being transmitted through that tiny little claw.
To reproduce the correct muscle strength,
the effects team used hydraulic rams.
Then, they had to recreate the action of the claw.
You can see clearly that this claw has got this huge knobble of bone
that would have had a massive tendon attachment running underneath this toe.
So when the animal wanted to pull that claw down rapidly,
it could be whisked through 180 degrees.
From the fossil, they could tell that the claw had a very sharp point.
But the underside wasn't sharp at all.
So, would this really be able to rip through flesh?
We're going to have to wait until the model is built to find that out.
In the meantime, I decided to take a closer look at our star.
Apart from the claw,
were there any other clues to suggest it was a ruthless killer?
Right, then. Velociraptor.
Big, sharp teeth.
Great big scary claw.
But then was velociraptor a fully qualified, proper predator?
It's, er...certainly got the eye for it.
It could spot its prey. And look at those legs, eh?
Long, strong - definitely a runner.
And that tail. Not for wagging, surely.
Long, thin tails can be very useful in the chase for prey.
Cheetahs use their tails as counterbalances
to help them weave around and keep up with their victims.
And velociraptor would have used its tail like this to quickly change direction.
But our dinosaur had something a cheetah doesn't have.
Remember? It had...feathers.
Now, presumably they evolved in the first place for warmth and insulation.
I mean, velociraptor certainly couldn't fly.
But nevertheless, those feathery arms must have looked very like wings.
Of course, a bird uses its wings in the air to manoeuvre and change direction
and velociraptor would have used its wings, as it were,
on the ground to do the same thing.
Now this might look a little bit odd
but it's not half as odd as these ostriches,
using their wings in a similar fashion.
Though I rather suspect velociraptor was a little more elegant.
So, we've got a dinosaur with sharp teeth,
with feathers,
and with a long tail for extra manoeuvrability.
So here was an animal undoubtedly capable of great speed or velocity
and er...somewhat rapacious with it,
hence veloci...raptor.
Good name.
Get off.
Velociraptor was a hunter, clearly capable of chasing its prey.
But what happened when it caught it?
Did it really use that claw to rip into the flesh
and disembowel its hapless victim, just like in the movies?
Until now, scientists have only been able to speculate what happened.
After months of painstaking research and meticulous craftsmanship,
our biomechanical model of velociraptor's leg was ready to test.
My turkey dinner date, Phil Manning,
was on site to make sure that everything was scientifically accurate.
Why do I feel as if I'm about to go to the dentist?
- It's awesome. I love it. - I don't know about love it.
I'm scared just looking at it.
It's an amazing piece and it's, I think, extremely accurate.
You can map out the proportions of the limb
so it's a pretty accurate reconstruction of what this foot could have done.
Right. We'll get it moving, but slowly. This is human effort.
- Dave? Very good. Look at that. - Very graceful.
It is. Yeah. If he went that slowly, I wouldn't mind.
It moved like I'd expect it to move for a leg of a raptor.
- So that's great. - Right.
What about the movement of the claw and the leg together, though?
OK. Let's have full noise, full speed. Let it go.
Just when you think, ''That's not gonna happen.''
- It's not gonna happen. - No. Relax. Perfectly safe.
Oh, God!
Mother!
That brings us to the disembowelling. It's fast, it's strong.
But can it disembowel?
The moment of truth is nigh.
The legendary claw is about to be put to the test.
Right. Bring on the first victim.
Chamois leather, which is about as tough as human skin.
Yes. Well, um...
All right, it's chamois leather. This hasn't got flesh behind it. I'm not convinced.
I think we need something more realistic to test if this could rip through flesh.
Realistic? I'm willing to bet this is another food experiment, yes?
Possibly.
I think we've proved that ripping through skin would have been no problem.
But in life, skin is attached to fat and muscles.
So we decided to use a more realistic challenger in the form of a pork belly.
Only slightly tougher than your own belly, as it happens.
As the world of palaeontology holds its breath,
we conduct an experiment never attempted before.
(Phil) Anticipation.
(Bill) Eurgh! Ooh...
- It's stuck. Can't even get it out. - That looks disgusting.
It has punctured it. Hasn't ripped it, hasn't torn it.
So let's face it. That is not disembowelling.
No, it's not. We're a long, long way away from disembowelling.
So the conclusion is the end of the claw was sharp enough to pierce the flesh
but it couldn't cut through it because the underside is round,
not like a blade.
So, sorry, Mr Spielberg,
but I'm afraid velociraptor was not capable of disembowelling its victims.
OK, then. What exactly did velociraptor do with that claw?
The answer lies in a truly incredible fossil
found in the Mongolian desert.
This is where velociraptor stalked round his territory millions of years ago.
One of the most common dinosaurs of the time
was the vegetarian protoceratops.
It was about the size of a pig
and it would have made a tasty meal for our hero.
In 1971, a fossil hunter stumbled across a protoceratops skull.
The skull led him to one of the most extraordinary dinosaur fossils
ever discovered.
Two animals tangled together. Protoceratops and velociraptor.
And the arm of velociraptor is clamped inside the jaws of protoceratops.
What he discovered was a fight between the two dinosaurs...
frozen in time.
Almost all the bones of both animals were intact
and in exactly the same position as when the attack was taking place.
Oh, boy. It's like some brilliant piece of sculpture, isn't it?
I mean, just look at it. That is astonishing.
I mean, think about this. We've got two dinosaurs, right?
They're rolling around together, jabbing and snapping.
And here they are, still locked in mortal combat.
I'm sorry. You just don't find fossils like this.
Except they did, so what are the odds against that, eh?
It must be like winning the lottery every week for the rest of your life.
No one actually knows how the two dinosaurs suddenly died
at exactly the same moment in time.
Some scientists think that whilst the animals were distracted mid-fight,
they were covered by a mud slide.
Others think they could have been suffocated in a monster sandstorm.
But one thing everyone agrees on - this is a battle scene.
That is truly incredible.
Mind you, does it actually tell us anything
about how velociraptor would have hunted?
Well, Dave Unwin, the velociraptor expert,
reckons the fighting pair fossil
is the conclusive proof of how velociraptor used its claw.
He's worked out exactly what was going on out on the desert.
Velociraptor has seen protoceratops from somewhere way over here
and come running over.
He's grabbed hold of protoceratops...
and we can see very clearly the tension and the energy in this struggle.
Look at the curvature on protoceratops
as he tries to pull away from velociraptor.
Look also how velociraptor's body is curved right round
as he tries to pull his prey toward him and kill him off as quickly as possible.
And it's just incredible it's actually captured in the fossil record
and preserved like this for millions of years.
Dave now turned his attention to velociraptor's claw.
Did it have a specialised use?
When he looked really closely,
he began to realise velociraptor was even more deadly than its reputation.
He wasn't stabbing the prey in any old spot.
He was stabbing the protoceratops in one of the most vital parts of the body,
which is the neck region.
Stabbing into the neck gives a predator a good chance of cutting the windpipe
or piercing the jugular vein.
If you cut the veins in my neck, I bleed to death literally in seconds or minutes.
Or alternatively, if velociraptor was lucky enough to cut through the windpipe,
the animal would suffocate in two or three minutes.
Just imagine it. Velociraptor, a nasty, ruthless, viciously equipped killer.
But hang about. I mean, come on. It was no taller than one of these.
(Gobbles)
So how come a creature so relatively small was so amazingly successful?
And it was very successful. We know that
because countless numbers of velociraptor teeth
have been found amongst the fossiled remains of its victims.
So what was the secret of velociraptor's success?
One theory has it that this turkey-sized predator was hunting in groups.
But how can we actually prove
that long-extinct animals hunted together
when all we've got to go on are fossil bones?
One of the best ways for scientists to theorise about dinosaurs' behaviour
is to study the behaviour of their closest living relatives.
Birds and crocodiles.
A single crocodile is scary enough.
But what about several working together?
One croc would have problems with a fully-grown zebra.
But, to coin a phrase, many jaws make light work...
of the zebra.
The first crocodile pushes the zebra into deep water, where it's out of its depth.
At which point, in comes the second crocodile.
It's all over in seconds, with plenty of zebra dinner for both killers.
So reptiles, or crocodiles at least,
do go in for collaborative hunting
but how about those other dinosaur descendants, the birds?
Well, there's a pretty extraordinary hawk. The only time I've seen it in the wild
was by a golf course on the edge of the Arizona desert.
So that's why we've come to Scotland.
You'll see.
This is Steve Ford, one of Britain's most experienced falconers.
Now, falconry usually means hunting with a solitary bird.
That is unless you're working with Harris' hawks.
Could they perhaps give us an insight into velociraptor's methods?
We shall see. Today, they're in pursuit of rabbits.
One of the good things about Harris' hawks
is the fact that they're gregarious and they work as a family group.
Therefore, they're ideal in a hunting field because they'll work as a team.
So it's nice to have a variety of birds here.
Males, females, immatures, adults,
all raring to get going to get out into the hunting field.
Here we've got a trio of birds. Two adults up here.
The youngster at the bottom here. Ooh. All in the tree at the same time.
Three birds stand a better chance,
hopefully three times as good a chance, of catching the one prey.
They're not after three different things. One, in this case, rabbit.
Oop. Seen something. In goes number one.
The first bird takes up a position on the left.
Whilst the second bird takes up a position on the right.
And thirdly, here's the backstop covering the rear,
in case the rabbit decides to double back on itself.
(Whistles) Go on, hawk.
I can't see it, but the rabbit's presumably scuttled away.
So number two going in to cut it off.
And I think they've got it surrounded.
The juvenile goes in...
and wham!
(Steve ) Good girl.
Teamwork. Synchronised hunting, as practised by Harris' hawks,
and very likely by velociraptors.
So, a velociraptor, with the looks and even the feathers of a hawk.
But, um...the teeth and the character of a crocodile,
and possibly the hunting habits of both.
So, back 75 million years ago.
Down at the water hole, a plump yet stocky protoceratops,
a potential meal for not one but several velociraptors,
if they work together.
The first velociraptor gets into position up on the high ground.
Whilst the second one sets off down to the low ground.
And they're off.
I think we can all agree. Velociraptor most certainly lived up to its billing.
A ruthless hunter and a vicious killer, just like on the movies.
OK. Maybe it wasn't six foot tall.
And it couldn't actually disembowel its victims.
Nevertheless, it could certainly use that sickle-shaped claw
as a lethal killing weapon.
And just imagine a whole pack of ravenous velociraptors.
I mean, surely they'd take on, well, just about anything.
Or would they?
What I'd like to know is, was there anything that they couldn't kill?
The biggest potential meal for velociraptor out on the desert was one of these.
An ankylosaur.
If protoceratops can be likened to an ancient pig...
then an ankylosaur was more like a prehistoric cow.
It was a big old thing and it was vegetarian.
That great big pot belly would have been full of hot, steaming, fermenting foliage.
It's a bit like eating a couple of tons of soggy cabbage.
You can imagine what effect that would have.
Put it this way. I wouldn't have hung around at this end.
And it was not only no doubt fabulously flatulent.
It was, well, not very bright.
That is its brain. Yes, indeed.
This is, relatively speaking, the smallest brain of any dinosaur.
Then again, you don't have to be particularly quick-witted to hunt plants.
Anyway, let's imagine the scene. He's out on the plains, grazing away.
He's docile, dozy and dumb.
Surely this was destined to be made mincemeat of by hungry velociraptors.
Or maybe it could look after itself rather better than we might imagine.
Look at at that tail. Suspiciously lumpy, I'd say.
And this isn't skin. This is thick armour.
So this animal isn't an old cow.
It's more like an armoured tank on legs.
And I couldn't help wondering.
If some velociraptors decided to attack an ankylosaur, what would happen?
Well, I wasn't the only one wondering.
Scientists are also keen to work out who killed who out on that desert.
I went to visit Ken Carpenter, who's curator of the Denver Museum, USA.
He's a world expert on ankylosaurs.
I like ankylosaurs because they're so different among dinosaurs.
They have very squat little bodies. In one sense, they're built like me,
so I can kind of relate to them.
They probably had a short temper. They weren't very bright.
But they were plant eaters so they might have been rather gentle animals.
Gentle animals maybe, but what about that tail?
The bulbous club on the end looks like a weapon
and palaeontologists have often described it as a weapon.
But was it really? And how effective was it?
It was time for us to do another dinosaur experiment.
To date, they've only found eight fossil tails from Mongolian ankylosaurs.
But we tracked one down and we sent a cast of it to Ken.
Ken and his team set about analysing it so that we could build a fully-working replica.
The tail has two parts. The flexible bendy bit
and the solid club on the end.
This is the tail club. This is the business end of an ankylosaur.
It's made by vertebrae which have fused together to form a handle.
The true working end of these plates of armour fused together
forms almost a battle-axe.
When Ken took a closer look at the fossil cast,
he made an amazing new discovery.
We were very fortunate. Something we've never seen before
is the damage to the tail club where the bone had broken off.
That could only have happened if the tail club had hit something really hard.
It hit with such force that the bone just popped off here.
It did it twice, which suggests the animal had struck something really hard,
both directions.
This provides us with the best evidence that indeed this was used as a weapon.
If this is a weapon, what kind of damage could it inflict?
For example, what would it do to a velociraptor?
Back in London, our special effects team set about building a replica tail
with the same strength as the original bone.
Next, we needed to know exactly how much force
an ankylosaur would be able to put behind its tail swing.
While we were busy building our scale model in the UK,
Ken was busy in the US doing his maths.
Here in front of me, I have the tail we used in our analysis.
We have all these structures on the side and bottom.
This is where muscles attach, so we can see the volume of muscle around the tail.
And from that volume, we could then calculate the force the tail can generate.
It turned out the tail club could generate two and a half tons per square inch,
the weight of a car, in a very, very small area.
Two and a half tons? That's a lot of force.
Ouch.
You can imagine the predator coming and the ankylosaur swinging this club.
It's gonna do a lot of damage if it hit a vital area.
Two and a half tons is a lot of pressure on any carnivorous dinosaur.
Until now, scientists could only guess the damage the ankylosaur could inflict.
But with Ken's calculations and Dave and john's replica tail,
we were able to put a 75-million-year-old weapon through its paces.
Ken flew to London. He wasn't going to miss this.
Ken, I am nervous.
I feel like a car salesman.
Is this the moment of truth? Have I pleased the customer?
Not that I made it myself, but...
- Is this what you ordered, sir? - This is very nice.
- Very nice? - Looks like the real thing.
- Can you imagine being whacked by it? - Is that the right size for an adult?
It looks good. Length looks good. Height above the ground.
It's a thing of beauty, no doubt about that.
But is it a thing that can inflict pain? We want to see it swish, don't we?
Dave, please?
Dave, Ken. Your customer. The man who made it.
Wonderful.
The team based the movement of the tail
on the same ankylosaur skeleton we sent to Ken.
Right. Well, we take the tail and pull it back.
First, a demonstration at low power.
Clips in here. Clips in here.
OK. Just a languid swish.
- Let her go. - Here we go, then.
(Ken ) That's really nice.
(Bill) It might have been languid but it would be flipping painful.
The tail had been built to deliver a force of two and a half tons
over every square inch of the aluminium club's whacking surface.
So what kind of damage could it do to yet another piece of butcher's pork?
This ribcage is designed to be strong enough
to protect the animal's internal organs.
Oh, boy. If we think of that as not so much a rack of barbecued meat...
(Ken ) It just collapsed the entire ribcage.
Oh, that's painful to look at.
OK. So, here it is. An ankylosaur.
Formidably fortified.
Brandishing a deadly weapon and ready to do battle with...this.
The velociraptor. OK, it's got the reputation as a fleet-footed marauder
and I'm sure it can be a bit of a nuisance, but it's only little.
So this stuff must be a bit over the top.
The obvious conclusion is every now and again,
this guy would have had to fend off something more formidable than...him.
No disrespect.
Velociraptor wasn't the only predator at large
on the prehistoric plains of Mongolia.
In the forests surrounding the open scrub of ankylosaur's home,
lurked another even more impressive killer dinosaur.
Tarbosaurus.
The Mongolian equivalent of T rex, with jaws that were every bit as powerful.
As we proved in the last programme,
the munching power of such an animal would be devastatingly destructive.
If tarbosaurus could have crunched through metal,
ankylosaur's armour would have been no problem.
The ankylosaur would most certainly have needed a powerful weapon
to keep its attacker at bay.
Phil Manning told me about some fossil clues
that indicate how the vegetarian was defending itself against tarbosaurus.
There are examples of lower legs and shins of predatory dinosaurs
that have had almighty blows kicked into the side of them.
It's possible that such injuries could have been caused
by the tail club on the end of an ankylosaur.
So how much damage would an ankylosaur tail have done
to a tarbosaurus' leg?
Our stand-in is a piece of timber.
The right size and the same strength as bone.
If an ankylosaur tail club could see off a gigantic tarbosaurus,
what on earth would it have done to a velociraptor?
How big was velociraptor again?
Velociraptors were actually rather small, probably about the size of a turkey.
- We need a turkey, don't we? - We do. Then we'll really know.
(Bill laughs)
Well, now, Ken. It's fair to assume that an actual velociraptor
would be a little bit more nimble than this.
But even if it was ducking and diving
and even if there were several of them,
if they got within swishing distance of this tail,
this is what would happen to them.
(Bill laughs)
Once more for Ken, I think. Yes?
Then again, a sprightly velociraptor with feathers
may have been agile enough to avoid being clobbered.
Nevertheless, it still had to get through ankylosaur's armour plating.
And that wouldn't be easy.
To find out how strong that armour was,
I went to see some of ankylosaur's distant relatives
that have very similar skin - my old friends the alligators.
Now that doesn't look so much like skin as sort of leathery bone.
It looks incredibly tough, and believe you me, it is incredibly tough.
Ankylosaur would have been covered in that, so it was protected against attack.
I honestly can't think of a living creature that could get through that stuff
and I'm beginning to wonder if even velociraptor's claw could manage it.
Well, there's only one way to find out. It means another claw test.
This time, velociraptor's claw has to attempt to pierce skin like that.
I mean, not literally that.
Not yours. Don't worry. It's fine. Quite safe.
What we did do was import a piece of crocodile
from a crocodile farm in Australia.
Then we put our velociraptor leg back in action.
Now. Remember what the claw did to a piece of pork.
OK? Now the croc skin.
And look at that. The claw simply bounced off leaving hardly a scratch.
Not only that. The force of the claw hitting the bony skin
broke off its tip.
So apparently ankylosaurs were indeed impenetrable armoured tanks.
It seems velociraptor really didn't stand a chance.
So is that the end of it?
No. There's one last twist to the tale.
Dino Frey studies alligator and crocodile armour.
And he's discovered that ankylosaurs may well have had a weak spot after all.
I'm a biologist and I work with living animals.
These living animals help me to explain extinct animals.
I caught up with him researching alligators and crocodiles in Florida.
Of course, before he can study them, he has to catch them.
At which point, I went back to bird-watching.
And now you can see when he gets up. You see the armour?
Whilst Dino was scrutinising the crocodile's skin,
he noticed something intriguing.
On crocs, there is this armour.
But interestingly, the babies don't have armour
and especially in the neck where you would expect protective armour
against neck bites of big predators.
The armour's reduced.
On the young crocs, the defensive armour isn't yet fully developed.
So the small crocs are much more vulnerable to predators.
And, er... There's evidence that a heron can harpoon a little croc
without any problem.
But it will break its beak if it tries to do the same with the big guys here.
Ankylosaur armour was so similar to crocodile armour
that scientists reckon it's fair to assume
that baby ankylosaurs would have been just as vulnerable as baby crocs are.
As if to prove it, in Mongolia they found an extraordinary set of fossils.
12 young ankylosaurs.
Amongst the bones were the tell-tale unmistakable teeth of...
Yeah, what do you think?
Velociraptor.
These defenceless baby ankylosaurs
would have provided an ideal meal.
By reconstructing all the evidence that we have gathered from the fossil bones,
we can now reveal velociraptor at its most ruthless.
So, as it turns out, velociraptor does indeed deserve its scary reputation.
Not quite like the movies pictured him perhaps,
but nevertheless an extremely efficient killer.
Dinosaurs became extinct millions of years ago.
The first dinosaur fossils were found less than 200 years ago.
Yet scientists have been able to discover so much in so little time.
And I think that's pretty mind-boggling. But it doesn't stop here.
Every day, more and more fossils are being discovered
and every now and again something is unearthed to turn things upside down.
For example, no sooner had we relegated velociraptor's disembowelling claw
to the level of a meat hook
than this is discovered.
It belongs to a South American dinosaur at least ten times as big.
Yeah. That could do a bit of damage, couldn't it? Put you in your place.
You know, what's so tantalising and so exciting
is that there's so much that is still uncertain and unknown.
In fact, there's only one thing that is absolutely indisputable.
And that is that there are a lot more fantastic fossils out there somewhere.
Just needs, er, somebody to find them.
It could be you.