Michael Habib (mhabib5@jhmi.edu) wrote:
<Also, 'assassins knives' are recurved, not decurved, to the best of my
knowledge, so I don't think they are often claw-shaped. Decurved
knives are
produced; I do not know what their purpose is.>
Assassin's blades, such as the gurkha or sikhanese knives of the
Indian
subcontinent, are sharpened on their inner edge, and are used with the
edge-side out to puncture laterally into the throat, slicing outward
as it
travels from side to side. The curvature of the blade forces the knife
to curve
outwards through the initial puncture and in the process of the blade
width
increasing, opening the wound wider and eventually slicing open the
entire
throat. Grisly, effective, and leaves an ugly corpse. They are also
very quick,
I am told.
The action is similar to that proposed for sabretooth cat bites in
opening
jugulars and eventually "tearing out" of the neck.
The same may have been true of dromaeosaur sickles, with sharper
inner edges
on the unguals, though it was not true of *Baryonyx*, once thought to
be a
dromaeosaur of titanic proportions due to the nature of the pollecial
ungual.
It was also one of the reasons the pollecial ungual of the holotype of
*Megaraptor namunquaihuii* was considered to belong to the pes of a
dromaeosaur.
Cheers,
Jaime A. Headden
"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969)
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