(Image source: UC Berkeley / LiveScience)

BY STEVEN SPARKMAN

ANCHOR CHRISTINA HARTMAN

Some stories are just destined to have epic headlines. Researchers out of University of California, Berkeley, used biology and engineering to create a study combining dinosaurs, modern lizards, and robots.

LiveScience explains with the eye-grabbing headline “Acrobatic Velociraptors May Inspire New Generation of Agile Droids.”

“Meat-eating dinosaurs like Velociraptor may have been quite the acrobats, using their tails to land aerial maneuvers safely, say scientists studying today's leaping lizards. Long-tailed robots built as part of this work could help inspire a new generation of maneuverable search-and-rescue droids...”

The researchers were out to test a 40-year-old hypothesis that dinosaurs and modern lizards use their tails to right themselves in the air. They used red African lizards, known for their acrobatics, and essentially pulled the “slip on a banana peel” prank on them.

The lead researcher explains in this video from Nature.

“When they jumped on the vault we made it so that sometimes they didn’t slip, and they just jumped right to the wall. And other times they slipped, and their body would start to rotate forward, and what we discovered was that that energy in rotating forward could be redirected to the tail so they didn’t nosedive into the wall and they landed stably.”

If you’ve ever seen a tightrope walker use a pole for balance, you’ve seen something similar. They both obey the same physical laws. A writer for Discover Magazine explains.

“For the same reasons, long-jumpers swing their arms down at the end of their jumps to bring their legs up. Like everything else in the universe, they obey the law of ‘conservation of angular momentum’. In any isolated system ... a rotation in one direction has to be counter-balanced by a rotation in the opposite direction. … The same applies to a leaping lizard...”

Using physics formulas, the researchers built their own leaping lizard -- a robot with a tail, which they dubbed Tailbot.

When Tailbot drove off a ramp normally, it tilted forward toward the floor. But if the tail was engaged, it used the momentum to keep itself upright, just like the lizards did. (Video source: Nature)

Adding tails to robots could be an effective way to make them more agile and maneuverable. But the researchers didn’t stop there. They also applied their models to the deadly dino stars of the film Jurassic Park. Popular Science explains.

“Just to drive their point home, the team tested their math on a velociraptor model, and found it could have used its massive tail in a similar fashion. Given strong enough muscles, it may have been capable of aerobatics beyond those displayed by geckos and other tree lizards...”

There’s a scene in the film where a raptor leaps down from a balcony. If you go back and watch closely, you can see that tail turn up. Looks like the animators got it right.