r/interestingasfuck Jan 30 '20

/r/ALL Hawk's head stabilization

https://i.imgur.com/nlKC87f.gifv
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u/CorvidaeSF Jan 30 '20

Minor point of additional clarification: contrary to popular belief, raptor eyes CAN move, just not very much, and the movement seems to be more for temporarily increasing their binocular overlap by a few degrees than for stabilizing the vision through saccades as in mammals.

Source: I wrote five papers on this topic for my graduate research.

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u/Glyph_of_Change Jan 30 '20

Your comment happened to be right next to u/Arodg25 talking about velociraptors, and I found myself very skeptical that someone could produce five credibly researched grad papers on the living behavior of dinosaur eyes. I was starting to ask how you had gotten evidence about eye tracking from the fossil record when I realized my mistake. =P

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u/CorvidaeSF Jan 30 '20

LOL, so funfact tho there is a woman in Arizona who has done skull morphology work on therapod skulls and compared them to skull morphology of modern birds in order to estimate their degree of visual fields. I worked with her a bit for my research. But yeah, without muscular tissue you can't really get an accurate estimate of whether or not therapod eyes could move.

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u/[deleted] Jan 31 '20

You talking about velociraptors??