Latest Claw Stories

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com Engineers at the University of California, Riverside are looking to nature for inspiration in creating stronger vehicle frames and body armor. They may have found a key structure in the club-like claw of the sea floor-dwelling mantis shrimp, according to a report published online this week in the journal Science. The 4-inch crustacean, also known as a stomatopod, uses its claw with the deadly speed of a 22-caliber bullet to crack open everything from crab...

Celebrities are channeling a distant relative with what Harper’s Bazaar describes as the latest trend in nail fashion for 2012: claws. But this may not be the first time primates traded their nails for claws. A new study co-authored by a University of Florida researcher examines the first extinct North American primate with a toe bone showing features associated with the presence of both nails and a grooming claw, indicating our primate ancestors may have traded their flat nails for...

Experiments by a team of researchers in New York and New Jersey have generated evidence that questions the common belief that the pterygotid eurypterids ("sea scorpions") were high-level predators in the Paleozoic oceans. This group, which ranged the seas from about 470 to 370 million years ago (long before the dinosaurs appeared), included the largest and, arguably, scariest-looking arthropods known to have evolved on planet Earth. Reaching lengths of 2 ½ meters with a body...