In the Early Cretaceous section of our new Dinosaurs under the Big Sky exhibit is a display that shows two Deinonychus climbing up the neck of a sauropod.  This scene is very controversial as it suggests that raptor-like dinosaurs including Velociraptor used their hand claws to climb their prey.  The so-called slashing claw might also have been used to dig into the prey animal's body as the raptor climbed up to feed on the live animal.  I think all the small predatory dinosaurs like Deinonychus, Velociraptor, Troodon and others attacked in groups and climbed their prey to begin feeding.

The reason for thinking that these dinosaurs could scale their prey has to do with the shape of their claws, as they are identical to the claws of climbing animals like cats and black bears, and very different from the claws of dinosaurs such as Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurus.  I think prey scaling was the method all the dromaeosaurs used to bring down prey much larger than themselves. And, I think that is the reason why there were no large predatory dinosaurs.  The large meat-eaters were most likely scavengers.

So, what do you think of this hypothesis?