Tarzan - I mean Jason Gridley - versus madness

I'd never call Edgar Rice Burroughs 'visionary'.
Like George Lucas, he assembled wildly popular works out of wildly disparate elements, and like Lucas, I never expected an original idea.  (Let us let 'The Monster Men' to stand as the holotype for my complaints, shall we?)
But while listlessly paging through 'Tarzan at the Earth's Core', I ran into a scene which I nominate for the best idea ERB ever had:

!~Gliding Stegasauri~!

 I wish to god blogger had manicule symbols for this one. I suppose it makes as much sence as any other idea vis-a-vis stegasaurus spine plates, really.

"AS Jason Gridley leaped down the canyon side toward the lone warrior who stood facing the attack of the tremendous reptile gliding swiftly through the air from the top of the opposite cliff side, there flashed upon the screen of his recollection the picture of a restoration of a similar extinct reptile and he recognized the creature as a stegosaurus of the Jurassic, but how inadequately had the picture that he had seen carried to his mind the colossal proportions of the creature, or but remotely suggested its terrifying aspect."

"... the reptile, using its tail as a rudder and tilting its spine plates up on one side, veered in the direction of the American..."

"... From the instant that the stegosaurus had leaped from the summit of the cliff, it had hurtled through the air with a speed which seemed entirely out of proportion to its tremendous bulk, so that all that had transpired in the meantime had occupied but a few moments of time, and Jason Gridley found himself facing this onrushing death almost before he had had time to speculate upon the possible results of his venturesome interference.

With wide distended jaws and uttering piercing shrieks, the terrifying creature shot toward him..."

" Still shrieking with rage and pain it glided to the ground beyond him.

Almost immediately it turned to renew the attack. This time it came upon its four feet, and Jason saw that it was likely to prove fully as formidable upon the ground as it had been in the air, for considering its tremendous bulk it moved with great agility and speed..."

This calls for a dramatic reconstruction!  As a exercise for the reader, I leave the calculations of how light a stegasaurus would have to be in order to be able to glide upon its plates... 

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Raptor Crampons

Deinonychus and the raptors tend to stick in my mind, because like Stegosaurus or Ankylosaurus, they are just so damned flamboyant. It seems odd to me that predators ranging from 10 lbs to 160lbs ( a 10X scale increase) would use exactly the same very specialized prey assault technique.

Today I had the image of a row of Velociraptors  hanging from a branch like bats.

Maybe the claw was a climbing claw, but not for huge herbivores: actually for huge herbs?
Nearly all of the raptors fit in the weight class of the puma/cougar/jaguar which are modern large tree-philic predators. The tree-climbing would also explain the stiff tail, fused to prevent motion in a vertical plane.
Woodpeckers and sapsuckers prop themselves on their tails while hanging from trees. Could the raptors hang themselves from their claws, prop themselves on their tails, and wait for prey, with minimal energy expenditure?  The strong front legs and long grasping fingers would be very useful for this role as well.

If this were the case, there should be signs:
The muscle attachments for the talon claw would be robust.
The talons themselves would show wear inside the inside edge. The wear on the tip would probable the same in either case.

 
A semi-arboreal species would have strong pressure to develop gliding of flying abilities.
Microraptor has already been suggested for this role, but I am willing to expand the possibilities.

 Utahraptor could be argued as the antithesis to this - at 1200lbs, its not climbing trees. But, like the Giant Ground Sloth, its quite possible that the creature adapted to a changing role, and became a forest floor monster, padding through the trees in search of prey, its sleeping dreams disturbed by strange desires to hang head down in the moonlight
Upon some googling, I find Manning et al. (2005) suggest that the claws would be more effective for climbing than killing.