Nearly everyone has seen Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. From this film the world has taken an image of the Velociraptor as a very scary, very smart pack hunter that was larger than a human. We all remember the disemboweling claw on the forearms. The medium is effective, and Spielberg did a fabulous job.
The size of Velociraptor was greatly exaggerated in the Jurassic Park movie. The
dinosaur weighed only about 15kg and was some 1.5m long. In the movie,
the dinosaur was presented as being taller than a man.
The real creature belonged to the Dromaeosauridae, a family of small to medium-sized, lightly built and fast-running dinosaurs from the Cretaceous Period (146 million to 65 million years ago) who appear from the fossil record to have been very effective predators. There is even evidence some, such as Deinonychus, hunted in packs.
And here’s the really interesting new information. A re-assessment by the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum of Natural History of a Velociraptor fossil forearm unearthed in Mongolia in 1998 has revealed an array of small bumps. In modern birds, such “quill knobs” are the locations where secondary feathers, the flight or wing feathers, are anchored to the bone with ligaments. Modern birds that primarily soar or that have lost the ability to fly typically lack quill knobs. Strong fliers, on the other hand, always have them.
Alan Turner, from the AMNH and Columbia University, explains, “A lack of quill knobs does not necessarily mean that a dinosaur did not have feathers. Finding quill knobs on Velociraptor, though, means that it definitely had feathers. This is something we’d long suspected, but no one had been able to prove.”
(A) Velociraptor ulna (forearm) fossil. (C) Close-up detail of red box in (A),
with arrows showing quill knobs. (C) Comparison with a modern turkey vulture.
(D) Same view of (C) but with secondary feathers still attached
The Mongolian Velociraptor from this study weighed about 15kg and was some 1.5m long. It had short arms, indicating that the feathered creature could not fly; but its feathers may have been useful for display, to shield nests, for temperature control or to help it maneuver while running, according to the researchers.
You told a great story Steven, but the real world has intruded into your fantasy. I presume you didn’t have any nefarious political axe to grind, as did Oliver Stone, so I’ll continue to enjoy your version, while reminding myself that truth often is stranger than fiction.
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Imported comment:
# jscroft
Saturday, May 7, 2011 5:00 PM
As you say, we all remember the scene in Jurassic Park where two big raptors hunted the little kids through the Welcome Center kitchen.
But really… trade two 150 kg raptors for 20 of them at a tenth the mass and the same number of teeth per animal, and Spielberg’s nightmare just gets WORSE!
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