Repository of Randomness: Velociraptor

Today is National Velociraptor Awareness Day, so I celebrated it, as much I could, by eating chicken (the closest to velociraptor I was going to get, but also probably something it would have gone after if it was still around) and watching the Jurassic Park movies. I'm actually currently watching the end of number 2 right now, as I type this.

All that aside though, I'm going to tell you about Velociraptors and why everyone is wrong about them if they watched the movie.

Those are Utahraptors, or Deinonychus. Velociraptors are a lot smaller and could probably be punted around by a particularly enthusiastic human if necessary. The others are bigger, and more likely to be able to take on a human. But, I'll talk about them some other time.

Velociraptors are today's topic. Pic from Mental Floss below of a fossilized skeleton of one.

These guys have a meter long tail, which is half their length...and twice their height. To compare them to domestic turkeys, they're a bit shorter, a lot longer, and a lot lighter. Nothing like the almost human-sized raptors from the movies. There are suggestions that they could get up to 100 lbs and a meter tall, but that's probably not the average. The picture below is from Live Science and shows what their skeletons look like, so what we think they do.

If you've watched the movies, you probably remember the thing about how their claws slash through you like a razor and how deadly they are. Well, a test got done and...nope. Their claws were probably so they could grip onto things instead of slicing. They're too small to have caused as much damage as you think. Deinonychus, on the other hand, has the larger claw you're thinking of, and could be that deadly. They also kept it in the air when they walked, to make sure it stayed sharp.

There was also a lot of talk about the velociraptors hunting in packs...again, nope. No evidence so far. Again, that's the Deinonychus. All fossils of velociraptors have been pretty solitary.

And, to fully destroy your image of them...there was a site found with evidence that a velociraptor was killed during combat with a sheep sized herbivore before the pair were killed by a sand dune or something falling on them, which means we don't know who would have won, but still. Those dinos you were so afraid of from the movies couldn't take down a sheep-sized protoceratops. Picture below from Live Science to show what one artist thinks it could possibly have looked like.

You probably already knew this one-- they're feathered. They probably looked more like an eagle than anything, but I kinda adore imagining them looking more like some the truly ridiculous birds of the world. We do know they couldn't fly though, in case you were curious about that one. So maybe more like kakapo. Except, they do have a very long tail that is inflexible, so sticks out all the time, unlike a monkey tail, so...something else. How about this guy, from a list of birds with long tails? The White-Bellied Go-Away Bird, A-Z animals. He looks cool. I'm going to have to write about him some other time.