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Velociraptor Had Feathers
Spy der Mann writes "A new look at some old bones have shown that velociraptor, the dinosaur made famous in the movie Jurassic Park, had feathers. A paper describing the discovery, made by paleontologists at the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum of Natural History, appears in the Sept. 21 issue of the journal Science."
It's reputation is about to be tarred and feathered once this news gets out...
http://www.breatheinfo.com/images/big_bird.jpg
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All those little 'created' humans walking around at the same time must have killed them all to make headdresses.
It all makes sense! How could I have been so foolish before!
Hang on, did I take my tablet today?
I was under the impression that this has been known for a long time. Or perhaps it was just suspected. Can anyone clarify?
What was depicted in the movie Jurassic Park was clearly Deinonychus. Velociraptor didn't have that large inner claw. In fact, the name Deinonychus means Terrible Claw while Velociraptor means Speedy Predator. I suspect they misnamed the dinosaur in the movie because the name Raptor was more marketable to children.
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And it wants it's shocking feathered velociraptor back.
You can see Disocvery documentaries from years ago where the velociraptor is small and feathered.
SO. F*CKIN'. WHAT.
Yes, Jurassic Park is fiction, not documentary, and also the story says they filled-in some holes in the dino DNA with grod DNA and so on (so they're not perfect replica of the original dinosaurs).
But also it's a damn entertainment movie. You can either get entertained (Jurassic's velcoraptors kick ass! well at least in the first two movies), or get pedantic and rediscovered the damn feathers each few years.
As if someone gives a damn.
So is velociraptor going to be announced as the earliest known ancestor of birds?
I wonder why other velociraptor fossils haven't been found with feathers, if all velociraptors had them? If this is the first one where feathers were identified then I'd ask if it really is the same species. Is it possible that this new fossil is a different species, but one where the skeleton was close enough to velociraptor that a fossilized version is originally identified as one?
Constantly being tarred and feathered, the poor velociraptors were often the butt of the larger dinosaurs' jokes.
Nowhere is there proof that the 'raptors actually grew those feathers out of their skin!
I'm sure XKCD will have something to say about this. We welcome our Mwahahah flying, feathered velociraptor overlords! ..first post!
Does that mean Spielberg is going to retouch Jurassic Park to add feathers?
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
This doesn't seem to be very groundbreaking. A quick look at wikipedia and the picture [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Velociraptor_BW.jpg] shows some sort of lizard with feathers on it.
bah.
Barrens Velociraptors, and most of them found through Azeroth have feathers too. Are these types related or they are distant cousins.
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
I just can't take a giant feathered dinosaur seriously, even if it is chewing my face off. Just looks like a big fruity lizard with a feather boa, probably going to catch a Broadway show when it's done devouring me.
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This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
it would appear so. it's way overdue for an extended 'breather' though.
nowhere to hide now. get some oxygen on yOUR brain. gaze up towards the heavens, the skies seem to be clearing somewhat, & there's lots going on up there. clean house, trust yOUR creators, help another. that seems to be most of the deal.
despite everything we've been highly trained to never disbelieve, change, way beyond the controll of our 'keepers', sometimes radical, does occur. the lights are coming up all over the place now. see you there?
This will teach all of Jeff Goldblum's critics a well deserved lesson!
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
They taste like chicken!
And they tasted like chicken too!
What with America being so overweight and all, now we have to bring back the 'raptors.
I can see it now. A car pulls up to the drive-through. "I'd like the 48-pound chicken bucket, 4 pounds of mashed potatoes, and a 10-pound sack of beaks and feet"
"Would you like that Crunchy Jurassic, or Original Recipe?"
How did this get moderated "informative", of all things?
Pengiuns == raptors with feathers?
http://evilpenguins.tribe.net/photos/dc173506-5ac0-4084-bcac-fa1a3a898ef3
Is that you, G-Bill?
..and the US Air Force http://www.google.com/search?q=f22+raptor&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS230US230&aq=t
Could be a joke in here, but the weather is too nice for cheap shots.
We are certain that these new birds are featherless, however.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
That kid in Jurassic Park was right....
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Clearly this is not a realistic portrayal of the dinosaur. It doesn't have a saddle, and Adam is missing from the picture too.
My other SIG is a Sauer.
Deinonychus Scale Drawing
Look out dude, its going for your leg!
See, in the article it mentions briefly before getting to the feather part that the Veliciraptor may be smaller than originally thought. Then it goes on about how this guy found bumps on the arm bone that correspond to bumps on the same bone in birds. Alright. But then it mentions that the bumps have never been found on any Velociraptor bones before.
My question: Why is the conclusion that Velociraptor had feathers and not that they've discovered a different species?
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. - Neitzsche
welcome our feathered velociraptor overlords!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_issues_in_Jurassic_Park
Deinonychus was rechristened by some authors, which happens moreoften, like the all known Brontosaurus which is named Apatosaurus.
There have been renamings all along, including to believe in a species and revoking his own line. Happened to the Gorgosaurus, too. Depends which line of Paleonotology you follow, there was always big debate over such things from the beginning of this science.
There go all my childhood fantasies. Instead of being scary, they ran around looking like Liberace.
"GRR! Don't I look FABULOUS?!"
I was very disappointed to hear that they now believe velociraptors had feathers. Not very menacing when they look like tall chickens.
The process of discovering this new feathery information was shown in a lame IMAX documentary called Dinosaurs Alive!, narrated by Michael Douglas. It's playing now in a number of markets as both a 2D and 3D film.
Well, if you look at nodern carnivores, you see such examples as:
- the fox, which is pretty darn red
- the tiger, which is relatively bright orange and with stripes too (and cats somewhat inherited that: a normal tabby male is almost always orange, though the females are nearly always grey when they're tabby.)
In fact, think about this: the most logical camouflage colour would be green, right? That's the colour we dress our soldiers in, right? Well, in practice mammals are coloured anything but green.
A hypothesis there is that camouflage doesn't always mean having the same colour as the surroundings. Three quarters of camouflage in the animal world seems to have to do more with the mental capacity of your opponent (prey or predator, as the case may be) than with blending in.
Primates have very evolved, arguably top-of-the-line image analysis and recognition capabilities. A lot of more primitive animals don't. For example, strange as it may seem to you, a lot of animals have trouble recognizing a snake as a snake. (In fact, one hypothesis is that a lot of the natural selection pressure for increasingly bigger brains in primates was... snake recognition.) A lot take "shortcuts" to save neurons, like mainly processing edges instead of whole shapes, or mainly seeing stuff that moves instead of analyzing the whole picture. A lot are nearly colour-blind, or have other primary colours for their vision than humans have. Some species (e.g., a lot of birds) don't even try to recognize another animal as a whole, but just look at where the eyes are: both in front for stereoscopic vision means predator, eyes on the sides means harmless herbivore. Etc.
So basically don't assume that what's piss-poor camouflage for _you_, also counts as such for another species. It may be actually _excellent_ camouflage in the environment that animal has to deal with.
E.g., lots of stripes and dots may look like begging for attention to you, but may severely overload the edge detection in more primitive species, by creating lots and lots and lots of extra edges, and thus prevent them from figuring out the whole.
E.g., the reason a lot of exotic fish are orange, yellow and red, is because those frequencies get absorbe the fastest in water. If you go deep enough, pretty much all available light is... blue. So you don't really need to colour yourself black, you only need to absorb blue. A simpler and cheaper to produce pigment can serve the same purpose and achieve the same effect.
E.g., a big tail like that of the pheasant may look like an unexplainable handicap, until you realize that most animals have a very simplified way of judging how big an opponent is. They only judge how big the image looks, not try to reconstruct the 3D animal in their brain and judge the size that way. There's a reason cats puff up and turn sideways when they might need to fight. To _you_ it's the same cat turned sideways, but to more simple-brained animals (apparently including other cats) it just became a lot larger and thus more dangerous. Or to the same animal you might look like a lot of an easier prey if you crouch or sit than if you stand up. So, depending on what predators it had to evolve with, being able to fan a giant tail can actually act as a deterrent.
So basically, we probably can't extrapolate what the raptors' plumage looked like. It probably depends a lot on the environment, and on how their prey's brain worked. And given the many millions of years involved, I wouldn't be surprised if it changed over time as their environment and prey evolved.
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If there was a 2 meter dog about to chew your legs off, I'd be concerned.
Velociraptor was a late dinosaur. there had already been birds around for a while. Not a bird, just a distant cousin.
Indications are that all dinos had down as young, probably had feathers growing up. May have lost them, if they were the large species, may not have. All the species I am aware of had stones in the chest cavity, when found whole, indicative of a gizzard. Like birds, the large species also had hollow bones. That saves weight. In birds, it helps the power to weight ratio which is vital for flight. In dino's it made possible larger body size. Preditor/prey ratios also indicate that they were warm blooded. Footprint evidence gives speeds of up to 45 KPH. Not often, but possible. That is very impressive for an animal the size of a whale. Most all of this evidence has come up in the last 30 or so years. Dinosaurs were not birds, but were in many respects bird like. It'll be interesting to see what else we can learn about them.
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The Velociraptor stupid. Geesh
This is interesting stuff!
And his proud, feathered father.
It was used in WWII. No real evidence it worked well, but the principle applies to predators. Who is going to miss a big galumphing thing charging towards them, no matter how well camouflaged? That's not the point. The point is to make the prey misjudge distance, direction, and speed, so that when you leap, they dodge the wrong way.
Humans use the same kind of visual shortcuts that other animals do. In fact, it's in the basic structure of the eye. The rods and cones in the eye are cross linked and inhibit each other, meaning that only large changes between adjacent cells are transmitted by the optic nerve. The brain then rebuilds a complete picture based on the edge and tone information transmitted.
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Some people say you were a ferocious killing machine.
Some people say you hunted in packs.
Some people say you're a giant chicken.
</chicken boo>
It depends on the scientist you ask. Some would classify Deinonychus antirrhopus as Velociraptor antirrhopus, thus simpy a large species of the same genus. While biologically we'd classify animals according to their genetics, with dinosaurs we only have phenotypical clues, i.e. we can only judge by how they looked like (and their distribution) as to how close they might have been related. Some dinosaurs commonly treated as two species could even be simply the same species' different genders.
I guess Alan Grant really was onto something..
Wrong. Scaly skin impressions have been found as far back as 1908.
Most Dromaeosauridae dinosaurs are suspected to have had feathers.
The article says 'The Velociraptor in the current study is estimated to have been one meter tall, 1.5 meters long and weighed just over 13 kilograms'.
Although this is probably accurate ('cause a pelican can have a wingspan of 2 - 3 meters and weigh as much) how much of a 'vicious carnivore' can a 13 kg creature really be?
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Don't give them any ideas!
I remember reading an article in National Geographic many years ago about this. The ultimate speculation was that birds of prey (like ravens) had descended from velociraptors.
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...how much of a 'vicious carnivore' can a 13 kg creature really be?
Go ask a wolverine.
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In fact, think about this: the most logical camouflage colour would be green, right? That's the colour we dress our soldiers in, right? Well, in practice mammals are coloured anything but green.
This is because most non-primate mammals (prey animals for most of the flashiest predators) are red-green colorblind. Many shades of orange or red look the same as shades of green or yellow, and as you point out with undersea creatures, reddish pigments are metabolically cheap.
The edge detection theory you put forth is fascinating though. Are you aware of any studies that support the concept, or is this just an educated guess?
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For quite a while now I've had a personal theory, unproven but intriguing nonetheless, that they way some dinosaurs moved is portrayed incorrectly as well. My theory is that many of them hopped instead of walked. Consider the T-Rex. If you really consider the T-Rex's physical characteristics you might start to wonder how in the heck it walked at all. Its body is not built for movement one leg at a time; it would be off-balance. Scientists counter this notion by saying it used its large tail to help it balance. I agree with this notion, however I find it much more likely nonetheless that the T-Rex hopped; not walked. By hopping instead of walking the T-Rex would be much faster and far more agile than if it tried to walk one-leg-at-a-time. Before you scoff at this idea consider a comparison between a T-Rex and a Kangaroo. Essentially a T-Rex is a huge Kangaroo-like lizard. ;-)
We have known that other related species had feathers. Since it was thus likely that the common ancestor had feathers, this would likely relate to Velociraptor as well. Now, if there was only a way to tell from the fossile record what color they were ;-)
However, this is still a really cool find and adds more evidence that this entire group of dinosaur species had feathers.
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I didn't know about this museum; here is an article about it. And here is the museum.... creepy.
John Hammond: You may have us. But you'll never get off the island!
Raptor: I beg to differ. You see, the other Raptors and I have constructed a crude suspension bridge to Venezuela. Once there, I shall lie low and assume odd-jobs...oh dear I believe I'm molting
This just in. Velociraptors were a bit more gay than previously thought.
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Jackass.
Why do you hate America so much?
looks like a pokemon to me
I've been harvesting feathers off of raptors for months now.
http://www.wowhead.com/?search=raptor%20feather
Your mom was the villian of Jurassic Park
That's very insightful and true. Though if I'm allowed to make two minor additions, I'd also say that:
1. Primates have vastly higher bandwidth along the optic nerve than some other species (e.g., IIRC you have about 10 times the bandwidth of a hamster) and vastly increased number of neurons reconstructing and analyzing the image in the brain. If you go even lower down the chain (since we're talking 80 million year old reptiles), a frog for example doesn't even transmit the tones at all, but has its neurons fire information that's split roughly into the streams:
- something just brightened
- something just darkened
- there's probably an edge here
- a group of pixels moved here
So a frog's mental image doesn't even contain the information to accurately reconstruct a greyscale image. Instead most of its mental image is pretty literally composed of edges and things that moved.
I.e., while _you_ would still see a battleship painted in dazzle camouflage as a battleship, and might just be confused when rangefinding or judging direction (via that painted bow shock at the wrong end), a frog would literally see it as a mess of edges that make no sense whatsoever.
So basically while indeed, various forms of camouflage do work on humans too, the less evolved life forms are a lot easier confused.
2. While you're right and very insightful about mis-judging direction and speed and distance when finally attacking, I'd add that an even more critical stage is the lying in ambush stage.
Cats for example are mostly ambush hunters. Even if a mouse judges everything correctly when the cat is already dashing for the kill, it's even more important that the mouse doesn't recognize the cat while the cat is waiting to ambush it. Either disruptive or cryptic camouflage can make a huge difference at that stage. Sure, the movement recognition will kick in when the cat starts the sprint, but at that point it's already too late.
But to agree with your other point, though, yeah, it does work on humans too, to various extents. Some leopards have been known to be just short of invisible to humans when they want to. A particularly infamous one is credited with over 400 human kills after she got wounded by a hunter and apparently decided to have her bloody vengeance. The number two spot goes to one credited with 125 human kills. You'd think a big orange cat with lots of spots would be easier to spot, especially when you already know she's on a human killing spree in the area, but there you go.
(And to go on an off-topic tangent, it kinda makes me wonder about their intelligence. If you think about it, something like deciding to have vengeance upon a whole species or race needs a few rather abstract concepts, that you wouldn't expect a cat to have, or need.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The interesting thing about this finding is that the feathers in this dinosaur were associated with the ulna. In birds, most feather follicles are embedded in the skin. Only the flight feathers are attached to a bony structure. This is presumably because in birds, feathers form a major structural component of the wing itself. They need stiff shafts and a firm anchor to the skeletal system so as to maintain the form of the wing during flapping flight. The shape of a bat wing is maintained by a bat's modified finger bones and pterosaurs had some spine structures to support the wing membrane.
So why did this presumably non-flighted dinosaur require feathers with secure attachment to the bones of its forelimb?
Well, it just occured to me that one image is worth one thousand words. Here's a pattern that disrupts even a human brain, badly. Try to focus on it. Heck, set it at someone's background wallpaper if you're pissed off at them.
http://www.uncg.edu/%7Ewhanthon/illusions/optical_illusion.jpg
(And no, it's not the goatse pic. Much as that's been known to disrupt human thought patterns, this time we're talking just overloading the image processing;)
So basically now think an animal with maybe 1/10 of your optical nerve's bandwidth, and even less neurons in their brain dedicated to processing the image. I have no doubt that a zebra's pattern appeared and thrived because at some point it had the same effect upon some predator (who needs to estimate distances very accurately) as the above-linked wallpaper.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
That's very true and insightful, but IMHO it fits in the same category I've described: gaming the opponents' image analysis. It only works because the brain processes that information in a certain way.
That said, I'd add that some animals are both counter-shaded and disruptive, though the only examples that come to mind atm are predators. E.g., a tabby cat is both.
Again, it's not particularly disruptive to a primate brain, so most people wouldn't think of an orange tabby as camouflaged. In practice, it only needs to disrupt a mouse's senses, though.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
and Grizzly Adams had a beard.
More like http://www.ffcompendium.com/art/10-chocobo-a.jpg
Well, I guess it would depend entirely on whether the croc managed to grab the cassowary. If it did, at any point, it's game over. But if the cassowary manages to dodge the lunges, it should be able to do a bit of damage to those eyes.
Of course, not being much of a carnivore, the cassowary would probably just bugger off into the jungle where the croc couldn't follow, and win that way.