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Velociraptor Had Feathers

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the well-and-wings-to-put-them-on dept.

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."

8 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Not Velociraptor at all. by Chess_the_cat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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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  2. Missing Link? by Algorithmnast · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Missing Link? by rucs_hack · · Score: 4, Interesting

      the suspicion is that all dinosours had feathers.

      Feather are made from the same stuff as scales, chitin (snakes and so on), its just a form of scale thats better suited to temperature regulation. Having feathers did not mean flight was even possible, that would have required specific adaption that feathers would probably have helped, but it would have been some environmental push, not the feathers themselves that caused birds to emerge.

  3. Re:Is this news? by dave1791 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Not that big actually. 2 meters long and most of that tail.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velociraptor

    IIRC, I read somewhere that it is that all of the dromaeosaurids were very, very, closely related to birds and might actually have been flightless birds, having descended from that first bird (the one with the unpronouncable name).

  4. Not bird ancestor by YetAnotherBob · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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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  5. Re:Is this news? by jonnythan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Picture of one of these little bastards attacking:

    http://www.robotbreeder.com/Robotblogger/uploaded_images/cassowary-attack-2-753549.jpg

    Wow.

  6. Dazzling camouflage works on humans, too by spun · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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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  7. Raptor Feathers in World of Warcraft by SendBot · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've been harvesting feathers off of raptors for months now.

    http://www.wowhead.com/?search=raptor%20feather