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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."
http://www.breatheinfo.com/images/big_bird.jpg
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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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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?
Its been suspected for a long time, but what was laking was decent quality fossil evidence. There have been clues before, but the evidence wasn't good enough until now.
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?
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Barrens Velociraptors, and most of them found through Azeroth have feathers too. Are these types related or they are distant cousins.
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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 will teach all of Jeff Goldblum's critics a well deserved lesson!
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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?"
No, it was not known for Velociraptor. Your second sentence is correct. Feather impressions were known for some pretty close relatives to Velociraptor, and it was therefore suspected that Velociraptor could have had feathers too, but no direct evidence of them had been found until this discovery. This new discovery isn't feather impressions either, but the presence of knobby structures on the bone that correspond to where the base of feathers in modern birds are up against the limb bone.
The full article by Turner et al. can be found here in Science.
Looking at the pictures, the features are quite suggestive, and the structures are in the right place, but I'm not 100% convinced. If the interpretation is correct, though, these sorts of structures could be found on other specimens and in related species (according to the article, though, not all modern birds have these structures, so the distribution might be variable). I'm sure that this will be tested out fairly quickly by other workers.
My theory is that the 'raptor wasn't a dinosaur at all. It was just a really big ostrich. OK... a really big, really smart ostrich.
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No, no... dinosaurs became extinct because they tasted terrible with the Colonel's secret herbs-and-spices recipe. Go back and read Darwin's famous treatise, Oregano on Species , where he proposes the theory that all food evolved from lesser forms of food -- the survival of the tastiest. After all, you don't see chickens, sheep, or beef cattle threatened with extinction, do you?
Clearly this is not a realistic portrayal of the dinosaur. It doesn't have a saddle, and Adam is missing from the picture too.
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Your theory is almost correct, in that one could probably say the ostrich is just a small, stupid dinosaur.
If you want something a little more convincing than an ostrich, consider the cassowary; a six-foot tall bird that can run at 30 mph, jump 5 feet high, and swim well, with a 5-inch middle claw on each foot that the bird can and will use as a weapon, disemboweling a human with a single kick. They are intelligent, vicious when threatened, and cunning enough to outflank organized groups of humans they perceive as a threat.
Fortunately, they aren't carnivores.
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?
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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).
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.
The chicken, obviously.
Wait...
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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Actually, Wikipedia asserts that they do eat small animals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassowary):
"They are frugivorous; fallen fruit and fruit on low branches is the mainstay of their diet. They also eat fungi, snails, insects, frogs, snakes and other small animals."
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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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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeopteryx
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Picture of one of these little bastards attacking:
http://www.robotbreeder.com/Robotblogger/uploaded_images/cassowary-attack-2-753549.jpg
Wow.
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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I remember seeing these birds when I was in Papua New Guinea.
Almost as big as an ostrich and very unpredictable and dangerous
The wicked claw is the main threat but don't forget the boney head
going crashing through the jungle at automobile speeds.
Some villagers would keep them as pets till they got old and turned on somebody.
Guess they didn't have any pet tigers to get mauled by so they had to make do with a gigantic bird.
The salt water croks and the cassowaries were definately at the top of the food chain on the island and were the two largest animials.
So feathered dinosaurs can be scary.
I used to bullseye those things in my T-16 back home.
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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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This just in. Velociraptors were a bit more gay than previously thought.
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I've been harvesting feathers off of raptors for months now.
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