I enjoyed the Jurassic park movies...except perhaps the little girl that wouldn't stop screaming in the first Jurassic park movie!
You remember her? Wouldn't shut up when the rest of the sane people were trying to remain hidden to the T-Rex.
I remember thinking, someone better knock this girl out, or she will kill everyone!!
Obviously that was what made her believable and a great part of the movie...she was about to be eaten by HUGE lizards from a forgotten age....I probably also would have screamed just like her!
The thing is, as much as we would like to believe that the depictions of these ancient beasts was correct, it seems that they were in fact not likely to be big scaly lizard type animals at all, but more bird-like than lizard-like.
The Velociraptor fossils were in fact smaller and and had small rows of bumps on its arms, which are exactly the same as birds of today. These are quill knobs that are present in todays birds.
unfortunately there are not any great fossils of Velociraptors, so there is no way to know what the feathers may have looked like, but a new fossil may have some answers.
In northeastern China, a new fossil has been discovered that is one of the closest relatives to the Velociraptor.
A farmer found the skeleton which was laid down in a lake and then buried by volcanic ash....a near perfect storage unit for the fossil, because some of the soft tissues can be preserved as well.
"Zhenyuanlong is covered in feathers. Simple hairy filaments coat much of the body, larger veined feathers stick out from the tail, and big quill-pen-feathers line the arms, layered over each other to form a wing. This is a dinosaur that looks just like a bird. If you could see it alive you would probably make no distinction between it and, say, a turkey or a vulture" -Stephen Brusatte
So if you take a look at Zhenyuanlong , then you should get a better picture of what a Velociraptor would have looked like if it still walked the earth.
A small, fast running feathery bird from hell :)
Although small is a relative term of course, were talking about the Zhenyuanlong being a 2m long dinosaur from tip of the feathery tail to its nose. That is one little poodle I don't want to run into in the streets!
Below is an artists impression of what a Zhenyuanlong or Velociraptor may have looked like.
This is quite an important study however, because it opens up the discussion as to whether the other dinosaurs were also closer to birds than reptiles as initially thought.
Could the T-Rex have had feathers perhaps? In fact I read an article in the National Geographic that suggested that most dinosaurs could have been feathered!
Read the article HERE
I for one think the idea of having large carnivore birdlike animals roaming around must have been terrifying! When I see how they hunt and tear at prey, they seem a lot scarier than the lizards do.
Going back to the movies, in Jurassic World, where the Aviary was broken and all the flying dinosaurs were set free, they were caused more havoc in 5 minutes than any of the large 'lizards' did.
OK its only a movie, but were not talking an exact science here, just an overactive imagination of a guy in the Cape :)
All the best to you!
