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."

Artist's rendering:

[flimflam]

http://www.breatheinfo.com/images/big_bird.jpg [breatheinfo.com]

Misleading picture

[merikari]

Clearly this is not a realistic portrayal of the dinosaur. It doesn't have a saddle, and Adam is missing from the picture too.

Re:

[Chris Mattern]

Quite right. Here [cocolog-nifty.com] is a much better picture.

Chris Mattern

Re:

[satoshi1]

I'm pretty sure he was commenting about the creationism museum in Kentucky...

linkage

[commodoresloat]

I didn't know about this museum; here is an article [msn.com] about it. And here is the museum [creationmuseum.org].... creepy.

Re:

[BigDogCH]

And here are some interesting pictures from it..........I presume.
http://images.google.com/images?q=creation+museum [google.com]

Proud Father

[soloport]

And his proud, feathered father. [petcaretips.net]

Not Velociraptor at all.

[Chess_the_cat]

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.

Re:Not Velociraptor at all.

[caluml]

What was depicted in the movie Jurassic Park was clearly Deinonychus.

I think you'll find it was just computer generated.

Re:

[GaryPatterson]

Velociraptors as big as the ones in the film weren't found when the first Jurassic Park movie was made, and anyway they had flatter snouts. The animals in the movie were always Deinonychii (pl?), with that rounder head, rigid tail and sickle claw on each foot.

Just looked up when the Utah raptor was discovered - 1993 according to Wikipedia. Hmm... might be close either way. The book was from '90 and the film was released in '93. Hmm...

maybe because of

[g4b]

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.

Re:

[Yold]

Velociraptor does not mean Speedy Predator, raptor means theif.

And the Megaraptor, not the Deinonychus, was the villan of the JP movies.

Re:

[Yold]

BTW, contrary to parent post, a Velociraptor did have a large 3-4 inch scyth-like claw.

Re:

[ari_j]

They were velociraptors in the novel. Whether it was Crichton, Spielberg, or someone else at fault for any inaccuracies in the visual description or portrayal of the creature, it was Crichton who wrote about velociraptors, and I somehow doubt that he did so in order to make his novel marketable to children.

Re:Not Velociraptor at all.

[DragonWriter]

What was depicted in the movie Jurassic Park was clearly Deinonychus.

I thought the general consensus was that the JP "Velociraptor" was definitely to big for a Velociraptor and probably a bit too big for Deinonychus, and probably most similar in size and body plan to Utahraptor (though a bit small); at any rate, most likely, the CGI critter was designed based on Velociraptor and then scaled up till had the desired dramatic appearance on screen, so calling it "clearly" any particular bird is probably mistaken; it is a fictional creation based loosely on then-current ideas about Velociraptor adapted to fit a particular theatrical vision.

Velociraptor didn't have that large inner claw.

Actually, the "sickle claw" is a distinguishing feature of the family Dromosauridae of which Deinonychus, Utahraptor, Velociraptor, and a whole host of other relatives are members.

Re:

[PeelBoy]

That's not a sickle claw it's a stone age crowbar.

Missing Link?

[Algorithmnast]

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?

Re:Missing Link?

[rucs_hack]

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.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Feathers/scales/hair/fingernails are all made of keratin, not chitin. Feathers are a form of scales??? Why the fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached!

Re:

[DragonWriter]

the suspicion is that all dinosours had feathers.

I don't think that is theory, but instead that quite a lot of theropod dinosaurs (aside from birds, which are theropod dinosaurs and indisputably have feathers) had feathers, and that many that have not been previously recognized as such are actually not just "theropod dinosaurs with feathers", but actually birds (Velociraptor included.)

Re:Missing Link?

[suv4x4]

I have a really hard time imagining the large herbivorous dinosaurs with feathers.... Not that that means anything, just that I have sucky imagination ;-)

Some dragons are drawn with feathers instead of scales. It looks pretty good.

The problem seems to be people keep imagining that those feathers are same as present day feathers, and brightly colored. In fact, the Discovery raptors had brightly colored feathers which didn't make any sense for a carnivore.

I would expect more subdued hues, lots of gray and brown, so they are not as noticeable to their pray.

In fact, from some distance, it wouldn't look much different compared to scales, it'll just be somewhat less shiny.

No idea

[Moraelin]

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.

Dazzling camouflage works on humans, too

[spun]

It was used in WWII. [wikipedia.org] 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.

I'd go one step further, though

[Moraelin]

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

Re:

[smellsofbikes]

>the most logical camouflage colour would be green, right?

Actually, the most logical camouflage color is countershading [wikipedia.org], which the Wikipedia link does a terrible job of describing. Essentially, countershading says animals are darker on the top than on their bellies, fading from one to the other -- like thousands of species of fish, many or most mammals, and a fair number of insects. What happens is that when light is falling from above, on something that is darker on top and lighter on bottom, it appea

Still the same thing, though

[Moraelin]

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

Re:

[smellsofbikes]

That's true: if you can reason out what you're looking at, disruption is more difficult (although apparently not impossible: the first British Navy ship painted using disruptive coloring kept getting hit by other RN ships who misjudged where it was.) My point was mostly that apparently color-matching, particularly green-color-matching, is not as effective as image-alteration. There's an interesting essay about this by Steven Gould. Basically, Thayer, the guy who came up with countershading, overextended

Excellent post.

[__aailob1448]

Every once in a while, I come across a post so enjoyable that I must compliment whomever wrote it.

Thank you for making /. a better place.

Orange vs. colorblind mammals.

[Valdrax]

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

Re:

[Moraelin]

Well, given that I'm not a zoologist, probably "talking out the arse" is a more apt description than "educated guess". So take it with more than a grain of salt.

That said, if the above paragraph didn't drive you off yet, there have been studies exactly on this domain. I didn't keep a list of links, being that I just read a ton of unrelated stuff and just rely on memory from that point, but some quick googling turns up quite a few links on animal vision and camouflage.

E.g., This one [jstor.org] seems to discuss just tha

One image is worth 1000 words

[Moraelin]

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 [uncg.edu]

(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 n

Re:

[gardyloo]

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.

Another reason is that green *may* be one of those colors which is quite difficult to produce.

I heard a story on NPR recently about the environment around Chernobyl helping to partially solve one of the difficulties with the evolution of color: If more brightly-colored birds get more mates, then why aren't ALL male birds very brightly colored? The thinking goes that there must be a tradeoff of some sort --- bright colors must convey some disadvantage, too, so that not every male bird has them. Perhaps a

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[supersnail]

Think Drag Queen construction worker.

outa do the trick.

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[budgenator]

Well go watch a video showing a cock fight, then imagine looking a banty roster eye to eye, of course these guys, the Cassowary [wikipedia.org] should be able to make your blood run cold with out using your imagination.

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[Mr. Underbridge]

So is velociraptor going to be announced as the earliest known ancestor of birds?

That would assume evolution works as a ladder - but it doesn't. It's more like a tree. This indicates that velociraptor *could* be an ancestor of birds; probably more likely is that they share a common ancestor.

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 velo

Not bird ancestor

[YetAnotherBob]

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 flig

Re:

[evilviper]

Preditor/prey ratios also indicate that they were warm blooded.

...And the massive size of the largest dinosaurs entirely precludes the possibility of being warm blooded, lest they have to eat for more hours than there is in a day to maintain their weight.

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[DragonWriter]

I wonder why other velociraptor fossils haven't been found with feathers, if all velociraptors had them?

There has been considerable, IIRC, evidence of feathers in velociraptor fossils previously, and evidence of feathers throughout the same family, which there is some reason to believe are actually birds. But feathers don't fossilize really well, and most of the evidence for velociraptor in particular has been indirect indications.

Re:

[DragonWriter]

So is velociraptor going to be announced as the earliest known ancestor of birds?

Probably not; IIRC, there is some evidence the other way around, that is, that Archaeopteryx, generally accepted as the first bird, may be an ancestor of Velociraptor, which would then be a flightless bird.

Re:

[jc42]

... Archaeopteryx, generally accepted as the first bird, may be an ancestor of Velociraptor, which would then be a flightless bird.

Minor quibble: Some of the bird fossils recently found in China are dated to a few millions years before the earliest Archaeopterix fossils, and appear somewhat more modern in many respects. It's more likely that Archaeopterix was in a clade that branched off early, and died out. But this is all still a lot of speculation, as there are significant error bars on all the dates.

They also had tar pits back then...

[mrRay720]

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!

Re:

[Nextraztus]

Feathered Raptors...Tar? it's Un'Goro Crater all over again!

Queue XKCD comic

[Xyde]

I'm sure XKCD will have something to say about this. We welcome our Mwahahah flying, feathered velociraptor overlords! ..first post!

Re:

[Quinnie]

No one tell Randall Munroe about this, or he'll start running away from birds.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends on what the intent of the post was. If it was to notify or remind XKCD to do a comic on the topic, it would be "cue". If it was to go to XKCD after reading slashdot, then it would be "queue".

Han shot first...

[Progman3K]

Does that mean Spielberg is going to retouch Jurassic Park to add feathers?

Re:

[suv4x4]

Does that mean Spielberg is going to retouch Jurassic Park to add feathers?

No, but the Jurassic Park 4 seems to get it right [img171.exs.cx].

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[jollyreaper]

Does that mean Spielberg is going to retouch Jurassic Park to add feathers?

And he's going to replace their scary teeth with walkie talkies.

Looks like a giant turkey...

[aapold]

That kid in Jurassic Park was right....

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[Daniel Dvorkin]

Yeah, but, but ... T. rex bit first!

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[Aneurism75]

Damn you beat me to the punch... I was thinking the same thing.

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[Drathos]

It's been a while (several grateful years) since I've seen any of them, but I'm pretty sure that in the third one some of the raptors had a little plumage on their heads. Not what was meant in the article, but still..

Separated at birth...

[Kildjean]

Barrens Velociraptors, and most of them found through Azeroth have feathers too. Are these types related or they are distant cousins.

Just as well the feathers were left off

[jollyreaper]

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.

Re:

[hey!]

Kind of makes the E. Dickinson poem a bit more ... diabolical.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all...

Jeff Goldblum was right!

[Big Nothing]

This will teach all of Jeff Goldblum's critics a well deserved lesson!

Now we have to bring them back

[DanielMarkham]

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?"

Re:Now we have to bring them back

[z0idberg]

and a diet Coke.

Re:

[TheQuantumShift]

Make sure it's an extra large diet, otherwise you won't get the full "diet" benefits.

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[Red Flayer]

Yes, the raptors should be brought back... but not to feed the portly. Rather, to cull the herd.

You can bet that more people will stick to their diets (or "lifestyle changes" if "diet" is too non-PC) if their intact survival depends on outrunning velociraptors.

Actually, there would be no possibility of outrunning the raptors. However, the principle still applies, since there would be a need to outrun the poor slob running next to you.

Who Says Wikipedia Doesn't Have a Sense of Humor?

[riffzifnab]

Deinonychus Scale Drawing [wikipedia.org]

Look out dude, its going for your leg!

Something doesn't add up for me

[OfficialReverendStev]

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?

See on IMAX

[Se7enLC]

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! [dinosalive.com], narrated by Michael Douglas. It's playing now in a number of markets as both a 2D and 3D film.

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[gstoddart]

I was very disappointed to hear that they now believe velociraptors had feathers. Not very menacing when they look like tall chickens.

Isn't that like saying that a lion doesn't look so menacing since it's fluffy and looks like a kitty from a distance?

I suspect they probably looked a little more menacing than simply a chicken. :-P

Cheers

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[Luthair]

It doesn't matter, I just can't take them seriously anymore. I mean feathers, come on!

Re:

[Se7enLC]

science be damned, I'm still going to see them the same way I saw them in Jurassic Park, and I'm still going to carry a super soaker of Welch's Grape Juice and raptor-proof my house.

Re:

[crashfrog]

Not very menacing when they look like tall chickens.

That's what I used to think, until I saw someone pecked to death by an angry emu...

Re:

[jc42]

OTOH, among my pictures that I like to impress people with are several with me standing with an arm around a very friendly emu. The critter was a pet of some friends. It really liked having its head and neck scratched, just like our cockatiels and conure do. They made an emu-egg omelet when I was visiting last year, which fed 6 people breakfast.

Emus do have some serious-looking claws on their feet, though. I don't think I'd want to get too close to one that wasn't tame.

Considering that our favorite pets

The chicken or the egg

[INeededALogin]

The Velociraptor stupid. Geesh

So Mr. Velociraptor...

[thisissilly]

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>

wieght?

[Kristoph]

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?

]{

Go find out

[Tony]

...how much of a 'vicious carnivore' can a 13 kg creature really be?

Go ask a wolverine.

Not exactly news

[Tarlus]

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.

Re:

[jgrahn]

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.

Uh, ravens are not birds of prey, they are (like most birds) passerines. Sounds very speculative, if you ask me.

Mega-Ultra Chicken

[zymurgyboy]

TFA:

"It's sort of as if you scaled up a chicken and then gave it really nasty teeth and big claws on its feet," he said.

Mega Ultra Chicken? No, shhhh, he is legend!

BillyWitchDoctor.com deals mostly in chicken.

Slightly gay

[merikari]

This just in. Velociraptors were a bit more gay than previously thought.

Raptor Feathers in World of Warcraft

[SendBot]

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

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

Re:Is this news?

[rucs_hack]

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.

Re:

[GreyPoopon]

There have been clues before, but the evidence wasn't good enough until now.

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.

Re:Is this news?

[syntaxglitch]

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.

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.

Re:

[dcollins]

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."

Re:

[GreyPoopon]

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.

Wow! I was just trying to be mildly funny, but most of this bird looks startlingly like the diagrams I've seen of velociraptors. Aside from the jaw area, how would the skeleton of the cassowary differ from a velociraptor

Re:

[jc42]

Aside from the jaw area, how would the skeleton of the cassowary differ from a velociraptor?

Two main differences: A velociraptor has two arms with claws on the end, while a cassowary has short, vestigial wings. And a velociraptor has a long, slender tail, while a cassowary has a typical bird-like stump of a tail.

There are also lots of other small differences, of course. But velociraptors and cassowaries are distant relatives, and their skeletons are as notable for their similarities as their differences.

Re:

[PCM2]

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.

You forgot to mention that it has a brilliant, eerie blue head and an overgrown beak t

Re:Is this news?

[jonnythan]

Picture of one of these little bastards attacking:

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

Wow.

Re:

[commodoresloat]

Picture of one of these little bastards attacking:... Wow.

Yeah pretty insane eh? The bird he's attacking is pretty wild too.

Re:

[bryguy5]

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 o

Re:

[dave1791]

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

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

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).

Re:

[mhall119]

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).

"ar-kee-OP-ter-iks"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeopteryx [wikipedia.org]

Re:Is this news?

[Digital Vomit]

I used to bullseye those things in my T-16 back home.

Re:

[DragonWriter]

My theory is that the 'raptor wasn't a dinosaur at all. It was just a really big ostrich.

Birds are theropod dinosaurs, and (while it isn't, as far as I know, actually settled), there is, I believe, some currency to the idea that the Dromosauridae (including Velociraptor and pals) are actually birds.

Re:

[phoenixwade]

In Soviet Russia, Ostrich is really dumb dinosaur! Taste like chicken!

"In Soviet Russia, The Chickens eat YOU!"

There, fixed that for you....

Re:

[somersault]

Would be more 'chicken eat you!' if you want to do it right.

Actually, there has been good evidence

[einhverfr]

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.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

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 [sciencemag.org]

Re:

[suv4x4]

No wonder the dinos went nuts and started killing people. You mixed in DNA from evil villian and Legion of Doom member Gorilla Grodd

Yea :( Well, that explains why Velociraptors where able to steal Grant's credit cards and order enormous amount of crap online in JP 3.

Re:new reason for extinctin of the dino's

[Anonymous Coward]

All those little 'created' humans walking around at the same time must have killed them all to make headdresses.

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?

Re:

[j00r0m4nc3r]

But which came first, the velociraptor or the egg?

Re:

[TheThiefMaster]

The chicken, obviously.

Wait...

Re:

[BigBuckHunter]

There go all my childhood fantasies. Instead of being scary, they ran around looking like Liberace.
 
You have the wrong flamboyant pianist. It's Elton John that wears the feathers.
 
BBH