We all know that silhouette, that six foot tall
pack hunting, you know, that door opening monster
from the movies. It's arguably the most famous
dinosaur villain in pop culture history. But
I've been digging through the source material
we pulled for today, and we've got everything
from Gobi Desert expedition logs to biomechanics
labs. And the creature in the fossil record is
almost unrecognizable. It really is. It's a case
of mistaken identity on a... just a massive scale
yeah if you met the real animal in a dark alley
or more accurately a dark sand dune you wouldn't
be looking up at a man -sized lizard. No. You'd
be looking down at something that looks like
a very angry, very lethal bird. And that's really
the mission for this deep dive, right? We're
not just debunking a movie. We want to reconstruct
the actual organism, Velociraptor, from the ground
up. Exactly. From the first find in 1923 to studies
from just last year. Okay, so let's start with
the name. It sounds fast. It sounds dangerous.
Velociraptor. And it's both. The name is pure
Latin. You have Velox, which means swift, and
raptor, which means robber or plunderer. The
swift thief. The swift thief. It's perfect. It
is a great name. But I was reading through the
history, and we almost didn't get it. The guy
who named it, Henry Fairfield Osborne, he had
another idea first. That's right, yeah. In a
popular press article, before the official paper
came out in 1924, he actually called it Oviraptor
Jedoshtari. Oviraptor? That sounds way too close
to Oviraptor, the egg thief. It does. It just
doesn't have the same punch, does it? Not at
all. I'm glad he changed his mind. Me too. Fortunately,
by the time the formal description was published,
he'd settled on Velociraptor mongoliensis. And
that's the type species, the one from the Jedokta
formation in Mongolia. And to be clear, when
we say Velociraptor, we're pretty much always
talking about V. mongoliensis. But you mentioned
there's a second species. Yes. Very briefly,
Velociraptor osmolska. It was described much
later, in 2008, from material found over in China.
It's very similar, but you see some distinct
differences in the upper jawbone, the maxilla.
So the genus was a little more diverse than just
one animal. A little, yeah. But for our reconstruction
today, mongoliansis is our gold standard. We
just have so much more fossil evidence for it.
Okay, so I've got the swift thief. Now let's
tackle the elephant, or I guess the giant lizard
in the room, the size. The movie version is looking
a person right in the eye. But looking at these
measurements, that's just physically impossible,
isn't it? It was a complete fabrication. The
real animal was. Yeah. It was small. We're talking
about a creature that was maybe, what, 1 .5 to
2 meters long total. See, 2 meters sounds long,
though. That's over 6 feet. It is. But you have
to account for the tail. The tail makes up a
huge portion of that length. It's like a balancing
rod. Oh, okay. So in terms of height, what you
would actually see standing next to it, it was
only about half a meter high at the hip. Half
a meter. So knee height on me. Knee height, exactly.
We're talking about something the size of a large
turkey. A turkey. Or maybe a coyote if you want
a mammal comparison, but way lighter. The weight
estimates put it somewhere between 14 and 19
kilograms. Wait, wait. 14 to 19 kilos. That's
like 30 to 40 pounds. 30 to 40 pounds, yeah.
My golden retriever is 70 pounds. You're telling
me the ultimate movie killing machine is half
the size of my dog. A very, uh... Very lightweight,
very agile dog armed with serrated teeth and,
you know, those giant sickle claws. But yes,
the mass is small. It's built for speed and precision,
not brute force. So how did we get from a 30
-pound knee -high predator to the monster in
the movies? I get Hollywood exaggerates, but
this feels like they just invented a whole new
animal. Well, that's because... In a way, they
did. Or rather, the author of the book did. Michael
Crichton. Michael Crichton. This is a fascinating
story. It all comes down to a paleontologist
named John Ostrom and his work on a different
dinosaur, Deinonychus. Deinonychus, that's the
North American cousin, right? Terrible claw.
Correct. And Deinonychus was discovered in the
60s. It was bigger, it was meaner, and it matched
the size of the movie Raptors almost perfectly.
And Crichton knew about this. He met with Ostrom
several times while he was writing the novel.
He basically took De Nonicus, the size, the aggression,
the pack dynamics, and used it as his model.
But he didn't use the name. No. He just thought
Velociraptor sounded, and I quote, more dramatic.
That's amazing. So he just, he stole the stats
of one dinosaur and slapped a cooler name on
it. Pretty much. And the funny thing is, just
as they were filming the movie, paleontologists
uncovered an even bigger raptor. Oh, I see the
note here. Utahraptor. Utahraptor. Which is huge.
Even bigger than the movie Monsters. One of the
special effects artists has this famous quote
where she said, we built it and then they discovered
it. So nature caught up to Hollywood. In a way,
yeah. But the damage was done. The pop culture
image was set. Okay, so the size is wrong. The
name is technically borrowed. And then there's
the look. The movies gave us these scaly reptilian
things. But there's the 2007 study here by Alan
Turner that says that's... That's just completely
wrong too. Oh, it's definitively wrong. There's
no debate on this one. Oh. Turner and his team
were examining the ulna. That's one of the forearm
bones of a Velociraptor specimen. Okay. And they
found quill knobs. Explain what a quill knob
actually is. Like what are we seeing on the bone?
So in a modern bird, the big flight feather is
on the wing. are anchored to the bone by ligaments,
and these ligaments create little bumps or knobs
on the surface of the bone. Attachment points.
Exactly. Finding these on a dinosaur fossil is
the smoking gun. It means Velociraptor had large,
complex, veined feathers on its arms. It had
wings. Well, you just said it was 40 pounds with
short arms. It couldn't fly, surely. Oh, absolutely
not. The biomechanics just don't work. The arms
are way too short to generate the lift it would
need. See, this is where I get a little stuck.
Why would evolution bother giving you a full
set of wings if you aren't going to take off?
It feels, I don't know, inefficient. Well, that's
the big question, isn't it? There are a few ideas.
One is display, you know, for attracting a mate.
Another is for brooding, using the wings to cover
a nest. But the most exciting one relates to
how it moved. Go on. It's a hypothesis called
WHERE, wing -assisted incline running. I think
I've seen videos of this with birds, like baby
partridges or something. Yes, exactly. If you
watch bird chicks that can't fly yet, they'll
run up steep surfaces like a tree trunk, and
they'll flap their wings like crazy. Right. The
flapping isn't to lift them up. It's to push
them down into the surface. It increases the
traction in their feet so they don't slip. So
let's picture our velociraptor. It's in the Gobi
Desert, which we know is full of sand dunes.
It's chasing something. It hits a steep dune
face. And instead of scrambling and sliding back
down, it starts flapping those feathered arms.
The aerodynamic force pins it to the sand, giving
it the grip to just run straight up a 45 -degree
incline. That is a wild image. A killer turkey
using its wings to get better grip. It's practical,
but it's a long way from the movie monster. It
is. But I'd argue what it actually did with its
weapons is far more interesting. And to understand
that, we have to talk about the fighting dinosaurs.
This is the famous one, the fossil found in 1971.
The velociraptor and a protoceratops locked in
combat. It is a perfect snapshot of violence.
You have the predator, velociraptor, and the
prey. A sheep -sized herbivore called Protoceratops.
They are literally frozen mid -battle. And the
raptor has its sickle claw? Where is it? It's
embedded deep in the throat of the Protoceratops.
And the Protoceratops, in turn, has clamped down
its powerful beak on the raptor's arm and broken
it. And they were just buried like that? Instantly.
The theory is a sand dune collapsed on top of
them. A sudden landslide of sand that preserved
them in that exact moment. Wow. So that tells
us what they hunted, but the how. That's where
the debate comes in. The movies show them using
that toe claw to disembowel their prey. The great
disemboweling myth. But I'm looking at a study
here where they tested a mechanical claw on a
pork belly. They did. For a BBC documentary,
they built a robotic raptor leg and swiped it
at a pig carcass to see if it would slash it
open. And did it. It punctured. It punched a
deep hole, but it didn't slice. And when you
look at the claw's anatomy, that makes perfect
sense. The inner curve is rounded. It's a pickaxe,
not a razor blade. So it's not a slasher. It's
a piercing weapon. It's a precision instrument.
And in that fighting dinosaur's fossil, where
is the claw? It's in the throat. It was targeting
vital organs. The jugular, the carotid artery,
the trachea. It wasn't trying to gut the animal.
It was trying to turn off the lights. But that
brings me back to the size. If I'm a 30 -pound
animal and I jump on a 200 -pound protoceratops
and just stick a claw in its neck, it's just
going to thrash me off. How do you stay on? And
that right there is the key question that leads
to the most compelling model we have for how
these things hunted. It's called RPR. RPR. Raptor
Prey Restraint. It was proposed by Denver Fowler
and his team back in 2011. Okay, break that down
for me. Raptor prey restraint. Fowler looked
at modern birds of prey. Hawks, eagles, that
kind of thing. When a hawk catches a rabbit,
it doesn't just bite it once. It lands on top
of it. It uses its body weight to pin the prey
to the ground, and it sinks its talons in to
get a death grip. So the claws are like grappling
hooks. They are grappling hooks, exactly. And
the foot anatomy of Velociraptor is incredibly
similar to modern hawks. That big sickle claw
is a primary anchor. They would leap onto the
back of their prey, sink that claw in, and just
ride it, using their weight to pit it down. That
sounds incredibly dangerous. You're riding a
bucking bronco. It is. And this is where the
wings come back into the picture. Remember where?
Flapping for traction. Yeah. Fowler's team suggests
the wings served another crucial function during
the kill. Stability. So like a tightrope walker
using a pole to balance? Precisely that. As the
prey animal is thrashing and bucking, the Velociraptor's
on top, flapping its wings, using that aerodynamic
force and drag to keep itself upright. They're
flapping stabilizers. So the wings aren't for
flying, they're for staying mounted on a dying
animal. That is, that's surprisingly dark. It
gets a bit darker. Because they aren't killing
with a single crushing bite, and they have the
prey pinned down. The RPR model suggests they
probably started eating the animal while it was
still alive. Oh. Modern hawks do this. They restrain
the prey and just begin to feed, waiting for
shock and blood loss to finish the job. That's
gruesome. But it's very efficient. That really
puts the weak bite force stat into perspective.
I saw that here, only 304 newtons. It seems pathetic
compared to a T -Rex. It's weak if you're trying
to crush bone, yeah. But they didn't need to.
Their teeth are serrated. If the claws are doing
the holding, the mouth just has to strip away
flesh. It's a saw, not a vice. Think Komodo dragon.
Okay, so we have a solitary hunter pinning its
prey, flapping to balance, eating it alive. But
I have to ask about the pack, the clever girl
moment. Is there any evidence for that? And this
is where I have to break the last remaining hearts
of the movie fans. For Velociraptor specifically,
the evidence for pack hunting is, well, it's
effectively zero. Zero. Not even a little. In
the Judacta formation, Velociraptor fossils are
almost always found alone. We just don't find
those mass grave sites with multiple raptors
attacking a single prey item, which is what you'd
expect. So where did the idea come from? From
Deinonychus again, the American cousin. There
are sites where Deinonychus have been found in
groups. But for the Mongolian Velociraptor, it
seems to have been a lone wolf. Or a lone lethal
turkey. A lone lethal nocturnal turkey. Right,
the eyes. Tell me about the scleral rings. Those
are the bony rings in the eye socket. They are.
And the size of the opening in those rings tells
you a lot about how much light the eye can let
in. For Velociraptor, the rings suggest an eye
that was adapted for low light conditions. It
was a night hunter. Which makes sense for a desert
environment. Avoid the heat of the day. Precisely.
And what's interesting is that their prey, Protoceratops,
shows a pattern of being catheter active in short
bursts, day or night. So that fighting dinosaurs
battle probably happened at dawn or twilight
or maybe even under a full moon. So let's wrap
all this up. The Hollywood version was a human
-sized, scaly, pack -hunting genius that could
open doors. The reality is a solitary, nocturnal,
feather -covered predator. It weighs about as
much as a coyote. It ambushes prey in the dunes,
pins it down with hawk -like claws, flaps its
wings to stay balanced, and then begins to eat
it. You know, that feels more real, more visceral
somehow, the mechanics of it. The flapping to
stay on top of a struggling animal, it makes
it feel like a real animal, not just a movie
monster. I think so, too. Biology is almost always
weirder and more interesting than fiction. Before
we go, I want to circle back to that RPR model
one last time. You mentioned something in our
chat before we started about the connection between
that killing motion and the evolution of flight
itself. Right. This is one of those ideas that
just, it's so compelling. If you think about
that motion, a feathered arm flapping to create
a stabilizing downward force, that motion is
remarkably similar to the... Power stroke of
a bird in flight. Wait, so you're saying that
the arm movement that allows birds to fly today
might have started as a way for dinosaurs to
kill things more effectively? It's a very strong
hypothesis. Evolution repurposes things. A flapping
stroke developed to keep a predator stable on
a thrashing victim could, over millions of years,
be refined and co -opted into a stroke that generates
lift. So when you look at a pigeon taking off
in the park... You might be seeing the distant...
repurposed echo of a predator holding down its
dinner that is a heavy thought to leave us on
the line between death and flight is thinner
than we think nature never wastes a good mechanism
well thank you for this deep dive this has been
incredible my pleasure