017 - Velociraptor: Fact and Fiction (Velociraptor)

[Theme Music] Welcome to the Dinosaurus, the Bear Bones Dinosaur Edutainment Podcast. I'm your host, Michaela Marshall. And I'm your host, David Lindley, and today we're talking about the Dread Beast itself. [Gasps] Monty Racks, I guess we already did that one. That's true. Velociraptor! Velociraptor! Ra-ra-ra, the fact and the fiction. But fiction is spookier! Significantly. Alright, Velociraptor, the terror beast of the Mesozoic, right? Terror beast! The cleverest, scariest hunter to have ever lived. So clever! Second only to T-Rex in majesty and awfulness, et cetera. Yeah. Okay, so let's kick things off with a quick timeline. Okay. This is a timeline that comes to us in four parts. First part is set in 1923. When an American expedition to the Gobi Desert, Mongolia, right, finds a dinosaur skull, Henry Fairfield Osborn of T-Rex fame, he knew that, right, described the specimen and gave it the name Velociraptor. Ooh, spooky. It is a dromiosaurid. Dromiosaurid, a clade of feathery theropods which lived all across the world, frequently called raptors due to family members like Velociraptor and Dakota Raptor. The family is named after the poorly known dromiosaurus. Dromios is Greek for runner, giving us the name Running Lizards. Oh, that's nice. Which is a close relative of birds and the, in my opinion, infamous troodon. Ah, yes. Because what is a troodon? Who knows? Who knows? This is a bit where Velociraptor proper exits the story. Yep, that's it. Alright, so we jump forward, that was 1923, let's jump forward to 1969. John Ostrom publishes a monograph on the newly named Dynonicus. Ooh. Dynonicus antaropus, a theropod which lived in what is now Midwestern North America during the early Cretaceous. While relatively large for a dromiosaurid, Dynonicus reached a maximum length of about 3.5 meters, standing less than one meter at its hip and weighing in at around 73 kilograms, comparable to an adult human. Early material was discovered in 1931 in Montana by Barnum Brown. But the species wasn't named until 1969, when John Ostrom published a now famous monograph on the creature. The name comes from Dinos for Terrible, like in Dinosaur, and the Greek Onokos for Claw. In reference to its truly spooky sickle claw on its second toe, the specific name means counterbalance. In reference to the supposed function of its long and well-supported tail. Well-supported as though it's like held up well, not like we have a lot of tails. Supported in the fossil record tends to mean different things. I see. So yeah, that makes sense. Okay. Good. Well, is it also well-supported? Yes. All right. Which is a spooky chompy boy from Montana. Yes. Actual Montana, not Mongolia. Actual Montana. The monograph featured a drawing of Dynonicus created by Ostrom student Bob Backer. Oh, hey, Bob Backer. You remember him? Yeah. It depicts a running bipedal dinosaur with sharp claws on its hands and feet, a long tail balancing its weight, and a cruel-looking claw on its second toe. It's a very spooky claw. It is. Let me show you a picture that I'm referencing. It's also in the show notes. Oh, yeah. Oh, man. This guy looks very familiar. Does he look familiar? Because he's on my shirt? He is on your shirt. Yeah. Fancy. Fancy you. When we talk about... Your fancy shirt. Paleo memes. This one is like the mother of all paleo art memes. This picture is Velociraptor in the public consciousness. To the point of excluding all others. No, I mean, I look at that and I'm like, "That's a Velociraptor." Obviously. Yeah. It's not. Nope. So that was 1969. The third part of our story is sometime pre-1990. All right. I don't know exactly when. Michael Creighton is writing a book about a theme park full of dinosaurs where man plays at being God and is punished for doing so in entertaining ways. That sounds neat. It's basically Frankenstein, both dinosaurs, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's good. No, it's great. Yeah. I mean... Not knocking it. Yeah. And I feel like, you know, Michael Creighton's trying to do the right thing. He's trying to do some research. He does. Yeah. He does a surprising amount of research for this book. He, like, he needs a spooky dinosaur. He needs a couple spooky dinosaurs. He needs antagonists. Yes. Yeah. T-Rex is big. It's popular. Yeah. He's the spookiest. And he's looking through other things to find out what else might be spooky. Sure. Comes across Dynonicus. He consults fairly heavily with Ostrom during writing the book, Jurassic Park. But he changes one minor, major thing about the dinosaur when he puts it in the book. Just its name. Its name. Dynonicus is not spooky. I'm sorry. It's not. Velociraptor is decided to be more dramatic, and Dynonicus is hard to spell. And, like, Velociraptor sounds like it's fast, you know? Yeah. And, like, Raptor. Right. Raptor sounds spooky. But then I'm like, have I been conditioned to think that-- Dynonicus literally means terrible claw. Right, right, right, right. It's a cool name. Okay. It's cool. It's cool. It's not as cool. And, like, it doesn't sound cool in English. Right. It's also hard to pronounce. Yeah. It's not really clear. And, like, this is it. No one's going to read it and be like, "Ah, Dynonicus." Right. They'll look up the etymology of that name and say, "Ooh, look what it means. How spooky." Creighton also changes the size of Dynonicus. Well, it'd be dumb if it was small. And, I mean, we heard how long Dynonicus was. It was a couple meters, I think. It was, like, a human size. Yeah, it's, like, three and a half meters long. But it's only, like, a meter and a half tall sort of thing, which is pretty short for a human. But still spooky. Like, human weight, I guess. Like, a human weight. Yeah. Like, if a human was, like, leaning over and, like, running, I'm going to say Naruto-style. I feel like it'd be similar. Yeah, sort of. Yeah. Okay. I mean, Dynonicus would look cooler at that point. Of course. Anyone looks cooler at that point. All right. So that's the third part of our story. "Jurassic Park," the novel, is published. 1993, Steven Spielberg is adapting the novel into a little film you might have heard of it. It's called "Jurassic Park." Oh, man. I'm going to go... It's a good score. It's a very good score. John really knows. Yeah, it is. Of course. The filmmakers make "Dynonicus/Velociraptor." It's really hard to talk about this creature at this point. It's hard to talk about it. Yeah. Either one, I guess. They make it bigger. So it's scarier when it's bigger, as you said. It's also probably easier to make a puppet. You can get your hand up inside of, like the head of. There were actual... I don't know if you know this. There were actual a couple of human-sized puppets where a person would get into like a skiing pose and have to be zipped into the puppet. I did not know about this. And the puppet was like airtight for some reason, so it had to have like an air tube going in. It sounds like a nightmare. But yeah, so there's probably a couple of times they really use them in the movie. I'm thinking that might have been for the foot shots when the kids are hiding in front of the kitchen. It's when they're in the kitchen. Yeah. Yeah. There's actual like puppeteers in life-sized puppets. The feet are surprisingly good, especially for having human feet in them. They're puppeteers. That's what they do. They still have feet. Yeah. So "Velociraptor" is in the film that we've seen. It ends up coming out looking a lot like that Bob Backer drawing. Very much so. So much. Because they probably saw that and they were like, "Oh, this is spooky." Yeah. If you need concept art for it, you go to that and you're like, "Okay, we make this." It's spooky. We make this. Yeah. And there's like a scale bar on it maybe or something, but who cares about that? We make it big enough that we can have a human foot inside of its feet and human hands inside of its head. Yeah. So when we need to do that. Jurassic Park ends up becoming somewhat popular. Yeah. "Velociraptor" and "Velociraptor" become very prominently associated with the franchise to the point where you can't have a movie in the Jurassic franchise without them. No. They don't think so. The franchise does not think so. Anyway, they're burned into public consciousness. Absolutely. "Velociraptor" is already fairly well in there. "Velociraptor" definitely not. And "Denonicus" not really, right? No. And I mean, it is now, but for all the wrong reasons. It's still cool. It's still cool. Yeah. As we can talk about it. Yeah. It's hard to criticize though. No. You can't. You can't really say a bad word about Jurassic Park's "Velociraptors." I think everyone's like, "We know." Exactly. We know. They know, but they don't want to know. We don't want to talk about it. Exactly. Yeah. And that's fine. We can go forward from there. Yeah. Into some featured creatures. "Velociraptor" is one of the most terrifying dinosaurs ever to have stalked the Earth. A horse-sized theropod from Montana, which could disembowel its prey, and children who made fun of it, with its fearsome toe claws. What skeletons found in the field measure, and this is quoting Dr. Alan Grant, "About five or six feet high and about nine feet long, though larger specimens may have existed." Studied extensively by Dr. Alan Grant, the raptor lived in the "Jurassic?" We must assume. It's Jurassic Park. And was unwisely brought back to life in the early 1990s. Etymology is not given, but these dinos are frequently referred to as "Raptors." It's a lot easier to just say "Raptors" than always having to say, "The Velociraptors are coming." Yeah. That's less cool. Watch out for the Velociraptors! And I have a similar, not that similar, dinosaur for us. It is called Velociraptor. Velociraptor Mongoliansis, a mid-sized dromiosaurid theropod from the late Cretaceous of Mongolia, discovered by Peter Kaisen in 1923, and named by Henry Fairfield Osborn, who also named T-Rex. Velociraptor grew up to about two meters long and would have weighed around 15 kilograms when fully grown. Velox is Latin for "swift" as in velocity, and raptor means "thief" or "plunderer," giving "swift thief." The specific name Mongoliansis honors its country of discovery. So I've got a dinosaur to talk about, and you do too. Yeah, we've both got dinosaurs. One's cool, you know, the other is also, it's okay, yeah. What have you learned about Velociraptor? So my research, there's big air quotes there, about this dinosaur is all in chronological order of how I learned information in the movie. So the first thing I learned was that the dinosaurs seemed to confusingly be strong enough to make its entire crate thing, like, move back from the place that they were trying to, like, they had locked into place and then it like, charges and the crate comes free. So it's strong enough- Well there are multiple of them, right? That maybe they're working together? 'Cause they're smart. Possible. They are smart. But then, like, not strong enough to just like, pull a man in, like, from another man's arms. Or like, maybe they do question mark. So anyways, they seem pretty strong-ish. Well they've got, like, pretty small arms, you know, so maybe the strength is all in the body. The legs. The legs. They're good at running, yeah, as we learned that later. I also had, like, a lot of problems with how they were doing this. This transfer of Velociraptors, like, why was the gate not, like, an automatic gate? They had other automatic things at the park. But a man has to climb up there? Okay. Yeah. No. It's fine. That's the first thing I learned. Next. So we talked about this. I'm not great at character names, so I've just called him Sam Neal the whole time. Dr. Alan Grant. Dr. Alan Grant. Yeah. So Sam Neal and Laura Dern. Don't know her character name. Nope. Find what I really found to be an extremely intact fossil. Oh, very much so. So- It's 100% intact. And they're, like, kind of excited. They were not excited enough for me about how intact this fossil was. This is just a whole thing. They're like, "Oh, I guess it's the Velociraptor." You're like, "It's the whole Velociraptor." Is this the one that they're digging out, or is it the one with the ground penetrating radar? That one. Okay. The radar. And they're, like, looking at it, they're like, "Hmm. Hmm. Pretty good." Pretty okay. No, it's the whole thing. Right. It's like 15 feet long. Which is weirdly short for being that tall? Yes. That's not long enough. But actual dynonicus is three and a half meters. Right. And only a meter high at the hips. No, yeah. Usually it's much, much longer versus how tall it is. Yeah. So that's very strange. It looks stush. A little stubby, but spooky. He can be stubby and spooky. Right. And then Sam Neal starts talking about how Velociraptors are closely related to birds. Everyone thinks this is hilarious. Everyone's very confused by this. They're on a dino dig site. And they're like, "Birds, this guy, he's such a nut." What? He's the most well-respected paleontologist in the world. Yeah. And, like, he studies these Velociraptors very closely. Okay. So he points out that the pubis, or pubic bone, in his terminology, is pointing backwards, like in modern birds. And to me, I was like, "Hold on. We did that episode." We did. And the Thiskeans, the bird-hip ones, having the bird-hips but being like triceratops and things that are not birds. Not birds. Dromiosaurids, though, yes, have the backwards-pointing pubis because they are so closely related to birds. So close. This is the best science in this film. Absolutely. Yes. 100%. No, by far. Yeah. Right. So everyone mocks Sam Neal. That's great. And then there's a child. The child thinks he's all cool, and he's like, "It's just a turkey. Turkeys are not scary." Why is this child here? I don't know. Anyway. I don't know. So Sam Neal decides he wants to scare this child by describing the ways in which a Velociraptor might happen upon him and the bad time he would have. So first, he points out that he's very adamant about this, that a Velociraptor's visual acuity is not based on movement like T-Rex. Dinosaurs are very visual creatures, incredibly visual, and they're depicted constantly in these movies as being completely non-like, almost blind. Like, literally blind. But relying heavily on smell as if they were like a tiger. Yeah. And at one point, so after the Jeep has been flipped and Sam Neal is standing there with a female child, and T-Rex is like up in their grill sniffing them and does not seem to realize they are there. Largest nasal cavity is brought up at some point. Right. Doesn't seem to matter. So it can't see, and it's smelling them, but not really. Well, it's raining. I guess it's raining. And they're covered in blood because of the Jeep flipping over. Yes. That's it. Right. We learned that Velociraptor hunted in packs. Okay, questionable. There's like no evidence for this in Dromiosaurus, in general, Dromiosaurus, rather. Definitely not in Velociraptor. Yeah. I've got a note that says no literature on whether or not it would be able to open doors. Yeah. The door opening. I... We'll get there. I also did not enjoy that. Right. But yeah, the idea being that there are, you know, two to three Velociraptors and one distracts you and is like, "Hey, look over here." And then the other ones get you from the side and like a pincer movement, which implies a very high level of intelligence. What would the ikno fossil look like for that? What would the traces, the tracks be, right? Because we have the footprints of one dinosaur, like, let's say an ornithominus or something. Sure. Yeah. It's planted looking at a Velociraptor. Right. So you've got the other... Two-toed footprints, actually, because they have three large toes, but their second ones have these sickle claws on them. So they don't actually walk on them at all. Right. So you only get these two-toed tracks, which is interesting. Okay. That's cool. Anyway, you've got these two-toed tracks looking at this thing. Yep. And then you've got two more sets coming in from either side. Yeah. You could actually construct a... Like, if you had a very good set of ikno fossils, this is a plausible scenario to have reconstructed. Especially... We don't have it, but... No, we don't. Because they're main method of killing things. If they're doing it all the time, then, yeah, odds are that at some point... This actually sort of plays into a flaw in trying to interpret things from the fossil record in that it's very common to think that because you found behavior once, that represents the majority scenario. Right. So even if we had just found this once, the mean would be out there that this is how they did all the time, despite most fossil trackways being preserved in non-standard conditions. Because in order for something to fossilize, you're not just walking across hard ground. No. You're walking across something that can preserve that footprint. That's true. That's true. So there you go. We have no way of knowing. It's probably wrong. Anyways. So, yeah, you mentioned there... I mean, you didn't call it a six-inch retractable claw. Retractable. What's retractable? Sam Neal said it was retractable. Wow. That doesn't seem right. It seems insane. Retracting to where? To where? Yeah. To where? Maybe just like pulling off the ground is what you mean by retractable. Maybe that's what he means by retractable. Retractable really makes it sound like it is like going back inside of its foot. Yeah. Which doesn't... Like a cat's claw. Like a cat's claw. But that doesn't... Anyways, it's a big, big spooky thing. He's got one. He just carries it around to threaten children with. Until he drops it. Yeah. He's like, "I don't need that anymore." So a couple of times during the movie, people kept suggesting that Sam Neal and Laura Dern would be out of a job. Now that Jurassic Park was a thing, it's like, "Ah, we've got dinosaurs. No one needs paleontologists anymore." And you're like, "That's not how that works." They're already very well-rooted in biology. Right? They just dropped some of the geology. But like, don't you want to find more dinosaurs? More dinosaurs. So that you can make more of them, anyways. I don't know why that bothered me so much. Laura Dern is a vision in denim. Let's move on. Okay, so they get to the park. Everything's great. They go and they watch some little velociraptors being born, or their little eggs. And this is also very unrelenting of a velociraptor. But there's a scientist in that lab who is erasing something. So he's written something in pencil. And now he's erasing it. He's in a lab. He's a scientist. I forgot that you're a scientist. I was like, "What's the matter with erasing things?" You can't erase things. No, you can't. You're not allowed to erase things in science. You can't erase pencil? Yeah. What's he doing? I don't know. Anyhow, there's a big hubbub made about how the velociraptors imprint on the first thing that they see. And this doesn't really come into play in this movie. Until Jurassic World, which is many years later. Many years later. And you're kind of like, "Why did...?" Is that what birds do? Is that why they were... Thought to be what some animals do? I'm not aware of any cases where that's actually true. No. No. And so it's very strange that they make this big deal about them imprinting on the first person they see. There are lots of myths about it, and I guess that's where it's coming from, like the baby bird nest thing. Right, right, right. Oh, don't put it back because birds have such... The birds will reject it. Yeah. They've got such great senses of smell. No. They don't. They don't. It won't happen. Put it back. Put it back, yeah. It may have been kicked out on purpose. Birds are jerks. Oh, this one sucks. Bye. Oh. Right. But yeah, no, it struck me as odd that they made this big deal about it, and then yeah, many movies and many years later, it's... 20 years later. Potentially. It's like a major plot point, I would say. Yeah. In... The first Jurassic World. Yeah, because it's like Chris Pratt has imprinted on the dinosaurs or something, and then... They're his bros. Yeah. And then they leave him, but they come back, or I don't know, or remember, and I watched that one recently. Okay, Samuel is mad that they bred raptors. Yeah. He's really mad about it. He's like, "What were you thinking?" Right. And then Crocodile Dundee. Yeah. Who has wonderful socks. He does. He pulls those things up. Hi. Hi. It was the '90s. It's a heady time. His style of the time. Yeah. Like chilling with his foot up, just surprisingly suggestively. Yeah. Well, his shorts are also pretty short. And then like the high socks just really sort of emphasize... Sorry. Crocodile Dundee. Yeah. Crocodile Dundee. So, he's telling Samuel about how they are lethal at eight months, and he means lethal. The idea that it takes them eight months to become killing machines seems insane to me. This will come into play in a future episode, I guess, but we're going to eventually talk about how fast dinosaurs grow. Yeah. They grow pretty fast. Pretty fast. Eight months, though, for like a specific species. I don't know. Listen. Right. We also learned that they can reach cheetah speeds. They cannot. No. If... I've got a note about this. Fifty to sixty miles per hour if they get out in the open. No. It's so fast. It just says not getting up to the as fast as a motorcycle speed seen in the films. No. No. How could they? I mean, they're swift lizards. They're swift. Sure. Sure. But no. Especially when they're so, like... I mean, the ones that we're describing here are very mid-heavy, right? Because they're so tall but not long enough. Yeah. It just seems like running would be all awkward. Can we talk about why Dynonicus antaropus is called antaropus? Yes. The counterbalancing thing? Yeah. So, big tail. Yeah. It's got all these spines, basically, in the tail that keep it locked together. Okay. So, the spot that this kept it locked into, like, a rod shape, so it was just a cylinder coming out of the butt, right? Sure. You good old butt cylinder. What's a butt cylinder good for, Michaela? For stabilizing. Pivoting. Pivoting. Pivot. So, you take in a corner, right, as a velociraptor-sized Dynonicus, and you need to pivot. And you use your tail to counterbalance because it's just this big old rod that's attached with a swivel joint at the butt, the butt area. Oh, here. Cloakal region. You know what else uses their tail to stabilize? Cats? Cheetahs. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of this is just taking some cheetahs, it turns out. This is not correct, technically. Yeah, I know. We have found some fossil evidence, some preserved tails, that are very sinuous. They are F-shaped. They go back and forth a lot. Yeah. So, it seems like they were probably pretty rigid up-down, and they might have been able to pivot that up-down, but side-to-side they were pretty swishy. Right, like a tail would be. Yeah, usually. Tailed or swishy. Yeah. Okay, so not cheetah speed. What about the graded jumping? They're excellent jumpers. I've got nothing about jumping in my notes, I'm sorry. That's a very difficult trace fossil to find. Right? I don't know how to. Wait! No, this is crocodile Dundee-sang. Yeah. Okay, so he's verified it because they've jumped up and eaten people. Well, yeah, he's seen it. He's literally seen it. Yeah, okay. I'm fine with that. There's nothing to say that they were bad jumpers. No, they're extremely intelligent. He talks at length about their intelligence, I would say. They're problem solvers. They were systematically testing the electrified fence to try to find weaknesses in it, which is exciting. Well, okay, not completely unfounded. We've got corvids, and it's taking all that I have to not say "covids," but they're corvids, ravens, and magpies and things. They're very smart. Very smart birds, right? Yeah. Birds are jerks. They are. Basically as a rule. Have you ever seen the video of a, it might be a raven, I don't know, some sort of large blackbird sliding down a roof on like a little skateboard type thing? It's the cutest thing. Birds like to use slides and things. It's so cute. Oh, it's so cute. Yeah. But good problem solvers. So sure. Yeah. You know what? Sure. Velociraptor and Dynonicus. It's very hard to talk about. Yeah. They're both very similar to birds. They're both Jromiosaurids. Go for it. They're smart. They're smart. Why not? They're smart. He refers to the group of raptors as a pride. Sure. Which I- This is also just Cheetah lion talk, right? It's just lion. He's just talking about lions. He's just talking about lions. Yeah, I think so. Excellent jumpers. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And then they have a primitive level of vocalization for communication. I expect them to have actually a fairly well diversified range of vocalizations. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense that- If they're going to be planning things, you know, they need to be like, "Hey, you go over that way." Yeah. You know, probably less than, you know, less than that. I don't know. Birds, they have some pretty, and like animals in general have some sophisticated calls. They do. A lot of it is just like, "Hey, stay away from here because I'm a jerk and I'll peck you if you get too close." For birds, specifically. Right. But- It is funny that this is such a pro-dinosaur yet anti-bird podcast. I'm not anti-bird. I just think that they're jerks because they are. That's science. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. But like, what is it? Prairie dogs I think have been shown, oh, I'm going to have to find this for the show notes now. Oh, no. Prairie dogs have been shown to have very varied forms of communication, possibly with words for like yellow. Oh. So when researchers are approaching them, they'll make different vocalizations based on the color of the clothing sort of thing. I learned this off of QI, so it might be wrong. It might be wrong. Some of those researchers are very entertaining people that believe a lot of things they shouldn't. That's fine, though, because it makes for good entertainment. It does. Yeah. Keep going. Right. And then, I mean, a bunch more stuff happens. Sure. To your exes. And yeah, we eventually learned that the raptors are capable of opening doors. Yes. Now, it's the kind of doors that they have at the park, which are the issue. Right. Because they're just the kind of doors that you can kind of, yeah, just like put anything in and it's just going to kind of open. Well, okay. So you did a thing with your hands. And like if we look at this Bobbacker thing again, we have the hands and their T-Rex hands. Sure, they are. Yeah. For some reason, they've been put on a Dynonicus. Whatever reason. Dynonicus, it has long hands. Look at these things. They're nearly dragging on the ground. They're very long. They're surprisingly long, which is one thing that we get wrong frequently with raptors. Because like, yeah, itty-bitty, itty-bitty arms is a frequent trope because of velociraptors in Jurassic Park. Also, not held palms down. They're not pronated. They're held palms facing inwards. So actually, this door would have been kind of a pain to open for them. Yeah, you could like put a thing on it, but like it's not like you have a hook to get on top of that. So like following it down is going to be much harder. Whatever you're going to use is face. Possibly. Push it down. Pretty hefty face on Dynonicus actually. Does have a pretty hefty. Big wedge shaped. Yeah. So maybe, yeah, maybe if they had been, you know, more accurate, then they wouldn't have gotten into that kitchen. Yeah. And they're not just terrorizing those children in one of the best moments in cinematography. Cinematic history. It's so good. So good. Yeah. So I mean, I guess we're happy that they terrorize the children. Yeah. Right. So they go along. They're hunting together and then they're about to surround the, they are surrounding the humans and the humans are saved valiantly by T-Rex. So T-Rex chomps on one of the velociraptors and you know, it's bad. But then the other velociraptor like attacks T-Rex in theory to avenge or save its friend. This plays on a paleo art meme. Okay. Because you'll frequently see Dynonicus depicted as group like pack hunting sauropods. And this image of one of them clinging to approximately the neck chest region and trying to slash at it with the claws. Very prominent. And a book at home I'm sure that has a big colorful 90s era image of this happening. And I'm not saying it doesn't make for good drama, you know, good movie making. I just, everything about it seems so wrong to me. The idea that you have these smaller predators that yes, they hunt together, but there's a very large predator and like you're going to run. That's just survival. You don't attack the larger predator because it's got your friends. You've run away. That's crazy. That's a good point. But that's not, you know, if the velociraptor gets away, then it's like question mark, where'd it go? When Sam Neil knew that velociraptors like one of them, you see it and then the other two come at you from the sides, right? He knew that crocodile Dundee doesn't pretty crucially because he's all like clever girl, etc. Yeah. He's like, you know, focused on it with his gun. Yeah. With his gun. Could Sam Neil have saved that man's life by just telling him about their ikno fossils? I suppose at what point? When he's got the leg up with the socks. They do have a very long conversation. Yeah. Because that guy's just crocodile Dundee is just like bragging about how much he knows about velociraptors and Sam Neil could fire back a little bit and be like, Hey, here's a neat fact. Yeah. Bet you didn't know. That's true. Sam Neil seems like the kind of guy that would want to tell people that fact. Yeah. Especially when they bred raptors, which are terrifying. Yeah. You're right. Someone should have told him. No one did. It was his undoing. Clever girl. Clever girl. Yeah. I also had a real issue and like, I know that it's for the visual effect when they lower that like cow in and then the the cow is being lowered on some sort of like large harness type thing. And then the velociraptors eat the cow and just destroy the harness. And you're like, how many harnesses are you going for? Well, why not just drop the cow, right? Like I understand this. I'm very humane, but the cow is meant to be eaten. Just so many harnesses. Can I tell you about real velociraptor? My only, my last thing, my last thing is that so I did not watch Jurassic Park three. Yeah. Yeah. But apparently they did like a redesign of, okay, keep going. Yeah. So they made its face longer and they gave it a crest, a crest of feathers, which is the incorrect way to restore that. That's fine. I'm mad about the justification. Okay. Because like filmographically, whatever, they just make a new movie. They update the things so they can sell more toys, right? If you've got the old 1993 velociraptor toy, your old news, everyone's talking about Jurassic Park three this summer. You gotta sell toys. I mean, they aren't because it's a very bad movie. Yeah. Super bad. Didn't watch it. Yeah. But the just someone for some reason felt a necessity to justify why they look different. Right. Because, you know, a reporter asks them there, they don't just want to be like, because we want to sell toys. No. So what they say is that they've evolved in like 10 years. Yeah. And like what benefits are they getting? From a crest. Yeah. Yeah. So what is the thermal regulation, sexual, display or species recognition? I mean, always. Yeah. That's probably the thermal one. That makes sense. Some of the most sense to me. Yeah. And then the Jurassic world velociraptors all look pretty different. And apparently in the lore of Jurassic world, each of them is like made individually. And the reason, because a lot of them are different colors. Right. Like there's blue, who was blue, and they're all like spliced with something just specifically to make them look a bit different. So like there's a, I think there's one that's kind of purpley maybe, and like a green one. I don't know. Yeah. That one there, they're really, really hunting that pack. Do you know that blue is a structural color in nature? Have I already talked about this? I don't know. Okay. Blue is a structural color in nature. And what that means is like, if I grind down a red rose, right, and I just put it through a blender. Yeah. A really fine blender. The dust that comes out will look red. Right. No matter how fine I grind it. Because it is red. If I take a blue looking feather and grind that up, it will no longer look blue. Because the reason it looks blue, maybe, I mean, you might have to get like really fine for this to actually happen. But the reason it looks blue is because of how light bounces off the surface of it. And at that point, I'm kind of like, isn't that how all color works? And yes, but it's actually the structure of the surface that makes it look blue rather than like melanin, which makes things look, I think can can be reddish as well as browns and blacks and whites. That's interesting. So blue, being a velociraptor, got some streaks of structural color, apparently, not related to feathers, which is very impressive. Yeah, they're just right on the skin. Yeah. Yeah. So real velociraptor, right? Had feathers. Wow. I know. This is commonly brought up. We didn't know. Sorry, we knew it had feathers for quite a while because like phylogenetic bracketing, all the things around it had feathers and we had fossils of it. So it's like, wow. It's like the chances of it not having feathers well. We didn't have direct evidence of it having feathers until 2007 when we found quill knobs on the ulna. All right. There you go. Which is how we frequently know that things had feathers. Cool. Have you heard of the fighting dinosaurs fossil? No. It is a national treasure of Mongolia. Wow. It has picked or it has captured a protoceratops that died fighting a velociraptor and is so cool because like the velociraptor has got one of its arms stuck in the protoceratops's beak. So it seems like what happened is sort of late at night, walking up a sand dune, a velociraptor jumps on protoceratops from behind. Protoceratops bites down on its arm and like a cat, the velociraptor slashes at the protoceratops. Of course. Basically just trying to get free. This kills the protoceratops but doesn't release the mouth. The dune sort of collapses or like something covers up these things and they are preserved like this for millions of years. It is such a cool fossil. It's very nearly complete. There's a reason it's a national treasure. Yeah. So embarrassing for that velociraptor though. It's incredibly embarrassing. More things about velociraptor that are just actually different. So much smaller, right? So small. A lot of people have heard, yes, velociraptor is smaller than in the movie. Sure, sure, sure. Quite small. And the skull, the face looks so different. I'm going to bring up a picture of a velociraptor face. Oh yeah. Now this looks shockingly similar to a jackal skull. It's got a bit of a curve like upwards towards the nose and jackals as mammals have much more solid skulls. This has big-- So many gaps. So you've got the antorbital finestra and the orbit, which is huge in this thing. And then the temporal finestra. So a lot of holes in the skull. But in general shape looks a lot like a jackal. And considering that the Gobi Desert was also a desert back when velociraptor was alive, might have been doing many of the same things that jackals or coyotes are doing. Yeah. You know? Being a sort of desert hunter going after proto seratops because it's a big meal and it hasn't had one in a while, even though that's a dicey proposition for it. Right. And sometimes it doesn't work out so great. No. It does not. No. Velociraptor was likely nocturnal. We know this because of the relative size of its eyes and things, sclerotic rings and all this stuff that I am not super knowledgeable about, but still cool to know, which is partly how we know fighting dinosaurs probably happened at night or like dusk because proto seratops was more active during the daytime or active when it needed to be. So probably around dusk. That's cool. But yeah, Velociraptor was an interesting little turkey. And when the kid says, "Sounds like a six foot turkey," he is very right. Samuel's so offended by that. Should be. That's fine. Oh. So hands, right? Yes. Hands that are not pronated. They're very long. They've got big feathers coming off of them. They're not wings. Velociraptor couldn't fly. And I found a very recent paper. It's like August 6th. It's currently the 10th, 2020, came out talking about whether dromiosaurids could fly. And like some of them could. Velociraptor and Dynonicus could not fly. Too heavy. Also listed in the paper is Tyrannosaurus rex could not fly. They've got to cover other bases, you know? They cover all the bases. Put the famous names in the paper. Right. And then people search and they see, could these dinosaurs fly? T-rex. And then Tyrannosaurus rex is in there and they're like, what? I'm going to read this paper. Yeah. Oh. Classic clickbait article. Isn't that so good, though? But a lot of these things could fly possibly Dynonicus when they were young, could either fly or more likely just get a bit of a boost while running up hills, you know? If they're flapping, that's providing enough of a boost to help them while running. Maybe help them stabilize, that sort of thing. Same goes for Velociraptor. When it was young, probably a bit more able to jump. Yeah, okay. You know? That's fine. I've heard that. Exactly. Yes. Tail is usually this thin rod that sticks out the back. Actually had a bunch of feathers in what is probably a tail fan. I don't know if you've seen updated dinosaur toys. A lot of them have micro raptor style tail fans where the feathers are pretty thin for most of it. And then at the end, there's a diamond shape of larger feathers. Oh, okay. Yeah. It looks surprisingly cool, actually. Considering that Velociraptor itself, when feathered, kind of looks dumb. Well, yeah. It's top-to-the-cool when you have feathers, I think. I'm not sure that's true. I think Velociraptor specifically looks like the larger dromiosaurids, Dakota Raptor, when feathered looks cool. It looks sleek. It's got these big hands and they're wing-like, but still scary because they've got these big, long fingers on them. Okay. Velociraptor itself is smaller and scragglier, being the jackal coyote. So then you get turkey. Yeah. So you take what you can get, you know? They should make a Jurassic Park where they replace all the Velociraptors with actual Velociraptors. Yeah. I would watch that. They absolutely should. Just finally, on the hands, the feet are probably the weapons. Oh, right. I meant to talk about it. We're talking about the kid and Sam Neal's talking about how the Velociraptor slices belly open or something. Yeah. This is like a meme from the vision of what cassowaries are or do, or like emus or ostriches. There are lots of myths about how dangerous they are and how many people they kill. They're sort of dangerous. They're not, like, they're human-sized birds with big dagger talons in some cases. Yeah. So if they get you, it's going to be bad. They don't generally try to get you, you know? No. If you're keeping food from them, if you've got a bunch of food and you want it and they're very hungry, that's when they're sort of going to lash out. If they're associating you with food because you've brought them food in the past and you have no food right now, you're probably going to get you. Cassowaries and other ratites, so emus and ostriches, kick a little bit. The Velociraptor probably wouldn't have kicked so much. No. Like, especially not like standing on one leg and karate kicking out with the other, you know? Oh no, it looks so dumb. It doesn't actually work. They need a lot of balance to do that. What they're probably doing is like grabbing on with these arms. Yeah. They don't extend them too far. They mostly hold something like to their chest. And then like a cat, actually, they kick at it with their claws. Yeah. To just damage it. It's not going to be like the single disemboweling swipe. It's just going to be the little kicks and that's going to be painful as anyone who has had a cat and tried to pet its tummy would know. You know, cheetahs do have like a hooky type thing on their paw to hook things when they grab them. Yeah. Maybe Velociraptors are more like cheetahs than we thought. I mean, yeah, we're giving Jurassic Park a lot of guff, but maybe it's right. So that is Velociraptor. Michaela, what is the voice for Velociraptor from the film? Oh, so spooky. It's very spooky. I mean, we're going to sneak up on him. Yeah. And then we'll surround him. As a pack. As a pack. As a pack. Yeah. Because we're a pack. Like wolves or cheetahs. Or some other animals. Cheetahs don't hunt just packs. They're very solitary animals. We're like a wolf blended with a cheetah. What could be more scary than that? Blinds. Sprides. Yeah. They're very spooky. They're very spooky and big and, yeah. Velociraptor Mongoliansis would have been more like this. But. But. But. But. But. But. But. Then it dies when it's trusty. That poor guy. It's such a good fossil. There's also a really bad reproduction of it that gets brought up occasionally. And it's got like the worst legs. It's got frog legs attached to this protoceratops skeleton. And you look at it and initially you're like, oh yeah fighting dinosaurs. Super cool. It's not. And it gets brought up online occasionally like the dinosaur subreddit. Okay. It'll be like, I thought dinosaurs didn't have sprawling legs. What are with these frog legs? And it's like, wait a minute. What are we looking at? Like what? What is this? So did someone just make that as like a silly joke? No clue. I've tried to look it up. And all I could find is people selling it as life-like replicas of the fossils. It's so weird. It's very strange. It's very strange. Huh. Yeah. So that was Velociraptor. Yeah. Coming up none the next time. None the next time. I'm actually very disappointed that we didn't have any well-actualies. Mmm. Because this was the episode for them. Yeah. Maybe next time. Because next time we're getting into a very uncontroversial topic. Were dinosaurs warm-blooded? I don't know. The answer will not make you happy. It will do nothing to set your curiosity. Great. It will give you no fun party chatter. It will be a non-answer. It will be. You're describing a non-answer. Because that is the answer to all of these sorts of questions. When something is debated, it's because there isn't a clear-cut answer. This isn't even that much debated at this point. No. This is just like, oh, it's like asking why the sky's blue and you expect to get like a snappy cool answer to that, right? Yeah. And then you hear the answer and you're sort of, you tuned out halfway through and you're kind of like... Yeah. Anyway, we'll try not to do that. Oh, no. I don't want to do that. Oh, listeners. It will be a hopefully to the point lesson. Good. Yeah. All right. That's it from us. This has been a longer episode. That's fine. That's fine. Until next time, listeners can always tweet at us on the Twitter. Science Twitter has continued to be pretty awesome. Good. Got to say. So many dinosaurs in there. Johnson Ransom on Twitter has been doing like summer of theropods. Okay. And I think he's just passed 68 or 69 or something. Really cool. Does a different theropod every day, tweets about it with a little thread. That's neat. Anyway, we're on there at the Dinosource and we are reachable via email at [email protected]. And that's it. Until next time, us to your vista.