If You’re A Fan Of Jurassic Park Films This Is Gonna Be A BIG Let Down: The Truth About Velociraptors

“Velociraptors were actually only about the size of a domesticated Turkey, being only about 3 feet tall and 6 feet long, with most of the length coming from the tail and weighing in at around 20-30 pounds full grown.  More than that, they also looked somewhat like a Turkey as well, but with a long tail obviously.  It turns out, Velociraptors were very similar to birds in a lot of ways.  They had hollow bones, feathers, built nests for their eggs, and are thought to have behaved very similar to birds.

As Mark Norell, curator of fossil reptiles, amphibians, and birds at the American Museum of Natural History, stated, “The more that we learn about these animals the more we find that there is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors like Velociraptor. Both have wishbones; brooded their nests; possess hollow bones; and were covered in feathers. If animals like Velociraptor were alive today, our first impression would be that they were just very unusual looking birds.”

More than that, there has never been one bit of evidence that suggested that Velociraptors hunted in packs.  In fact, every fossil found of Velociraptors has seemed to indicate they were solitary creatures.  There was even one fossil where the Velociraptor was in the act of trying to kill a Protoceratops, which was a pig sized dinosaur, when a sandstorm came up and buried them both while they were still fighting one another.  If they hunted in packs, there should have been more Velociraptors at that find, particularly given the size of the Protoceratops relative to the Velociraptor.

Next up, the Velociraptors were not found in the United States, as the films suggested: where the paleontologists in the film dug up the Velociraptor skeleton in Montana.  In fact, they have only been found in Central Asia around Mongolia.”