Study Velociraptor Was a Fluffy Feathered Poodle From Hell
Tens of millions of people have flocked to theaters this summer to see Jurassic World, an action flick "starring" a team of trained Velociraptors that hunt genetically modified dinosaurs on command of their human master. It's a preposterous storyline of course, but very entertaining. I study dinosaurs for a living and it didn't bother me to see Velociraptors being used as hunting dogs for the sake of good cinema. What I didn't like, however, was that the Velociraptors were depicted as big, drab-coloured, scaly brutes. That's because the real Velociraptor was a lapdog-sized predator covered in feathers. Palaeontologists have known this for a while. If you look at the arm bones of Velociraptor you can see a row of bumps, identical in size and shape to the quill knobs of living birds the anchor points for big wing feathers. But because Velociraptor hasn't been found in the perfect geological settings that fossilise soft tissues, we don't know exactly what its feathers would have looked like. But we have a better idea now, thanks to the discovery of a spectacular new dinosaur from northeastern China that I studied with my colleague, Junchang L of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences. Our new dinosaur, Zhenyuanlong, is one of the closest cousins of Velociraptor. Its gorgeous chocolate-coloured skeleton was found by a farmer in 125-million-year-old rocks that were laid down in a quiet lake buried by volcanic ash. It's just the right environment for preserving the soft bits that usually decay before a fossil is formed. Read next See Zookeepers Imitate Chris Pratt's Raptor-Training Move in Jurassic World, Listen to the most important stories of the day