"Clever Girl"

 

 

It’s become simply unavoidable to reference Jurassic Park whenever this particular dinosaur is brought up in a conversation, for a number of reasons. First of all, it’s that movie (and to a lesser extent the original novel) that introduced Velociraptor to the general public and made it a pop culture icon. One, however, that has little to do with the real animal based on what is known about it. The film’s portrayal is extremely inaccurate and intentionally exaggerated, as they needed a vicious, physically intimidating and uncannily intelligent villain to generate enough tension in the audience. So, instead of changing the animal’s traits until they made it unrecognizable, as works of fiction tend to very often do, they just switched the creature for another one and kept the Velociraptor name because, you know, it sounds cool. But the animal they chose to call by that name in both the movie and the book is actually a bigger, North American relative of the real Raptor called Deinonychus antirrhopus. And then they exaggerated its traits and turned it into a suitable antagonist.

The real Velociraptor (“fast thief”) was actually a small, turkey-sized feathered predatory dinosaur from Mongolia. That is why the full name of the species is Velociraptor mongoliensis. The fact that the characters of Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler are introduced in the movie while they are recovering the skeleton of an alleged Raptor in Montana should already tell you something. Deinonychus (“terrible claw”), on the other hand, is a relative of Velociraptor that did live in North America (including Montana) in the early Cretaceous period, around 110 million years ago. It’s both bigger and bulkier than its Asian cousin, and has a more robust skull, but it shares its overall body plan and those terrifying sickle-shaped claws on its feet. The problem with it was its name. What kind of name is Deinonychus anyway? Why use it in a book or a movie when you have the irredeemably cool Velociraptor available? So, Michael Crichton decided to take advantage of a controversial hypothesis that brilliant paleoartist, dinosaur enthusiast and amateur researcher Gregory S. Paul introduced in the late 1980s. Despite lacking an actual academic background in paleontology, Paul is considered an authority in dinosaur anatomy and a remarkable and influential artist. He’s also very well known for his unorthodox, often revolutionary ideas, many of which have actually been confirmed with time. He was an early supporter of the Dinosaur Renaissance, depicting dinosaurs as active, warm-blooded creatures, closely related to birds and in some cases, feathered (in fact, thanks to newer discoveries that provided us with a better understanding of their evolutionary relationship, we now know that birds are not relatives, but actual theropod dinosaurs). Other ideas of his were a little more out there, though. By the time Michael Crichton was writing Jurassic Park, Greg Paul supported the idea that Deinonychus’s crushed remains had been badly reconstructed by mainstream paleontology. He believed that, despite the difference in overall size, it looked a lot more like Velociraptor than it was believed at the time, and his skeletal reconstructions of the animal presented a lower, longer skull that looked a lot like that of its Mongolian relative, deciding that Deinonychus was nothing but an American representative of the genus Velociraptor, renaming it as Velociraptor antirrhopus and relegating Deinonychus as a junior synonym (just like Brontosaurus was considered a secondary, no longer valid name for Apatosaurus for many years, but that’s a story for another day). And with that, he inadvertently gave Crichton the perfect excuse to use the better-sounding name, and both him and Spielberg got their perfect villain. Now the only thing they had to do is take their creature one additional step further from the real animal, making it even bigger, giving it those unsettling eyes with vertical snake-like pupils and exaggerating its intelligence to make it almost as smart as its human antagonists. And voilà, there’s your cinematic Velociraptor.

Paul’s thesis on Velociraptor and Deinonychus sharing the same genus has been discarded, but his observations regarding their evolutionary closeness are still relevant, and they are both currently classified inside the same subfamily (called Velociraptorinae) inside the family Dromaeosauridae (now popularly called “raptors”). And even if many paleontologists already suspected back then that this particular family of dinosaurs were actually fully feathered like their avian relatives, this was still a point of contention and had not been successfully proven or accepted by the mainstream. Later discoveries of feathered theropod dinosaurs, including Dromaeosaurs older than both Deinonychus and Velociraptor, would eventually prove Greg Paul right in that respect. Back in 1993 though, it was perfectly acceptable to portray them as scaly reptiles with crocodile eyes, as long as they were shown to be active and fast like modern birds. Plus, it made them look more intimidating, which was unarguably more important for the movie than scientific accuracy anyway.

My Deinonychus piece from 2008, made for my unpublished book.

The funny thing is that that same year of 1993, paleontologist James Kirkland and colleagues described an unusually big new species of Dromaeosaur that they named Utahraptor ostrommaysi (“Ostrom’s thief from Utah”), which is a lot closer in size (although maybe a bit too large) to the movie’s raptors than any other previously known dinosaur. Steven Spielberg likes to joke that he was actually prescient instead of too imaginative with his creatures. What this “new” dinosaur certainly was not (and neither were Velociraptor or Deinonychus for that matter) is as incredibly fast and intelligent as the movie’s raptors are shown to be. Just like with the T. rex’s purported ability to chase a jeep at full speed (as I mentioned on my first post), they went a tad too far exaggerating this creature’s abilities. Not that these animals were necessarily slow or stupid, but there is nothing in the available evidence that points at them as being able to run at “cheetah speed” or being any smarter than modern birds of prey, which are actually quite smart. But then again, some artistic license should be allowed and even expected when trying to make a movie exciting and interesting for a general audience. 

 

 

One last thing I would like to point out regarding Dromaeosaurs, fictional portrayals aside, is that they were key in sparking what is now called the Dinosaur Renaissance in the 1960s, especially Deinonychus and its discoverer, paleontologist John Ostrom (it’s no coincidence that Utahraptor was named in his honor). Starting in 1964, Ostrom’s work on the newly discovered Deinonychus showed that dinosaurs were anatomically and probably metabolically closer to birds than they were to modern reptiles, and both him and his pupil Bob Bakker became ardent supporters of the idea that dinosaurs were active, warm-blooded creatures, closely related to birds, and Bakker went as far as proposing that some small theropods were probably feathered as early as the 1970s. They noted how extremely similar Deinonychus’s skeleton was to that of Archaeopteryx, which was at the time considered to be the oldest known bird. This view made a stark contrast with the prevalent consensus in mainstream paleontology at the time, which for the most part saw dinosaurs as little more than giant, extravagant and stupid reptiles, destined for extinction to be replaced by more “advanced” or “superior” creatures like mammals and birds. But in hindsight it seems hard to believe that such evolutionary failures ruled the Earth for around 160 million years, before finally disappearing. That would make for quite a successful variant of failure. And in fact, the ideas of the Renaissance were not too far away from what some early biologists had argued in the late 19^th century. Back in 1868, English biologist and anatomist Thomas Henry Huxley, popularly known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his public advocacy of the theory of evolution, already came to the conclusion that dinosaurs evolved from some group of small theropod dinosaurs after noticing multiple similarities between the skeletons of the Jurassic “bird” Archaeopteryx and the small theropod dinosaur Compsognathus. Unfortunately his vision didn’t get much support from the scientific orthodoxy of the time and was quickly dismissed, only to be revived a century later by Ostrom and Bakker. And it was the discovery of Deinonychus that started it all. Even if other Dromaeosaurs had been described long before that (Dromaeosaurus in 1922 and, funnily enough, Velociraptor in 1924), their remains were very incomplete and poorly understood. Deinonychus’s remains, on the other hand, were unusually complete and well preserved, which allowed paleontologists to finally see how similar some theropod dinosaurs were to birds and start to understand the evolutionary relationship between the two. A knowledge that, despite its numerous inaccuracies due to artistic license, Jurassic Park popularized among the general public. That’s quite an accomplishment for a work of fiction.

 

That's it for today. Take care and see you all very soon. 

"Clever girl"