New fossil shows Velociraptors had feathers... (1 Viewer)

[tommyboy]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-fossil-reveals-velociraptor-sported-feathers/

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 Velociraptoryou 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 Lü of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences.

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[Notorious T.R.E.]

Watched an omni theater video on this last year at the Science Museum. Told my wife all of these movies are going to have to re-cgi their dinos.