It's a funny thing, the media. You say something off-the-cuff (about T. rex being as fast as a Premiership footballer, or about 500 dinosaurs...), and they take it and run with it. In this case, someone happens to have compared the Velociraptor to a turkey. The fallout thus:
TURKEYSAURUS
Daily Mirror
VELOCIRAPTOR WAS 3ft TURKEY
Jurassic Park Dinosaurs: The Truth
Jurassic Park Dinosaurs: The Truth
The Sun
VELOCIRAPTOR WAS JUST A SCARY TURKEY, SAY SCIENTISTS
Guardian
Yet for all that, the only quote common to all the articles is from Mark Norell:
The specimen of Velociraptor mongoliensis in question is 1.5m long and probably weighed about 30kg. This is not news - palaeontologists (and anyone unfortunate to bring up the Jurassic Park films in the presence of a palaeontologist) have been saying for nearly 15 years that the Velociraptor in Jurassic Park was far too big. But we can't have Alan Grant being terrorised by a pack of ankle-nippers. May as well have set a load of corgis on him.
What is news is the presence of quill knobs on the caudal margin of the ulna. Which bone is the ulna? Hold out your arms, palms down, as though you were making wings (you can flap them a bit if you like. It won't help, but you'll amuse everyone around you). The bones of your forearm that are facing backwards - they're the ulnas. The radii are in front. So if you consider that, the caudal margin of the ulna (the backwards-facing long surface of the bone) is a good place for feathers. And because there are quill knobs we know these are pretty decent-sized feathers. Protuberances like that form on bones where ligaments and muscles attach. You can feel a big one in the centre of your shin, a couple of centimetres below your kneecap (I'm getting such a big kick out of knowing you're all flapping your arms and feeling your knees!).
On the basis of these, the authors surmise that there were 14 secondary feathers anchored along the ulna, which compares with the 12 of Archaeopteryx. The feathers have been retained in an adult specimen (going against some previous research that suggested the larger dromaeosaurs secondarily lost feathers or retained them only in juveniles - remember Dave?), and the authors propose that the feathers are retained from smaller ancestors that may have been able to fly.
Full text is available here, at least for the time being. Check out the high-resolution photograph of the bones.
Turner, A. H., P. J. Makovicky & M. A. Norell. 2007. Feather quill knobs in the dinosaur Velociraptor. Science 317: p1721. doi: 10.1126/science.1145076.
If animals like Velociraptor were alive today our first impression would be that they were just very unusual looking birds.So maybe the newspapers are just trying to pick up on the pre-Christmas hysteria that's sweeping the country - Paul and I saw yule logs in the supermarket at the weekend with BBE dates sometime in mid-November - so you can't even buy them now and save them for Christmas.
The specimen of Velociraptor mongoliensis in question is 1.5m long and probably weighed about 30kg. This is not news - palaeontologists (and anyone unfortunate to bring up the Jurassic Park films in the presence of a palaeontologist) have been saying for nearly 15 years that the Velociraptor in Jurassic Park was far too big. But we can't have Alan Grant being terrorised by a pack of ankle-nippers. May as well have set a load of corgis on him.
What is news is the presence of quill knobs on the caudal margin of the ulna. Which bone is the ulna? Hold out your arms, palms down, as though you were making wings (you can flap them a bit if you like. It won't help, but you'll amuse everyone around you). The bones of your forearm that are facing backwards - they're the ulnas. The radii are in front. So if you consider that, the caudal margin of the ulna (the backwards-facing long surface of the bone) is a good place for feathers. And because there are quill knobs we know these are pretty decent-sized feathers. Protuberances like that form on bones where ligaments and muscles attach. You can feel a big one in the centre of your shin, a couple of centimetres below your kneecap (I'm getting such a big kick out of knowing you're all flapping your arms and feeling your knees!).
On the basis of these, the authors surmise that there were 14 secondary feathers anchored along the ulna, which compares with the 12 of Archaeopteryx. The feathers have been retained in an adult specimen (going against some previous research that suggested the larger dromaeosaurs secondarily lost feathers or retained them only in juveniles - remember Dave?), and the authors propose that the feathers are retained from smaller ancestors that may have been able to fly.
Full text is available here, at least for the time being. Check out the high-resolution photograph of the bones.
Turner, A. H., P. J. Makovicky & M. A. Norell. 2007. Feather quill knobs in the dinosaur Velociraptor. Science 317: p1721. doi: 10.1126/science.1145076.
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