Fossil suggests raptors were 鈥榝luffy killers鈥
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Depicted by movie-makers as mean, green, man-eating lizards covered in scales, velociraptors probably looked more like large, toothy turkeys, a study said yesterday.
Close study of a newly discovered cousin dubbed Zhenyuanlong suni has revealed that velociraptors likely had large wings and feathery coats, according to research published in the journal Scientific Reports.
“The real velociraptor was not a green, scaly monster like in Jurassic Park,” said study co-author Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh.
“The real velociraptor looked like Zhenyuanlong: a fluffy- feathered killer.”
Brusatte and a team made a fossil reconstruction of Zhenyuanlong, one of the velociraptor’s closest relatives, which lived in northeast China’s Liaoning Province about 125 million years ago.
It is the largest dinosaur with wings discovered to date.
Zhenyuanlong was about 2 meters long from snout to tail, weighed about 20 kilograms, and was a meat-eater.
“Zhenyuanlong is a dinosaur that looks just like a bird,” Brusatte said by e-mail, apart from sharp claws on its wings and a mouth full of teeth.
The Chinese fossil is so well preserved that one can clearly see different kinds of feathers, including hair-like plumes on the body and big quill pen feathers on the arms.
Zhenyuanlong would have had “dense feathers” on its wings and tail, according to the team’s analysis.
“So it is a large dinosaur with short arms but it still has wings that look just like those of living birds,” Brusatte said.
“That raises a really big mystery: why would such an animal have wings?”
It was probably not for flying: Zhenyuanlong was too big and its arms too short to allow it to take to the air.
Scientists had previously observed quill attachment points on the arms velociraptor fossils, but no actual feathers — meaning they did not know what type or size of plumes it would have had, or for what purpose.
“We are lucky with Zhenyuanlong. It is found in an area where volcanoes buried dinosaurs, preserving fine details,” Brusatte said, adding that the velociraptors would have been much smaller than their movie counterparts.
“A real velociraptor was only about the size of a poodle dog,” he said.
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