Velociraptor: Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong #24

[Music] [Music] [Music] good evening tonight we proudly present Velociraptor Mongolian psious a tale of prolonged paleontological obscurity and abrupt meteoric V today that very popularity has made it an ambassador for science the new feathery face of dinosauria in the 21st century and now this human a bunch of people have sent in velociraptors I want to thank Alec who works for the st. George discovery site at Johnson farm they have the dinosaur auditorium there which is a good name for a facility I want to thank Alicia Michael Dillon TN Laura and Keith and one other person who remained anonymous and if there's anybody else who sees their toy here and is like you didn't name me I am preemptively sorry and please comment and thank you Velociraptor is kind of unique among dinosaurs that we've covered so far most dinosaurs that have household name recognition we have known about them for as long as they have been popular so like with Tyrannosaurus you have a century of tropes that is acquired over the years and most of them are wrong but with Velociraptor its popularity is extremely recent they've only really become a household name after the Jurassic Park films so they are post-renaissance post dinosaur Renaissance dinosaurs and because in the Jurassic Park films they were portrayed as active birdie animals that is the the baseline that we start from which is unique like you--you'll we have one toy here that has a Velociraptor dragging its tail you almost never see a toy with Velociraptor dragging its tail for instance now while Velociraptor has been the topic of ongoing research in the last 30 years it wasn't until really recently that its pop cultural presence has started to become unfrozen from where it was in those films because Velociraptor is so popular most people that care what a Velociraptor is have also heard at least that scientists think that they had feathers now so it's interesting that Velociraptor fairly I would say has become sort of the emblem of the 21st century evolving changing view of dinosaurs life appearance so in 1990 when the filmmakers said about creating what for many people is still the definitive Velociraptor what did they decide on well they decided they have a really large body size they have scaly skin reticulate scales they have their hands which can open doors held out like this as many of these toys are doing where it kind of looks like how a wrapped Oriole bird holds their hands in flight how like an eagle holds their talons hands and feet their eyes have slit pupils a lot of these toys absolute pupils even the ones that aren't explicitly Jurassic Park that is I'm surprised frankly how much purchase the slit pupil look has had with Velociraptor and with other dinosaurs in popular culture that are that are clearly drawing on Velociraptor you always see them with select bugles and the head is this vaguely Alice or like head it doesn't really look like a Velociraptor head it looks more like a more basal theropod like some kind of karna sore head just maybe lengthened and lighter as it happens the velociraptors in the film and in the book were really Velociraptor in name only as I mentioned Deinonychus Michael Crichton was using Deinonychus in his book but decided that that wasn't a dramatic enough name and went with Velociraptor and with apologies to Ostrom I'm inclined to agree the last Raptor is just an inherently cooler name and I would be lying if I said that I didn't think that that was a big part of why they become so popular but even if the filmmakers had wanted to make just the most accurate Velociraptor possible in 1990 they would largely have been drawing on Deinonychus and now that I've said that it might surprise you to learn that we've known about Velociraptor for almost a hundred years and we've had a complete skeleton since the 70s so why is that we have a lot of material now why wasn't it better known in 1990 well the short answer is that they're from Mongolia specifically they're from the judoka formation the most popular location of which is by Anzac the flaming cliffs this is campaign Ian Rock about 75 million years old there's also a slightly younger formation that has species of Velociraptor bottom Guyot and I believe we've also found material from the by Amanda who formation so the history of Mongolian paleontology is one of physical political and economic barriers the Gobi Desert is fossil rich and the fossils we recover from it are really well preserved there they're often preserved in three dimensions instead of being squished down like you usually find but the Gobi Desert is not a great environment for humans to be working in you can't work there at all for almost half the year because it's winter and then in the summer you're in the Gobi in the summer so it's an expensive proposition to go out and prospect for fossils so Mongolian workers have basically always had to go to foreign institutions to collaborate the first such institution was the American Museum of Natural History a century ago very few geologists had even been to Mongolia and some thought that the rock there was not fossil bearing which is called unfold a ferrous which is hilarious in hindsight now that we have so many dinosaurs from there but Roy Chapman Andrews and his then wife Yvette bore up Andrews and their automobiles those newfangled contraptions had the means to go and fossil hunt there in an automobile the team could cover ten times the ground that a camel caravan could so what they wound up doing was they had the camel caravan go through the desert through a No route carrying gasoline and water and food and other supplies and then they would go out in their cars and use nautical navigation techniques to go out into the desert then double back and meet the caravan at a predetermined point so it was quite an undertaking and I can go into as much detail as I have because it was extensively documented AMNH has a bunch of material from this expedition online if that's job was to photograph and film what they were doing and you can see some of those photographs and films Roy Chapman Andrews wrote books about this expedition which you can find on archive.org it's a really interesting little tidbit of history that first expedition in 1922 recovered the first ever dinosaur eggs and mostly was just looking for promising sites to visit the next year which they did and they brought more paleontologists including one peter seat caisson who is the one who on august 11th of 1923 discovered the holotype of velociraptor that was sent by camel back to china and then by ship to america and i'm presumed by train to new york i'm mentioning all this because it's really impressive the turnaround here because in 1924 henry Fairfield Osborn the then president of AMNH published a description of Vasa Raptor it was a very brief description and didn't go into a lot of detail about the morphology of the skull but at the very least we had a skull and the associated jaw it was a little bit crushed but still recognizable as Velociraptor and we had the thumb claw and the first bone attaching to the thumb claw initially Henry favored Osborn wanted to call it oval Raptor I found out but then he later changed it to the in my opinion much better Velociraptor the general impression that you get from Osborne's initial description is of an animal very similar to ornithol st's it's it's just a small bodied fast-moving theropod carnivore there's another animal described at the same time I trow daunted I believe called Soren authorities which interesting Osbourne kind of recognizes the avian Asst of it hence the name or NIT he waivers on whether it has megalo saurian or avian affinities but then also he says that it's the more sluggish of the to that that Sauron authorities is raptorial whereas Velociraptor is super raptorial and by raptorial what he's meaning is the the actual action of using their hands to snatch things that's what raptor literally means is snatcher there is occasional resistance to the use of the term raptor to refer to these animals which everyone does now anyway ornithologists will insist that no it's birds of prey and not and birds of prey doesn't specifically mean all predatory birds like penguins are predators but nobody would call them Raptors I did an Engram search of Raptor and some related terms and I found that it wasn't until the 1969 description of Deinonychus that Raptor really starts to become popular by the late 90s it is more popular than rap Torres the the former Latin term ever was which I think must have been the ornithology term and in any case Raptor was always less common than raptorial the the adjective describing actually grabbing things so based on that admittedly not terribly scientific survey I would think that the current popularity of the term Raptor is the dromaeosaurus egde so anybody who's insisting that we should only use it for birds of prey is perhaps a well-meaning but also perhaps out-of-touch another thing I found in a 10-gram search is that Velociraptor itself was not popular at all until the 90s the reason for that is probably because Americans would only have that head and thumb for quite a while the last expedition to Outer Mongolia I believe was in 1925 we stopped going to Central Asia at all in 1930 possibly owing to the great depression but Mongolia at the time was so aligning more firmly with the Soviet Union against China and we were approaching Mongolia through China the Mongolian Academy of Science did reach out to the Soviets instead to come out and do fossil prospecting in Gobi but they reached out in 1941 so that had to wait after the war in the late 1940s the Soviets did indeed send three expeditions led by even efremov you may remember from our therizinosaurus and Tarbosaurus episodes those are the expeditions that brought those animals back these expeditions were dividing their attention between the judoka formation and the new mega formation and you can see why they would want to maybe focus on the new Meg where they have the huge impressive animals that are not velociraptor though they did recover pinaka soros danaka soros from judoka during this period it was in the 1960s and 70s that Poland of all countries reached out to Mongolia to go back to Gobi they mounted a series of expeditions involving some familiar names we have Halse cow's milk ax and rin-chan bars bold working on these they do recover the first post cranial elements of velociraptor though as far as I can tell they weren't recognized as such and then in 1969 of course we have ostrich description of Deinonychus which allows us to fill in a lot of dromaeosaurus and allows us to say hmmm this is really different from ornithol st's this is a much more bird-like animal then in 1971 right after that we find the fighting dinosaurs specimen which we will talk about at length but is a fantastic specimen in its own right but also because it has an articulated Velociraptor within it that is not fully described however until 1983 and scientists in our part of the world knew that this work was going on but wouldn't necessarily have had access to the findings there were not a lot of opportunities for Soviet and Western scientists to communicate with one another there certainly weren't a lot of opportunities for them to collaborate I found that even nowadays researching for this episode there's still some stuff some material on Velociraptor that is only available in Russian or at least the online copies or only in Russian so how much harder must have been in the 70s and 80s to try to research this animal but then the 90s happened and within weeks of Mongolia declaring their independence from the USSR the Mongolian Academy of Sciences once again reached out to the American Museum of Natural History who mounted a series of expeditions throughout the 90s I believe they went annually out to Mongolia by this point the judoka formation or at least by Anzac itself had been pretty well picked over if you go there today it's actually a tourist destination there's some truly ugly dinosaur statues there but it was during those 1990s expeditions that we recovered a lot more Velociraptor material and we finally got a complete description in 97 and 99 by dr. Novacek so it just so happens that right when Velociraptor is exploding in popularity on the world stage the world scientific community is able to properly study them now the velociraptors in Jurassic Park were scaled up to a kilobyte or size about but they didn't take into account the allometric differences that happen when you have a large bodied Romeo sore like you can't just take a Deinonychus and scale it up to that size and I suspect in addition to the storytelling constraint of you want a big scary animal they also had production constraints because they needed a puppet that the puppeteer could be inside to act out some of those scenes in the movie the problem is that results in people seeing the actual size of Velociraptor and being like that's it and they're not small dromaeosaurs they're about medium size or about two meters long and they would have weighed maximum probably twenty kilograms but maybe more like 15 kilograms so I like to compare them to a coyote or a medium-sized dog it might be better to picture them as maybe a big swan or really big turkey that kid in the movie when he said that there's six-foot turkeys he might have been onto something now we can actually divide these toys pretty clearly between those that are trying to represent Velociraptor as an animal and those that are basically just aping Jurassic Park so even this toy which is a pretty accurate Velociraptor anatomically other than the lack of feathers and the pronated hands has done the Jurassic Park thing where the head is basically a big wedge and that's really pronounced in some of these other ones that are frankly not trying as hard where you have a big old triangle shape for the head Velociraptor was pretty narrow snouted this toy does it fairly well where it's it's a very narrow to throw that then widens once you get to the eyes and the cranium borrows bold recognized in 1983 that there was it seem to be two clusters of dromaeosaurus all cheer air some were high scold like dromaeosaurus and some were narrow scold like Deinonychus are like Velociraptor now Jaime or Hyman Hedden has a post where he goes into a lot of detail about the flesh on dinosaurs faces and he points out that the velociraptors in Jurassic Park none of these toys really do it exactly right but this one is probably the closest they have I don't know if you can see it but they have this pretty narrow to throw which is accurate but then they have all of this flesh packed on around it to build up the head to become this more carne asourian looking shape which makes it even weirder that on its it's you don't really see it on this guy but I'm guys like this you still see the entire battle finestra's outline even through all of those layers of flesh it's very strange furthermore in profile view the skulls that are taking cues from Jurassic Park have either a pretty flat area here or even a convex area here going from the top of the head to the tip of the nose whereas in Velociraptor the nasal is much more depressed there's there's sort of a concave area now I can't prove this but it would be interesting if the filmmakers specifically chose to go with an outdated reconstruction because it looked stronger by the time that that movie was in production Gregory s Paul had already updated Deinonychus 'iz reconstruction to have a somewhat longer and more depressed nasal area on the skull if you look at the older reconstructions of Deinonychus before we had found an intact skull it is much more like this guy in the head area what's interesting is those aforementioned high skull dromaeosaurus also have tooth serrations that lead us to believe that they were using their mouths as their primary weapons more so than a Velociraptor would be Velociraptor would primarily be using its limbs its its mouth was just for eating so its skull didn't need to be very strong so I would just say that when the filmmakers made those decisions to try and make Velociraptor skull look stronger their method was sound because selection pressure made dromaeosaurus take the same route now as I mentioned it's really common to see a situation like on this toy or to a lesser extent on this toy where there are really clearly lips around the tooth row lips are something of a contentious topic right now for dinosaurs the technical term is extra oral tissues and the question we're trying to answer is what was their extents and how pliable were they in the absence of a beak die opsins have bands of ligaments around mouths in dinosaurs close relatives the crocodiles those bands are tight so the teeth are exposed and the lips are basically a second set of gums in more distant relatives like lizards and tuataras the bands are looser and the teeth are covered by lips when the mouth is closed workers have attempted to map certain tissues to certain bone structures or bone textures which is why we see the term osteological correlates when we're talking about this topic in crocodiles the edges of the mouth bones are rounded off the skull has a rough texture with many many holes called foramina and more distantly related reptiles the edges of the mouth bones are sharper and have a smooth texture with few holes usually in nice neat rows now velociraptors skull looks more like the lipped condition notice the foramina along the bottom of the mandible line up with the tips of the upper teeth when the mouth is closed which would imply that if there's a lip there that's where it anchors so it's a it's a pocket for the teeth to slide into now because they're living relatives the crocodiles and the birds the the bracket that we put around non-avian dinosaurs have evolved away from the arcus or condition and in different directions I might add we don't know what dinosaur lips would have looked like we don't know for sure that they looked like monitor lizard lips which is what the Jurassic Park creators chose maybe they didn't have a distinct row of scales there maybe their lips were weird maybe they were tight and firm near the tip of the snout but then more pliable towards the back of the mouth for instance so it's kind of hard to tell but in this toy it would seem like the the ligament bands are pretty tight like it looks like if this animal closed its mouth you would still see its teeth and obviously this one does have its mouth closed and you do see its teeth I cannot at this time say that it is wrong to restore it this way but you should be cognizant of the decision that you're making if you have the teeth exposed with the mouth closed since we're talking about the flesh of the face we may as well talk about the stuff poking out of the flesh namely the integument the fuzz and scales and feathers we know from related animals that have been preserved with feather impressions that this toy has the right idea where there are feathers or fuzz in front of the eyes that then leave off and then there's scales or possibly skin but more likely reticulate scales on the snout you'll often see we really only have three feathered toys but you can see here they have chosen to have the skin or scales be a very different color than the feathers are that does sell the idea that these are bird-like because if you look at a bird their feet and their beak will be yellow or whatever and the rest of the bird is a different color it's not necessarily the case that the scales would be a dramatically different color than the feathers though so again just be cognizant of the decisions you're making both of these have crests of feathers this toy has weird sort of scaly brow crests and they're subtle on this toy but you can see that it has the Jurassic Park like crests running on the edges of the sort of corners of the face that they put there all of these are reasonable again I would caution using these particular ridges just because those are the ones that looked nice in Jurassic Park but and I questioned like the sculpt here these don't really look like any feathers I've seen but conceptually there's nothing wrong with there being hackles or other kinds of crests on the head as of 2019 we might actually expect there to be even more waddles or crests or other structures on top of the because there was a paper looking at these peculiar hollows on the tops of our cows or heads where blood could be exchanged between the inside of the skull and the surface of the skull and this could be functioning as a radiator to exchange heat it could also or it could be amplified by having blood filled structures on the head whether that's Caron Keeler skin like you would see on something like a turkey whether that's waddles or snoods or any of these other really fun terms for the various parts of a bird's face combs combs is a good one so what if the entire head and neck might be naked like a turkey or a vulture well there's a common belief that vultures heads are bald because they have to stick their heads into carrion and it helps them keep them clean and maybe but it's been found that it's actually for thermoregulation vultures in some parts of the world we'll go from a very hot temperature at the surface and then take off and fly up into the atmosphere and they've dropped 30 degrees or so so what they can do is if they're too warm they extend their neck out of their feathers and that cools them off and if they're cold they pull their neck back in and it's insulated it's been found that turkeys as well have thermoregulatory benefits to having a naked head though not to the degree that voltar's do because as far as I know turkeys do not store up into the sky but they found that turkey's southernmost range which goes down into mexico actually is extended by having a naked head because they can thermoregulate in those very hot temperatures so for an animal like Velociraptor a feathered dinosaur living in an arid environment like the Gobi was back then interestingly the Gobi in the campaign ian was fairly similar to the Gobi today you had arid to semi-arid environment with sand dunes and high plateaus what we call flats in America seasonal lakes it's an environment of very hot temperatures but probably very cold nights and this feathered dinosaur probably would have an advantage if it had a current cooler patch on its head or if it had a naked neck that it could pull back into its chest feathers so yeah I would say it's not unjustifiable six-foot turkey I hope I don't have to belabor the point that these were feathered animals even if we did not have direct evidence of feathers in Velociraptor we wouldn't her it because we have latent animals with evidence of feathers in the form of impressions and we can bracket Velociraptor between them and say yes this is a feathered clade however we do have a Velociraptor ulna which is a bone in the forearm which has knobs on it which are very similar to the knobs that we see in some birds and those are anchor points for the quills of wing feathers so we can at least say that Velociraptor definitely had feathers on its wings with quills so with the the calamus in the center of the feather and it's reasonable to assume that if they have feathers on their wings then they must have feathers elsewhere on their bodies what is less clear or at least is open to some degree of interpretation is the extent of the feathering and what form of feathers is on what body part it's kind of up to the artist where you stop the feathers on the legs sometimes you see them all the way down to the toes more often you see it just like this where it stops above the ankle it's unlikely that we would see feathers on the feet like we have in Microraptor or ante arnis less clear whether we would see leg wings like we see in Archaeopteryx or indeed my craft it's difficult to say what purpose they would serve in Velociraptor unless there was some weird like brooding thermoregulation purpose or again if it might be for display what we also don't know is the extent to which the feathering would modify the contours of the body so the more modern toys here whether they have feathers or not are showing an accurate Velociraptor chest the the torso of the animal was not what you see in toys like this a barrel or cylinder it was much deeper top to bottom than it was side to side we can see pretty clearly on the unfeathered one but even on the feathered one you can see this one has more of a bristle II Dino fuzz covering and you can clearly see the contour of the body underneath it where's this one it's more obscured and you can actually push that even further you could have just like a maximum fluff Velociraptor but I don't know that that would be particularly reasonable it really depends on whether it had contour feathers like structurally feather feathers or something more like down or Dino fuzz whether that would create that volume so it tentative sort of safe middle-of-the-road feathering for a Velociraptor would be something pretty similar to this where you have been Asia's feathers on the wings and on the tail you have contour feathers or down on the body and the upper legs you have Dino fuzz on the face and lower legs I called them wings earlier but should we they definitely look like wings but using that word would imply that they have some kind of aerodynamic function that they could flap or or use them for maneuvering through the air they definitely could not flap Velociraptor could only raise their arms to the sub horizontal position their shoulder socket actually offered them less range of motion than Deinonychus did so it would seem that if and that's a big F because this is up for debate velociraptors ancestors were flying or climbing they lost that ability in favor of being able to grab on to things underneath them and kick them to death to that end they have the what's called uncinate processes those Barb's that you sometimes see on dinosaurs ribs those help the ribcage maintain and structure but also help the breathing muscles and shoulder muscles do a better job in other words they they had the musculature that you would expect if they were dealing with vertical stresses with their arms and the question that raises is how good at grabbing things were their hands how apt is Osborne's designation of them as super raptorial well Center in 2006 looked at Bambi rapid ER and Deinonychus which are two Velociraptor relatives and specifically was looking at how their hands worked and how they were able to grab things he found that they could grab things with both hands underneath the body with their wrists retracted they could grab things against the far side of their body with the opposite hand which feels like the darkwing duck pose because I might want to call the shadow pose but I don't know if anybody will even get darkwing duck references at this point but he found that they could not extend both arms and both wrists and grab with both hands because extending the arm and the wrist supine AIT's the hand we've talked a lot about pronating the hand which is where it turns like this which they could not do but it turns out that they could or indeed had to supine aid if they were extending their arm all the way out speaking of pronation we've talked about this in almost every episode but you'll notice that all of the Jurassic Park II toys here have the classic hands facing downwards pose whereas all of the more modern toys have the more correct hands facing each other pose and also this one has its hands facing each other so I guess I have to give it points for that and for nothing else and we've mentioned so many times that they could not hold their hands that way but I don't think we've ever mentioned why that's such a popular trope still it just kind of looks right is my opinion when artists we're trying to convey okay this is a a weapon this is a hand used for grabbing at things they looked at living Raptors they looked at how an eagle holds it sounds or how a hawk holds its towns which looks pretty similar to this this one has really long hands like you would expect in a Velociraptor but these ones that are less concerned with getting the Anatomy right just kind of default to making it look just kind of develop to making it look like Huk talons and I think that's the intent and I like that they're using a bird reference instead of a lizard reference for for dinosaur limbs that's refreshing unfortunately it's also wrong so the next question you might have is if they're having to grab things with both hands are there primary feathers the feathers on their hands affecting how their fingers work well with regards to grabbing things Center certainly seems to think so that the the primaries would get in the way as you can see on this toy the fingers are separate from the wing the primary feathers are anchored to the second finger here it's a little hard to tell but that's what they're doing but the finger tips are not like encased in a mitten of flesh the way that you would see in a modern bird they can still move independent of the wing that has implications for their integumentary sense of auntie Arnaz a more distantly related animal that shows that it did have reticulate scales on its finger pads which is the well it's the pad same where at same place that your finger pads are we don't necessarily know but we assume that there were reticulate scales on the backs of the fingers as well we don't think they had an alula what's called a bastard wing on the thumb there would be no reason to have one since it as we establish it probably wasn't using its wing for aerodynamic purposes I don't know how reasonable it is to have what this toy has which are scoots on the fingers we know from evolutionary developmental biology that scoots are modified feather cells so it does make a certain amount of sense to have scoots there because if you're going to have flight feathers growing out of the fingers at certain point you have to turn those off and turn them back into scoots so that you can use the finger however some of these toys take that idea too far this is probably the best example because this is what I see all the time is sort of a feather sleeve but then of completely featherless hand and you won't see that we know that feathers develop at the fingertips first so you could potentially have I don't know if we found any but you could potentially have a dinosaur with feathered hands and not feathered arms but it would be extremely surprising to find one with feathered arms and no feathered hands now you may raise the objection Stephen look at their feet their feet clearly have scoots which means that they have secondarily turned off the feather genes which means that they could have just done the same thing for the hands and that's an excellent question I don't know of any work on this it feels like something that we could experimentally test like take a bird and turn off the genes for producing feathers on its fingers and see if it gets scutes like on its foot I don't know of any work going on in that area so I tempted Lee say that it's not genetically impossible to have featherless hands but as I just said it would be extremely surprising furthermore the the pressure the selection pressure to lose the feathers on your foot if they were ever present is much stronger than to lose it on your hands in a bipedal animal because your feet are always on the ground you're going to have to constantly be cleaning those feathers you're probably going to break those feathers really often whereas your hands since you're not walking on them way lower maintenance what's pretty unclear is exactly how long the primary feathers any of the wing feathers really should be in velociraptor we can look at related animals and indeed we do we have a pair of micro wrap tureens that are of use we have genuine long who is about the same size as Velociraptor and has primary feathers that are about twice the length of the hand we have sign or an of the Souris which is about half the size of Velociraptor but their wing feathers are about the length of the hand now if feathers present difficulties when we're trying to restore them and say this is exactly what it was eyes are that but more so we haven't talked about eyes very much on this show as evidenced by the fact that our animations usually just put a little hole there but eyes very really widely even between very closely related animals because the form of the eye is dictated by the function of the eye how the animal is using its vision in large part determines what its eyes are going to look like but without any direct evidence which I don't I guess you could maybe have a dinosaur's eye preserved in amber someday that's not impossible but lacking that kind of direct evidence all we can do is say well if we look at living ARCA Soares crocodilians and birds there are certain circumstances that seem to correlate with such-and-such eye so we're really asking is for an animal that filled velociraptors ecological role in velociraptors clade our crocodile like slit pupils reasonable and the answer is surprisingly yeah there is 2011 research comparing the scleral rings of various animals including velociraptor that's the circle of bone that you sometimes see in the orbit the eye socket of dinosaurs it tells us two things the focal length of the eye and the size of the aperture the size of the opening of the pupil I combined those give us the f-number if an animal has a low F number that means they're adapted to low light conditions they have a high F number they're adapted to high light conditions and those researchers found that Velociraptor do have low F numbers there they have what's called scotopic eyes they are suited to nocturnal or crepuscular lifestyle which is they're active during Twilight either in the morning or evening so watch out in mammals velociraptors coming for you however Protoceratops which we know from direct fossil evidence that Velociraptor at least sometimes preyed on is not strictly nocturnal they have what's called Mesaba Kai's so they're not really well adapted to either low light or high light that would imply that Protoceratops are either also crepuscular or what's called katha mural which is kind of a catch-all term for their active whenever they're hungry which is not uncommon in large herbivores they'll you know you will sometimes see cows out at night grazing and they're perfectly happy those researchers concluded that it is plausible that the famous fighting dinosaurs incident occurred in Twilight or low-light conditions so we can fill in that detail in our artwork so we can tentatively say that Velociraptor would need to be able to see well at night but also retain color vision so that they could see well in low-light Twilight morning evening conditions there's a living arcus or that fits that profile and that profile has slit pupils its crocodilians so how do slits help well when light enters the eye it bends it diffracts and shorter wavelengths the violet end of the spectrum Bend more and so they converge that is they focus too far forward so the image that actually reaches the retina has crossed over again and is blurry diurnal animals like us don't care our pupils are generally narrowed with deep focus but partially or fully nocturnal animals have their pupils wide to let in as much light as possible but they have a very shallow depth of field especially predators they can't afford to throw out any of those wavelengths so they have what's called multifocal lenses this has differentiated bands so that the different light spectrums will focus approximately where they need to be you lose a little bit but you gain those wavelengths that you were completely unable to use before the problem is what if it's morning and evening and the pupil narrows again now light isn't going through all of those fancy bands you have but with a slit it still can now in living dinosaurs birds multifocal lenses are really common but slit pupils are not this might be because if you look at a bird in daylight they actually keep their pupils fairly dilated they might have just such excellent eyes I have a citation for that bird's eyes are objectively excellent that they don't have the problems that slit pupils evolved to remedy so that was all a long way of saying that slit pupils are actually quite reasonable until and unless we find evidence of bird-like vision in dromaeosaurs we're rubbing up against an issue that occurs a lot with dromaeosaurus where we assume because there's such bird-like animals that any of the unknowns we have can just get filled in with bird stuff and that'll be close enough except we know and we have known for a long time even though bars bulbs work wasn't known in the West yet that's different parts of avian anatomy evolved at different times and usually for different purposes than they were ultimately used for in birds so we can't do that we should be very careful in fact about just filling it in with bird stuff or indeed frog DNA I don't I don't think we should leave that part and mind you I don't think that this look of Raptor persists solely because it's a cool look I think people audiences had an emotional connection to the Raptors in Jurassic Park so we should probably address why the behaviors were wrong to the Raptors in those films run as fast as cheetahs and our quote astonishing jumpers they hunt in packs they use their toe claws to slash and they're extremely intelligent demonstrating problem-solving abilities start with locomotion there is an extremely prevalent trope in dromaeosaurs of the stiff rod like table most of these toys have it to some extent but these toys are the most explicit this originates with Ostrom and his initial thoughts on Deinonychus he later changed his mind but at first he thought that they would be using their tail with its reinforcing bony rods as a sort of pendulum to control their trajectory while running around however we know based on a preserved articulated Velociraptor tail which is bent in an s-curve that their tail could flex about I demonstrated this in Deinonychus with pencils but the bundles of rods above and below their tail were more oval shaped than round and they were stacked more vertically than in big round bunches so the flexibility of the tail is what's called anisotropic it would Bend side-to-side quite a bit but not so much up and down so the rods were helping them keep their tails up cool but why was that necessary other dinosaurs hold their tails up without any problems well maybe it was because they were also supporting the weight of a tail frond or tail fan I'm using frond to mean like on this guy where there's been a shoe so there's retro says all the way down the tail and I'm using fan to mean like on this guy where there's basically no contagious feathers until right near the tip we do not know which situation Velociraptor had or if it even had either of them it's reasonable to conclude that it would have had some tail feathers just based on bracketing but based on related animals the jury is a bit out Microraptor has a fan our friends genuine lung and sign or Nath asaurus both have fronds some 20 17 workers working on a related animal found that there are some features on the sides of the tail vertebra that might be anchor points for tenacious tail feathers for retro says I don't know whether Velociraptor has those but I noticed that they seem to start at that same point that velociraptors tail transitions from being very flexible near the base to being rigid and rod reinforced further out which is right around vertebrae 6 & 7 caudal vertebrae ii 7 that said i don't know how heavy a tail frond or tail fan would be it seems that having those tail stiffening rods is not related to any kind of aerodynamic function because even though more basal animals don't have the rods they do still have that transition point between more flexible near the body and less flexible further out so before there was even the chance of them using it for any kind of flight or aerodynamic maneuvering they already had that transition it would seem that the rods are a byproduct of miniaturization they're actually ossified tendons like what we saw in certain long-necked sauropod what it does is allow precise motor control without having heavy muscles I away from the center of mass of the creature or in velociraptors case it allows muscular control of the tail even with their very reduced caudal muscles tail muscles indeed velociraptors tail muscles are very small dromaeosaurus in general have reduced tail musculature so the animals here that have a really narrow little tail are actually more accurate than the ones that have the big beefy tail with the muscles flowing into the back of the leg like we would want in a more basal theropod we talked about in Carnotaurus the cuddle femur allas longus and the other tail muscles that anchor at the bottom of the tail and the back of the femur that are used for running those like all the other tail muscles are reduced in Velociraptor so it's a reasonable to conclude that they wouldn't be strong runners similarly their lower legs it's probably clearest if you look at these to their lower legs are proportionally really short even by dromaeosaurus standards and it's true that these animals were at that point in the dinosaur family tree that they would be walking more from the knee joint than from the hip joint but even correcting for that they still have really short little foot bones which implies that they would not be fast runners this is because the leg below the knee determines their stride length and everything else being equal a shorter stride length is always going to be slower than a longer stride length dromaeosaurus in general seem to have been worse runners than their Troodon ting relatives and lack Velociraptor at least lacks the arc tone metatarsus which is that arrangement of foot bones where the middle bone can use the other two foot bones sort of like a shock absorber which is an adaptation for running which again Velociraptor lacks all of this led workers in 2011 to conclude that dromaeosaurus and blah so Raptor were likely ambush hunters so if we continue on down we reach the foot and the question of could a velociraptor slash you across the belly if you were alive at the same time the sickle claw as you can see in these toys and you can distinctly not see in toys like this or this was held off the ground there's some 2019 research on Deinonychus that is useful they looked at the tendons surrounding the sickle claw and found that similar to how if you just hold your hand out and just relax your fingers but then pull your wrist back without doing anything to your fingers your fingers curl is called tendon tendon esis grasp similar to that when velociraptors foot or dynamic as his foot was in its neutral position its claw would be resting up the purpose of this is to keep the clock sharp if you're walking on the claw all the time it's going to get dulled and it's not going to be useful as a weapon and it was definitely used as a weapon but was it used for slashing that idea seems to come from the incredible range of motion of the leg foot and toe joints as early as 1983 Barthold was pointing out that attacking with one foot while trying to pursue your prey requires a high degree of equilibrium and balanced more likely probably that the animal would let its body weight or gravity or its arms hold the prey and the venit would kick out rather than do that kind of ballet to try and bring its claws into striking range the aforementioned 2019 paper on Deinonychus is again illuminating they looked at how they could optimize the amount of force transferred through the tip of the claw and they found that a flex flame posture actually produces the most they also found that the animal's Anatomy was not great at transferring weight through the claw but it would have been good at grasping I point out that both grasping and kicking with the legs still flexed are things that the fighting dinosaurs Velociraptor is doing on the subject of grasping we need to look at the hallux which is a fancy term for the first toe which on some of these they are cheating they're using it as a strut to keep the animal upright which I don't necessarily hate except that this looks exactly like what you would see in a bird whereas what you really want this one is better where it's just the very tip of the toe also this one's cheating anyway by having the fingertips holding it but yes the hallux was not used for walking on but we've noticed that in Deinonychus at least the first toe roughly opposes the fourth toe which means that the first second and fourth toe could all be grasping at something while the second toe was doing its job of injuring it this squares with the 2011 model of Raptor prey restraint feeding which based partially on modern Raptors has the animal on top of whatever it's eating grasping it with its feets keeping it pinned with the first second and fourth toes using its wings either for balance or to shroud what it's doing from other interested parties and using its mouth to eat then again we have the fighting dinosaurs Velociraptor which clearly has one of its feet extended with all of its toes except the second one retracted while we're on the subject of the claw most of these toys have fairly conservatively said sickle claws we don't know exactly how big it would be because keratin sheaths are difficult to predict just based on the bony core that survives and fossils but it could have been like twice as long as the bone and the bone is 5 centimeters admittedly you probably don't want to have a giant blade on a children's toy that seems like a bad idea final notes on the feet would be that based on trackway evidence we have no trackway evidence for Velociraptor in particular but we have related Deinonychus ores of similar size and morphology we know for sure that they did walk only on two toes because we have what are called Didact all tracks we also know that the larger the animal the more of a pad it would have at the base of its toes so on Velociraptor we would expect to see a little bit of one and it doesn't look like any of these toys really have such a thing well this one kind of does I hate to refer to this one in as a positive although it does have a nice curvy tail laterally while being straight up and down so maybe they were listening or maybe they were accidentally right that seems more likely an interesting thing about one of the track ways that might apply to Velociraptor is that it's a group of animals all moving in the same direction there is very little evidence to suggest that velociraptors or indeed any dromaeosaurus hunted in packs pack hunting is a really sophisticated behavior very few mammals actually do it in mammals in general are quite smart there's a really persistent trope in paleo art that any tenant asaurus will be beset instantly by groups of Deinonychus this is based on a bone bed we found with several Deinonychus individuals all apparently having grouped up to feed on a dead tomato Soros now this could mean that those Deinonychus had grouped up to take down a very large prey animal but it could also mean that the prey animal was dead by some other means and a bunch of other unrelated Deinonychus all just showed up to opportunistically feed this is maybe more likely seeing as these are dioxins after all that this agonistic feeding behavior is a more parsimonious explanation than pack hunting but as usual we need evidence now you might say but Raptors are intelligent maybe they could use the really intelligent behavior of pack hunting well not clear the Raptors being hyper intelligent and drastic park is really cool because it dispels a long-standing myth that dinosaur is just in general were stupid dinosaurs were presumed to be reptiles and reptiles were presumed to be stupid pay raise like Velociraptor like other dromaeosaurus are subject to a slightly more sophisticated bias the parts of birds brains were named by researchers to correspond to the names of the basal ganglia in mammals which might be confusing but basically it means that just based on those terms it's assumed that birds are using much less sophisticated structures to do all of their brainpower stuff there are some ways that we can try to estimate animals intelligence we can look at the brain to body ratio the for brain to body ratio we can look at neuron counts but none of them are particularly good at predicting intelligence it seems like they're only really good at general trends and with extinct animals were in the dark because we can't test their intelligence that was kind of a point of Jurassic Park including intelligence it's like we had no way of knowing that they were going to be like this the brain case of Velociraptor has been described it's fairly similar to what we see in Archaeopteryx we can say that more of their brain was devoted to smell than birds have and we know that they lacked this particular structure that's used for taking in visual and somatosensory that is a sense of touch inputs and transferring them to motor controls which makes sense that they wouldn't really need that as much as an animal that can fly but as far as problem-solving ability goes we may never know I've mentioned several times the fighting dinosaurs specimen a Velociraptor is preserved kicking at a Protoceratops who is in turn pinning the velociraptors leg and biting its arm it is without exaggeration the most exquisite fossil we've ever found simply because it preserves that behavior that said I think we should be tentative about extrapolating from it too much like we tend to look at that and say oh a Velociraptor like to eat Protoceratops we have a data point of one and it's worth noting that the Velociraptor died in the attempt so it's not unlikely that they would have beaten a lot of Protoceratops of the megafauna that we've recovered from judoka from by anzac Protoceratops outnumbers all the other specimens combined by 15 to 1 and they're quite a bit larger and heavier than Velociraptor as well so one imagines that if Velociraptor was eating them it was eating them after they'd already died of other causes and there's no shortage of little mammals to eat either so I would imagine that Velociraptor attacking a Protoceratops was a fairly rare event I did see a suggestion that maybe the Protoceratops was stuck in unstable sand which makes sense that if if the big hunk of meat is immobilized and the Velociraptor which is much lighter can still walk on top of the sand that's an opportunity that it probably wouldn't be able to pass up obviously it went wrong but I can respect its gumption what seems to have happened is that it's Twilight in the desert Protoceratops is facing uphill and Velociraptor attacks from behind and to the right but something immediately goes wrong and Protoceratops is able to bring its beak to bang Velociraptor grabs at Protoceratops is faced with both of its hands but Protoceratops chomps down on velociraptors right arm and holds on for the next 75 million years Velociraptor claws at Protoceratops is stomach like a cat that didn't want its belly petted Protoceratops either crouches or collapses due to its injuries in kay spins velociraptors right leg so the Velociraptor pinned by it's dead or dying foe is losing blood fast from its arm wound the animals lay like that for some time it's not clear whether they both died at the same time but eventually velociraptors neck gets pulled into that characteristic s-curve as it dries they might have been partially buried alive by a collapsing dune or a sandstorm it seems that something pulled Protoceratops partially off of Velociraptor dislocating its shoulder this is probably scavengers but bars bold suggests that it was other Protoceratops trying to rescue their friend I didn't want to include that detail because it's speculation and heartbreaking but I have a lot of respect for the fact that bars bold is still publishing in his 80s so all I can do is report on what he thinks so having spent this entire episode essentially complaining about Jurassic Park I would like to at least extend an olive branch that their narrative and meta-narrative goals did align with my own goals they wanted to show that the bad guys in their movie acted on incomplete information and it turned out badly for them because dinosaurs were not what they were expecting you might say their dinosaurs were wrong but now we do have a lot more information we can fill in a lot of the gaps with velociraptor without needing frog DNA for some reason so we have what I would call a duty to Velociraptor to continue using it as essentially the mascot of new look dinosaurs and I want to thank you all for watching your dinosaurs are wrong please remember to do all of the things that people say at the ends of these videos and we will see you next time we would like to send a special thank you to these individuals who have gone above and beyond to support this show we could not have done it without you thank you [Music]

Channel: Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong

Views: 269,744

Rating: 4.9023438 out of 5

Keywords: ydaw, dinosaur, dinosaurs, steven bellettini, dino, dinos, velociraptor, fossil, record, fossils, anatomy, science, paleontology, paleontologist, prehistory, prehistoric, jurassic, triassic, cretaceous, mongolia, protoceratops, carnivore, herbivore, feathers, hunting, skull, claw, hip, bones, teeth, toy, toys, educational, kid friendly, kid safe, vertebrate, jurassic park, expedition, dig, fighting dinosaurs, non-avian, avian, bird, birdlike, dromeosaur, learn, learning, mongoliensis, amnh, american museum of natural history

Id: y-3bImbSJCM

Length: 64min 58sec (3898 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Rupee_Roundhouse]

Yass!!! Definitely gonna be watching this bad boy later!

On the old channel where he used to host his YDAW series, he did a 20-minute episode on Deinonychus. This will be interesting to see if and/or how it dovetails.

Nonetheless, a 60-minute episode will be a real treat!

[u/KwekuAnansi]

It's finally here!

[u/Cheloniformis]

I was literally just watching one, but now I am not home! Damn it!

[u/bigdicknippleshit]

an hour

wow

[u/EnderCreeper121]

Huh the naked neck stuff and eye slit part were really interesting! This series is always the best.

[u/seniorwings]

That was enjoyable and the host is likable. Thanks!

[u/Iamnotburgerking]

Re: pack hunting, while I doubt Velociraptor was a pack hunter (as it's the minority even among mammals), the 2007 study about Deinonychus not hunting in packs does have a few serious flaws (namely, they ignored that cooperative hunting in living archosaurs is actually more common than they assumed, and incorrectly assumed that infighting ruled out cooperative behaviour).

[u/Rupee_Roundhouse]

u/YDAW_Official, is Steven a paleontologist or an avid and savvy hobbyist? Either way, I get the impression he's constantly reading the latest papers and paleontologist blogs, which is pretty damn rad. And he understands the technical jargon, a level of competency that takes a while to attain.

How often are paleontological papers behind a paywall?

[u/Changyuraptor]

Yay, finally!