Velociraptor: the turkey-sized, feathered hunter of Mongolia

When and where

Velociraptor lived 75 to 71 million years ago in what is now Mongolia, with most fossils coming from the Djadochta Formation in the Gobi Desert. The Djadochta beds were a dry, dune-fielded landscape with only seasonal rivers, and a single sandstorm or dune collapse could bury an animal alive. That preservation mode is why Velociraptor specimens often arrive in three-dimensional, articulated condition rather than as flattened impressions, and it makes the genus one of the best-known dromaeosaurs in the fossil record.

How we know

Henry Fairfield Osborn named Velociraptor mongoliensis in 1924, working from a skull and claw found by the American Museum of Natural History's Central Asiatic Expedition the previous year. The single most famous specimen is the "Fighting Dinosaurs" pair excavated in 1971, in which a Velociraptor and a Protoceratops were buried mid-combat, with the raptor's foot claw embedded in the herbivore's neck. In 2007, paleontologists found quill knobs on a Velociraptor ulna, which are the bony attachment points modern birds use to anchor flight feathers. That single observation confirmed Velociraptor carried a feather covering down its forearms, settling decades of speculation. Source: Wikipedia entry on Velociraptor.

What set it apart

Velociraptor was small. Adults reached around 2 metres in length nose to tail and weighed roughly 15 kilograms, closer in size to a wild turkey than to the human-sized predator the Jurassic Park films popularised. The animal's signature weapon was a 6.5-centimetre sickle claw on the second toe of each foot, held off the ground in life and used as a stabbing tool against prey larger than itself. The skull was long and low, packed with backward-curved teeth, and the eyes faced forward enough for binocular vision over a narrow field. Brain size relative to body, calculated from endocasts, was high for any non-avian dinosaur, putting Velociraptor among the most cognitively complex theropods.

For collectors and classrooms

A scaled Velociraptor figurine corrects the Jurassic Park misconception on sight. Look for one that includes feathered forelimbs, in line with current paleoart, and that stays at the actual 2-metre proportional scale rather than ballooning to human height. Browse a hand-painted figurine.