100 Years of Velociraptor
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Hello and welcome to I Know Dino. Keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries and science with us. I'm Garrett. And I'm Sabrina. And today in our 519th episode... We're celebrating 100 years of Velociraptor! Nice. Also, it's Dino-vember. And with Velociraptor, you kind of have to talk about Henry Fairfield Osborne, who named Velociraptor, so...

We'll talk about him a little bit. There's a lot going on. There is. Velociraptor is definitely a top 10, maybe top 5 most popular dinosaur. Yes, and very famous thanks to Jurassic Park. We could have done the 100 year anniversary of, I forget what the other dinosaur was named in the same paper. Psittacosaurus, I want to say? Soronothoides? It's Soronothoides. Soronothoides.

There we go. Second tries the charm. Soaring authorities is named in that paper, but there is also over Raptor. Oh yeah. Over Raptor is another pretty popular one. It's a big day.

This paper came out November 7th of 1924. It's pretty good. We don't always know the exact date. Sometimes it's just the month. We also have a fun fact, which is that paleobiologist Zofia Keelan-Jaworowski not only found the fighting dinosaurs, which includes Velociraptor and Protoceratops, she also discovered Deinokyris and Gallimimus.

Yeah, she's got a lot of greatest hits there. Yes. And if you want to learn more about her, don't worry. We'll have an upcoming episode all about her soon. Which reminds me, I know that because we're on parental leave. We're expecting our second baby any day now. So it seemed like a good idea to record some episodes ahead of time. And with a toddler and now a baby on the way, it was a little bit too difficult for us to prep weekly episodes ahead of time like we did last week.

parental leave. So we're going to be experimenting with a bi-weekly format while we're away. I hope you enjoy our first parental leave episode. Yes. Yeah, we did a survey last year or at some point asking what people thought about if we switched to bi-weekly and a lot of people, most people said they would be okay with it. So we're

We're going to see just how true that is. But also, like Sabrina was saying, it just wasn't practical for us to pre-record months worth of weekly episodes. Bi-weekly is still hard to pre-record because we're basically recording two, three episodes a week right now. Yes. Because we are doing the I Know Paleo episodes, getting ahead on the episodes as well as the currently pre-recorded.

in our time, weekly episodes that are coming out. But if you want dinosaur content every week, make sure you sign up for our newsletter because we were able to write some stuff to fill in the weeks in between. And you can do that at inodino.com. If you go to inodino.com slash bonus, you'll also get access to our bonus I Know Paleo episode all about terror birds.

Yeah. And if you want more I Know Paleo episodes and you're not already a patron, you can sign up there and you'll have plenty of episodes to fill in those missing weeks as well as extended interviews, which I sometimes go back and listen to because I forget what all people told me. And it's kind of fun to go back years and see what the state of the science was when we were talking to an expert on something. And also just fun to revisit those conversations. Yeah.

So that's all at patreon.com slash inodino. And speaking of Patreon, we have some patrons to thank this week. And they are Toon Rex, Dr. Eric Nefarious, Big Sheep, Daniel McGill, Joao, Stygacosaurus, Ryan the Biochemist, Sauropod Susan, Sonia, and Katie.

Thank you so much for being a dino and all in our community. Seriously, your support is why we're able to keep the show going, especially when we need to take time off because we're having a baby. Yes. Yes. Thank you all very much. All right. Jumping in. It's the beginning of November, which means it's Dino-vember. I think we usually talk about Dino-vember, but kind of dove in for this year.

Basically an art month, right? Drawing dinosaurs is the idea. It's kind of like Elf on a Shelf, but with dinosaurs. Oh, that's right. I forgot. Yeah. It started in 2012 with Susan and Rafay Tuma. They made their toy dinosaurs come to life and be up to no good. So there's your Elf on a Shelf thing.

And they did it for their kids so that they'd have a sense of wonder and imagination and so they could all have fun together. Their website says it's a month-long imagination invasion. It kind of started because their youngest kid didn't sleep through the night, so Susan started setting up scenes with the dino toys to pass the time. And they wanted something fun for their older kids because...

They were too tired to take the older kids out every day. And the first year that they did it, the kids woke up to find dinosaurs had gotten into some cereal and made a mess in the kitchen. And they really liked it. So it kind of snowballed from there. Now they even have a book about it that came out a few years ago. There's one scene that involved 600 pounds of ice cubes strewn across the kitchen floor.

So it got pretty intense, it sounds like. Yeah, that sounds like a mess. Those are brave parents making that big of a mess for themselves to clean up. Yeah. Maybe their kids helped. Maybe. Yeah, you got to clean up the mess after the dinos. So now a lot of people celebrate Dino-vember. I know libraries, schools, and museums often make announcements about it.

Am I just completely mixing it up with something else where a lot of people draw a dinosaur a day? Yes. For Dino-vember? That's a different month. I believe April. Okay. Which the name is escaping me. Apparently there's National Draw Dinosaur Day, which is January 30th. Hmm. I guess just any excuse to draw dinosaurs. You can draw dinosaurs all year. Totally fine. Yeah.

So if anyone celebrates Dino-vember, let us know. We would love to hear some details. You can send that along via our feedback format, bit.ly slash dinoquestions.

Bonus points if you also use 600 pounds of ice cubes. Was it 600 pounds? I was thinking it was 600 individual ice cubes. 600 pounds of ice cubes? Yes, I read something about they used up 600 pounds of ice cubes. Maybe it took them a few tries to get what they were going for. So much ice. It is a lot of ice. So now that we've covered Dinovember, let's talk about Henry Fairfield Osborne.

Because again, on November 7th of 1924, so almost exactly 100 years ago from when this episode's airing, he named Velociraptor and Soaring Authorities and Overraptor. But again, we're focusing on Velociraptor. So Henry Fairfield Osborne Sr. was known for a lot of things.

He was the president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York for 25 years, and he named a number of dinosaurs. He became president of the American Museum of Natural History's Board of Trustees in 1908 and served until 1933.

He also served as president of the New York Zoological Society from 1909 to 1925. He had a lot of paleontology awards, and he described and named multiple dinosaurs, including Ornitholestes in 1903, Tyrannosaurus rex in 1905, Albertosaurus in 1905, Pentaceratops in 1923, and then, of course, Velociraptor in 1924.

And Oviraptor and Sorinothoides. Are we going to say that every time? Maybe. I don't know. I just think it's so cool that especially Oviraptor and Velociraptor are both very common dinosaurs. And the fact that they were both named in the same paper, which is only a few pages long, is pretty interesting. Yeah, they're just a few paragraphs apart.

As a curator, he worked with a lot of fossil hunters and preparators, including William King Gregory, Roy Chapman Andrews, Barnum Brown, and Charles Knight. I think we've talked about most of those people on our show. Oh, definitely, yeah.

He was also senior vertebrate paleontologist of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1924. His focus was on exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History, murals, dioramas, dinosaur mounts. And he got a lot of visitors to the museum, but not all scientists and researchers appreciated it at the time.

Yeah. Some people thought that the scientific study wasn't like meant for the public and it should be reserved for people that are studying the science. They didn't want it to be a big spectacle, which I thought was really funny because Barnum Brown was part of it. And he's literally named after a guy who created a circus. Yes. But that's not why he got into it. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, Osborne did have racist and eugenist beliefs, which did appear in the museum's exhibits and educational programs. It's worth noting many of his peers or contemporaries disagreed with his beliefs. So that's nice. It is. Yeah. Usually people sort of do a wide paintbrush and say, you know, everybody was doing it at the time, but I guess it wasn't everyone at the time. It was common because they even did a

convention on basically eugenics at AMNH while he was the director there. He was also the co-founder of the American Eugenics Society in 1922. And he said that heredity was superior to influences from the environment.

Yeah. He believed in progressive evolution and didn't think that mutations and natural selection played a role in evolution. It was a little behind the time in those, a lot behind the time in some ways, a little behind the time in others. Yes. He also had a theory on human origins called the Don Man Theory. It's based on the discovery of the Piltdown Man.

Bone fragments said to be a previously unknown early human before it was exposed as a hoax. It took 41 years to be exposed as a forgery that it came from three different species. Yeah, that's a really famous case of critical thinking missing. Yeah.

They got there. He also argued that humans had a common ancestor with apes and all apes evolved parallel to ancestors of humans. He denied that the common ancestor was ape-like and said it was more like a human. Yeah, it doesn't work well with eugenics if you descended from an ape and you're trying to talk about how superior people are or certain people are. Yes.

So there are definitely things to be aware of when studying Henry Fairfield Osborne. Yeah. And unfortunately, the exhibits that he created while he was there had a lasting impact. So, for example, part of the reason that a lot of the early ape dioramas have dark skin is because of his eugenics beliefs. Yes. But going back to his life in general,

He was born in 1857 in Fairfield, Connecticut, four years before the Civil War, which sometimes I forget about putting it in these historical perspectives. Yeah. Being born during the time of slavery, I'm sure, did not help with his view of different races. Yes. He lived until 1935, and he came from a wealthy family. He was the eldest son of shipping magnate and railroad tycoon William Henry Osborne and Virginia Reed Sturgess.

His younger brother was William Church Osborne, who was president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He had another brother who drowned in the Hudson River when they were young. That brother had a collection of local birds, which were later presented to the AMNH. Osborne studied at Princeton University. He got a BA in geology and archaeology. He was mentored by Edward Drinker Cope, so you can imagine which side of the bone wars he was on.

He also studied embryology and comparative anatomy under Thomas Huxley and Francis Malin Balfour. It's interesting, though, because he is from Connecticut. So you'd think maybe he was a Marsh guy, since that's where Marsh was from.

Oh, well, he and Marsh had some clashes. He married his wife, Lucretia Thatcher Perry, in 1881. They had five children, including Henry Fairfield Osborne Jr., who was a naturalist and conservationist. And then, of course, Henry Osborne Sr. was professor of zoology at Columbia University in 1891 and curator of the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology at the AMNH the same year.

He's also the author of over 12,000 printed pages in his lifetime. Is that a lot? I don't know. That's a lot, especially for his lifetime, I think. Yeah. I guess that if you, what's a typical book? Like 400, 500? 200. 200? Okay. Yeah, that's a lot of books. Yeah. Osborne died suddenly in 1935. His wife had died in 1930 after a nearly year-long illness.

So that's just to give you some background of his life. There's several animals named after him. Serolophus osbornei, for example, was named by Barnum Brown in 1912. Then there's the crocodile Osteolamus osbornei, named by Carl Patterson Schmidt in 1919. In 1937, so a couple years after he died, William Gregory presented a biographical memoir of Osborne

And it's full of praise. There's also some interesting tidbits about his life and how he became a paleontologist. For example, as a child, he didn't really collect things. His father encouraged him to do scientific work and even built him a lodge for his work. While a student at Princeton, Osborne and two other students, including W.B. Scott and Francis Speer Jr., decided they didn't want Yale University to, quote, have a monopoly in fossil hunting expeditions in the West, end quote.

That sounds like it might be referencing Marsh. A little bit. But I think, yeah, I think it all kind of came together. So when he was 20, they went on an expedition. This is in 1877. They collected fossil fish and plants in Colorado and fossil mammals in Wyoming. They studied the fossils and made drawings and wrote descriptions and expressed gratitude to Lady and Cope. Both helped him a lot throughout his early career. And then the next summer, they led a second Princeton expedition to Wyoming and they found mammals.

Osborne wrote, quote,

I have myself always found the mere assemblage of facts an extremely painful and self-denying process, and I've always been animated by the hope that such dry work would finally be rewarded by an interpretation or the discovery of a new principle, end quote. That might explain why he was into the exhibits.

Yeah, and possibly why he was sort of rejecting some of the main scientific theories of the time because he's always trying to find sounds a little bit contrarian in a way where it's like I'm looking for something new. I'm bored with just collecting data and the status quo. Yeah. So like you said, he was on Cope's side of the Bone Wars.

When he described a new animal, Luricephalus, he said, quote, this may eventually prove to be a species of Telematherium, Marsh, but the description given by him is so brief and uncharacteristic that it might apply to any of the allied genera, end quote. A little bit of shade there. A little bit. Marsh did such a bad job describing this animal that I might as well just rename it anyway. Yeah. Yes.

He also implied that Marsh followed Lady in exploring the Bridger beds in Wyoming, which Marsh denied. So Osborne and Marsh clashed over Mesozoic mammals, and they ended up writing mean reviews of each other's work. I don't know how Marsh found the time when he was writing all these mean reviews of Cope's work, but there you go. Maybe he hired ghostwriters to throw shade for him because he was so busy. Maybe. Or he just spent a lot of his time on grudges. It could be. It sounds like he did.

I think everybody involved intimately in the Bone Wars spent a lot of time on grudges. Yes. Which, speaking of, well, I don't know if this is probably not because of a grudge, but the American Museum of Natural History did purchase Cope's collection of fossils, partly because of Osborne. Oh, yeah. He was very much on Cope's side. Yeah. And Cope needed money late in life, so that would have helped. And that really worked out for AM and H. Some of those fossils are hugely important. Oh, yeah. I mean...

A lot of things worked out for a lot of people because of Cope and Marsh. Yeah.

Yeah, Osborn, usually when I hear his name, I think of the eugenics, unfortunately. Me too. Just because he had such a big impact on it and really emphasizing it with such a high position in paleontology, which is a real bummer because like you said, Velociraptor, Sauronothoides, and Oviraptor. Plus Tyrannosaurus Rex. Yeah. So-

In dinosaur science, he is a really big name. And I'm sure he helped popularize dinosaurs. But yeah, it's just so tainted. It's unfortunate. Yeah, that happens sometimes with these big figures in paleontology. But we do have him to thank for Velociraptor. So at least there's that. Yes. And speaking of, we will get to our Dinosaur of the Day Velociraptor in just a moment. But first, we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors.

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Again, to check out the new Allosaurus patch, sign up to get your own, or update your mailing address, head over to patreon.com slash inodino. So speaking of Velociraptor, we'll now get on to our Dinosaur of the Day. I'm going to say it's Velociraptor Revisited because it was our Dinosaur of the Day in episode 83. Okay.

It's weird to hear a two-digit episode. It is. We also discuss Velociraptor quite a bit as part of our Raptor Renaissance episode, episode 500. But it's such a famous and cool dinosaur. It's kind of like, how could we not talk about it on the 100-year anniversary? Sorry, Sauron, Ithoides, and Oviraptor. Yeah.

So Velociraptor was a dromaeosaurid theropod that lived in the late Cretaceous in what is now Mongolia and China, found in the Jadokta Formation and Bayan-Mandahu Formation. Again, it was named November 7th, 1924 by Henry Fairfield Osborne. So 100 year anniversary. Dromaeosaurs were closely related to birds, their sister group. They're small to medium in size and feathered. They lived in the Cretaceous, though some isolated teeth have been found from the Middle Jurassic.

And they lived all over the world. They were very bird-like and smart. They had long arms with sharp claws, which were good for grasping. Their best known, though, for those sickle-like claws on their second toes, which they would hold their second toes off the ground while walking. And they were very smart.

And only their third and fourth toe bones would bear their weight. So they were functionally didactyl. Yes, because the first toe also is way up off the ground. Barely even there. Small, very small. Kind of like a dewclaw on a dog or something. So if you see a track of a velociraptor, it's literally just two toes and a little tiny bump at the base for where that like kind of first foot bone is. Yeah.

And they might have used those second toe claws for going after prey and climbing trees. So it was important to keep them sharp. Yeah. And not necessarily the same throughout their whole life too. When they were younger, maybe it was more important to be able to climb a tree or something. And when they're older, it might have been more for attacking things. Of course, Velociraptor is iconic in Jurassic Park and

And Jurassic World, but we'll start with Jurassic Park because that's what made it iconic. Yeah. Because you've got Timmy and Lex. Then you've got Blue. It's a toss-up, I guess. Because, yeah, Jurassic World, it's definitely more of a character. It depends on your age. I think for people that were alive and watching movies when Jurassic Park came out, it's definitely a Jurassic Park dinosaur. But for the younger generations... It's all about Blue. I think so. It's more of a Jurassic World phenomenon. Yeah.

Yeah. Plus Jurassic Park focused, I think, a little bit more on T-Rex and a little bit less on the raptors. I think you're right. But then they kept popping up. They did. Subsequent films. Yeah. Well, we talk about this a lot on the show. Velociraptor in Jurassic Park was modeled after Deinonychus.

But then they also kind of made it the size of Utahraptor. And Utahraptor was discovered right around the time the movie was coming out. So it worked out. It was quite a coincidence. Yes. We talked to paleontologist Jim Kirkland about this in episode 34. And the way he puts it, Utahraptor is the star of the movie. So he's on team. Raptors were the important part of Jurassic Park, not T-Rex. Well, he found Utahraptor. So that makes sense.

I remember he pointed out too that the claw of Utahraptor is way bigger than the Velociraptor claw is in the movie. It's one of the few cases of things in Jurassic Park that look kind of puny and not scary compared to the real life animal. Yeah. So Velociraptor looked bird-like, but it had a very long tail and very big claws and teeth. Well, regular sized teeth, big claws and sharp teeth. Yeah.

Big teeth for a bird. Yeah. Birds don't have teeth. Yeah. Velociraptor has been compared to eagles. You could think of it like a land eagle. It walked on two legs. It had a long, low skull. It was estimated to be up to almost seven feet or over two meters long and weigh up to a 43 pounds or almost 20 kilograms. It has an upturned snout and a triangular jawbone.

Its skull grew up to over nine inches or about 23 centimeters long. Its snout was about 60% the length of the skull and it was narrow. I feel like I should mention too, even though it's seven feet or about two meters long, that means it's about a third of that in height. So right around two feet tall, maybe two thirds of a meter tall.

So that's why I think dog-sized is a good way to describe it. Sometimes they say turkey-sized if you're talking about it by weight because 43 pounds is sort of the upper estimate of what it might weigh. The long tail really makes a difference for length. Yeah, there's no good modern animal to compare these animals to because they're so lightweight for their size and they're also really long and skinny. So they're sort of weird. They're almost like a snake with legs or something in terms of proportions. Super weird.

but yes, sort of dog or Turkey. Like you were saying the lightweight too. It's because it had hollow bones. It also had a wishbone. It had large hands with three fingers on each hand and claws on the hands and

The tail was stiff. The one specimen was found with tail bones that curved sideways, so there's some flexibility to move side to side. Not too much, though, because the vertebrae on the tail really interlocked with these extremely long processes sticking off them that would link like a dozen vertebrae together. Right. And again, it had the sickle-shaped claw on each of its second toes. These sickle claws could grow to over 6.5 centimeters or 2.6 inches long.

And that's just the fossilized part. That's just the bone, not the keratin sheath over the top. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you are really talking about like eagle talons on this turkey. Eagle talons on a turkey.

Like we said, it had four toes, but it only walked on its third and fourth toes because that first toe had a small dewclaw and was a small toe. And then the second one it held off the ground because it had that large sickle-shaped claw. Wanted to keep it sharp. Can't be dragging it on the ground. Yes. It had a large brain in proportion to its body size, so it was probably intelligent. It was agile and probably a fast runner. And based on the scleral rings in the eyes, it might have been nocturnal.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe. There was a study from 2024 earlier this year by Yuan Tingzi and others that found Velociraptor may be in between modern diurnal and nocturnal animals. So somewhere in between night and day. Yeah. And it's also possible that all dinosaurs had the scleral rings, which would mean, you know, the ones that were nocturnal and diurnal. Yeah, they both had them.

There was a study from 2023 by Sashiro Tata and others that reconstructed the nasal cavity of Velociraptor mongoliensis and compared it to modern endotherms and ectotherms. And they found that Velociraptor probably couldn't cool its brain like modern birds. It's possible non-avian dinosaurs without a large nasal cavity didn't need them because brains weren't as developed as birds and didn't need to be as cooled down.

But the nasal cavity of Velociraptor was not large enough to regulate heat for a bird-like large brain. It didn't need energy to hunt. It was warm-blooded to some extent, but based on raptor growth rates, it may have had a more moderate metabolism. Quill knobs have been found on Velociraptor arms. They're attachment points for feathers, which means that Velociraptor had feathers.

Its arms, though, were too short to fly or glide, so it may have used feathers to attract mates or help for brooding or help it run faster up slopes. Six quill knobs have been found on a specimen. This was in 2007 from the Jadokta formation, but it may have had 14 quill knobs on its arms. However, that specimen with the quill knobs may need to be reevaluated and confirmed that it is actually Velociraptor.

Yeah, quill knobs are so cool because they show that it had large primary feathers attaching directly to the bone, which still every time I think about it, it sort of makes me cringe a little bit that they had feathers that went through their skin and connected to the bone. But it shows you how strong those feathers were and that potentially they were using them for flight. Yes, or brooding. Yeah, or something more than just insulation.

So the reason they need to confirm and reevaluate is because there was another dromaeosaur that was found in that locality, Sagan. So they just need to make sure that this one with the quill knobs is Velociraptor. But based on other dromaeosaurs with feathers like Genuine Long, Velociraptor probably did have feathers.

There's two valid species of Velociraptor. There's Mongoliensis, which is the type species, and Osmolske, which was named in 2008. There was a skull found in Inner Mongolia. The genus name Velociraptor means swift Caesar, and the species name Mongoliensis refers to Mongolia, where the fossils were found. I've also heard it called like rapid thief instead of swift Caesar. Oh, yes.

Yeah, raptors often means thief or something like that. So just depends.

The species name Mongoliensis refers to Mongolia, where the fossils were found, and the species name Osmolske is in honor of Polish paleontologist Halska Osmolska. The first fossil of Velociraptor was found in 1923 as part of an American Museum of Natural History expedition to the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. They were found at the Flaming Cliff site, which is where Roy Chapman Andrews went, and we talked all about his expeditions in episode 402. The

The indirect inspiration to Indiana Jones. Yep. And then Osborne, I guess, followed him there a few years later. Osborne did not follow him. Roy Chapman Andrews was exploring for Osborne and would ship the fossils back. Oh, I see. Okay. And that's how Osborne ended up naming all these dinosaurs, including Soronothoides and Oviraptor, because we have to keep bringing that up. So he named it, but he did not discover it. Yes. Okay.

And all three of those dinosaurs he named in 1924 had skulls. Yeah, they have really nice drawings to accompany the paper. As he put it, as Osborne put it, quote, the skulls are entirely dissimilar and extraordinarily interesting. It's true. It's kind of hard to think of dinosaurs that are more different than Oviraptor and Velociraptor. Yes. The Velociraptor skull was found in soft sandstone lying alongside a Protoceratops skull.

It's like a precursor to the fighting dinosaurs. Oh, there was a Protoceratops there. Although I think I said Psittacosaurus earlier. You did.

Osborne described Velociraptor as a, quote, typical megalosaurian type. Because a lot of dinosaurs were thought to be megalosaurs for a while. I didn't realize that was still going on in the 1920s. Yeah, it took a while. Osborne also thought that the claw, the sickle-like claw on the foot, was on its hand at first. But then John Ostrom recognized in 1969 that Velociraptor was closely related to Dromaeosaurus and Deinonychus and assigned it to Dromaeosauridae.

So that's how it's known as a raptor. Well, I guess it always had raptor in its name. Yeah, because it was seizing whether or not it was with its foot or its hands. It's usually a good guess that if you have big claws, they're on hands. There aren't that many animals that have bigger, more impressive claws on their feet. Right. Although, was it Megaraptor where the opposite happened? Yeah, exactly. They thought the big claw was on the foot, but it was actually on the hand. Yeah, because it's got a little bit of a similar shape to what Velociraptor has going on. Yeah.

In 2008, Pascal, Goldfroy, and others named bones found in 1999 by the Sino-Belgian Dinosaur Expeditions, they named Velociraptor osmolski, based on a jawbone and part of the eye socket. Velociraptor osmolski had robust teeth, a tear-drop-shaped fenestra or opening near the snout, the promaxillary venae,

fenestra that was as large as the opening in the maxillary fenestra. But a 2013 study found that the shape of the jawbone was more similar to Linharaptor, so maybe Velociraptor osmolskate isn't Velociraptor and needs to be reassessed. Yeah, that's always a thing when you have two different species within a genus, there's a good chance that as more dinosaurs get named, you're going to find some that squeeze between them that have different genus names and then

one of those, I guess the newer name for the species in the existing genus is going to have to get split out, which is what would happen here. Olsmulske would get split out into a new genus and you'd just be left with Velociraptor mongoliensis. Yes. You'd probably still have something Olsmulske. It could be like Halscaraptor. Oh no, it can't be. That already exists. Put some other raptor.

Well, we'll see what happens if it ever gets reassessed. Multiple velociraptor skeletons have been found. One was found in 1995 at the Flaming Cliffs, and it has a well-preserved skull and body with limbs, missing only part of the tail and ends of the long bones, and there's some small elements that probably happened from being scavenged. There was a skeleton found in 1993 found in a death pose with its legs tucked up under the body.

The skeleton was eroded, but parts of the skull, arms, ribs, and vertebrae were found. And based on this specimen, scientists found that the big toe, the hallux, wasn't reversed in raptors. So we only see this full reversal in Archaeopteryx and some birds, including in Antiornythines. Dromaeosaur skeletons previously thought to belong to Velociraptor have been renamed. One was Ichabod Craniosaurus. Yeah.

It's a skeleton without a skull. That's how you got that nickname. It was found in a 1990 joint Mongolian-American expedition in the Gobi Desert. But now that one is known as Shri Devai. It was named in 2021. If it sounds familiar, we talked about that in episode 328.

It's a cool one. I think I was saying it's Shreedevi, but I'm not sure exactly. And I think Ichabod Craniosaurus was an informal name, right? That's like in quotes. Oh, yeah. The nickname. Yeah. It's a fun nickname. It would be pretty funny if somebody officially named a dinosaur Ichabod Craniosaurus because it was basically a skull. Yeah. That would be pretty enjoyable. It would be. Yeah.

In 2020, Mark Powers described a Velociraptor specimen in his master's thesis, which he found was a third new species of Velociraptor based on it having a shallow jawbone. And later studies found it to be distinct as well, but it hasn't been named yet. So we'll see how that goes. There might be some new Velociraptor news. Yeah.

Velociraptor is, in addition to Jurassic Park, famous for battling a Protoceratops and the Fighting Dinosaurs. And that was found in 1971 by Zofia Kielin-Jaworowski and a Polish-Mongolian team. One of the coolest finds of all time, by far. Yes. Although Dinocyrus is up there for me, too. Yeah. The Fighting Dinosaurs probably were quickly buried in sand from a sandstorm or collapsing dune.

The Velociraptor has a sickle-like claw on the Protoceratops' throat, and then the Protoceratops' beak is clamped onto the raptor's right arm. So we don't know who was winning. They both lost. Well, yes. In the end, they both ended up fossils in the middle of a fight.

And in the fighting dinosaurs, the Protoceratops was much bulkier than Velociraptor, but it was relatively small. It may have been a juvenile. So it could be that there was an adult Velociraptor trying to prey on a juvenile Protoceratops. But it's unclear if this happened a lot. The fighting dinosaurs is the only direct fossil evidence we have of two dinosaurs interacting, at least so far. Well, there's the dueling dinosaurs now.

It's currently being prepared, so we don't know what to expect yet. Yeah, how directly interacting they are. Yes. I guess it depends how you phrase it, too, because we have, like, tooth marks that have healed on dinosaurs and, like, thagomizer holes that seem to have healed slightly, too. So that's evidence of them interacting, too. Yeah, but not...

Right in the middle of a battle. Might not count as direct fossil evidence, like two animals literally interacting, fossilized interacting together. Yes. Unless you include like a dinosaur sitting on a clutch of eggs or a dinosaur hanging out with others of its same species fossilizing together. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure how you define that. Yeah. Yeah.

If you're a fan of the fighting dinosaurs, you probably, you know, brush those to the side. Well, the fighting dinosaurs, it could have been a chance encounter between the two of them rather than a predator prey interaction too. We just, we don't know. It's hard to say. Yeah. We'll get more into Velociraptor and how it went after prey. So that includes its sickle claw in just a moment. But first we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors.

So at one point, the sickle claw in Velociraptor was thought to disembowel prey. But with the fighting dinosaurs, the claw is on the throat of Protoceratops. So rather than going for the bowels, like stomach area, it seemed to go for the jugular. Yeah.

So maybe Velociraptor pierced vital parts of the throat like the jugular or windpipe. Oh yeah, that's true. Windpipe would also probably get the job done. Yeah. A 2011 study by Denver Fowler and others suggested the raptor prey restraint or the RPR model. And that's what modern birds of prey do. They proposed this model after comparing raptor feet and legs to modern birds of prey like eagles and hawks. So maybe Velociraptor pierced

use the RPR where it leapt onto prey, pinned it and held it with the sickle claws, then would eat the prey and the prey would die from organ failure and blood loss, which sounds terrible. Yeah. Yeah. Animals aren't usually super interested in killing their prey quickly as much as they are in immobilizing it. Yeah. This stabbing is also supported by how Velociraptor was found with the fighting dinosaurs.

Velociraptor may have used its arms to help flap and balance while on top of the struggling prey. And then the tail would have helped with counterbalancing as well. You do see that a lot with things like eagles and hawks and other raptors as they use their wings for that balance. Sometimes like pressing down to get better grip and things like that. You can definitely see how that'd be useful on Velociraptor, even if it couldn't use its wings to actually fly. Yes. Help flap, keep it in place. Mm-hmm.

It also helped too because its jaws were relatively weak, so it had a weak bite. It was estimated to have a bite force of 304 newtons, and that's lower than other dromaeosaurids. Deinonychus, as an example, had over 700 newtons. And for the record, 304 newtons is about 68 pounds force, if you need a comparison. Not as strong as weakened bite, but not far off. Yeah. And they had sharper teeth.

There was a study from 2024 earlier this year that did find Velociraptor had a high bite force compared to other raptors like Dromaeosaurus and Deinonychus though. So it seems like bite force is a hard thing to estimate. That's true. You got to put a lot of assumptions into your models when you're estimating bite forces. In 2020, there was a study that reconstructed the endocranium of Velociraptor.

and they compared it to non-avian theropods, modern birds, and other modern archosaurs. They found that Velociraptor mongoliansis could detect a wide and high range of sound frequencies, so it had good hearing.

And it was also agile and could probably track its prey easily. So that suggests that Velociraptor was an active predator that would scavenge if the prey was older and bad health or maybe during droughts or other prolonged climatic events. The thinking is that Velociraptor probably ate small mammals and reptiles. It probably scavenged and hunted, which a lot of dinosaurs did. A lot of animals do. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm a little bit surprised that given their scavenging and some of their adaptability that none of these velociraptor, you know, basically flightless bird type dinosaurs survived the in Cretaceous mass extinction. They seem like they were in pretty good position for that. They're just unlucky. Yeah. They

There's a few scavenging examples of Velociraptor. There's a 2010 study that found evidence of Velociraptor feeding on Protoceratops. They found bite marks on what was probably Protoceratops bones near some shed teeth that were thought to belong to Velociraptor.

They found over 60 pieces of bone, including a partial jaw and four teeth. The teeth belonged to definitely a Velociraptorine based on the shape of the teeth and the size of the denticles. And the only Velociraptorine known from that time at that area, which is the Bayan Mandihu, is Velociraptor. At least that's what was known until Linharaptor was named also in 2010. But the Linharaptor paper came after this study was published, even though they were published in the same year.

So they added a note at the end of this 2010 study that said Linharaptor's description complicated their referral of the teeth to Velociraptor, but the poor condition of the known Linharaptor teeth made it hard to compare. And they also said, well, there's also lots of Velociraptor fossils in the area, so it still seems more likely it belonged to Velociraptor. Yeah. Well, that's hard to say. Yes. And also you get that thing where even though you might say, well, they're such similar animals, maybe they both hunted Protoceratops,

You get that niche partitioning where sometimes there's two very similar looking species and they do pretty different things. Yes. The teeth, we do know they were small, recurved and serrated. And the pattern of bite marks are similar to other tooth marks from theropod bites, which were interpreted as accidental marks made while feeding. So not deliberate bone biting, which is kind of scraping them while it was eating. Mm hmm.

One tooth was broken. Velociraptor skull and teeth don't seem like it'd be able to eat bone and they're small compared to Protoceratops. So the bite marks on the jawbone might show that this animal was eaten at a late stage because the tastier bits are in the legs or the abdomen area. Yeah, typically, like if you go to the butcher and you get a slice of cow, you don't ask for the jaw meat.

It's pretty far down the list. That's true. Those are the animals that are scavenging that get that usually. There are also a lot of bite marks on this animal, which might mean that a lot of the meat was already stripped off and the raptor was eating close to the bone. It's possible there was a group hunting or feeding situation because it doesn't seem likely that a single velociraptor, even an adult, could eat all the flesh of an adult Protoceratops in one sitting. And that Protoceratops was about adult-sized.

However, the fact that there's only two shed crowns may mean that there was just one scavenging individual and not a group of predators. Oh, I see. Because it wasn't just like a whole field of velociraptor teeth scattered everywhere where it looked like a whole bunch of them were chewing on it. Just a couple. So the scavenging also might...

Yeah.

Yeah, there's no evidence for Velociraptor hunting in packs, but there are raptor trackways that may show they walk together. So they suggested that either way, Velociraptor feeding on Protoceratops was probably relatively common.

We have two good pieces of evidence already. It's more than we have for a lot of other dinosaurs. Yeah, seriously. In 2012, David Hohn and others described a pterosaur long bone, a leg or arm bone, that was found in the gut contents of a velociraptor. The pterosaur would have been too big and dangerous for a velociraptor when it was alive, so it seems likely that the velociraptor scavenged it. This velociraptor was largely complete and articulated. It was only missing its right arm and most of the tail.

And it looked like it was injured when it died because there's one broken rib that showed signs of regrowth. So it was either injured or recovering from an injury. And it was a young sub-adult individual.

Part of the pterosaur bone was in the Velociraptor's chest cavity, and it belonged to an Asdarkid pterosaur, which is the group with some of the largest pterosaurs, if you think Hatzegopteryx and Quetzalcoatlus. Yeah. And then you compare that to the size of a Velociraptor, and you think, yeah, scavenging seems like the way to go here. Yeah, it seems more likely. There's narrow spaces between the Velociraptor's ribs, so it was probably digested and probably didn't

just end up in that cavity after the dinosaur died. Yeah, because if its ribs are more or less intact, there isn't an easy way for that bone to sort of get pushed in there by water or something moving the bones around after everything's fossilizing.

But it might not have been in its gut for very long because the surface of the bone is smooth. There's no signs of digestive acids. The edges are broken and jagged and rough, which may mean it was broken before or as part of it being ingested.

But the rough edges not being smoothed out may mean that the bone just wasn't long in the gut. Yeah, usually you get that acid etching pretty quickly. Yeah. So you would think this must have died very shortly after swallowing it. Yep. Maybe because of swallowing it. Oh no, it choked on it. Maybe. Maybe.

So going back to why this was a scavenging thing, that Velociraptor specimen is estimated to weigh 13 kilograms versus pterosaurs that had large wingspans. So they would have been dangerous unless it was already sick or injured.

The velociraptor probably ate the bone because there wasn't much meat left on the carcass unless it needed the minerals. Yeah, that's true. If it was laying some eggs. Yeah. And large bones being swallowed whole is not common, but it happens when there's no alternative. So it's probably challenging to eat. And yeah, like you said, maybe it didn't choke on it. Yeah.

One more example of a velociraptor specimen found was in 1995. Norell and others found a skull with two rows of small punctures on it that matched the size and spacing of velociraptor teeth. So those punctures might have been from another velociraptor. There's no signs of healing and the specimen wasn't scavenged, so it probably died from its wound. Interesting. I wonder how they know it wasn't scavenged. There must have been other evidence. Yeah, it must be the way the skull looked. No scrape marks.

Just got straight up murdered. Maybe there was a fight. Yeah. Really hard to say. Velociraptor lived in a semi-arid climate with sand dunes and intermittent streams. Some other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place included ankylosaurs like Panacosaurus, alvarosaurs like Linhanicus, protoceratopsids like Protoceratops, of course, troodontids like Linhavinator, and the dromaeosaur Linharaptor.

And some other animals that lived around the same time and place included crocodiles, small lizards, and mammals. And a lot of the animals that have been found in the formations were found in situ, and they probably died during sandstorms. Yeah, I've heard it described that Mongolia in the Mesozoic, the latest Mesozoic when a lot of the stuff fossilized, was pretty similar to Mongolia now. Sandy. Very good for digging up fossils. Yeah, and preparing the fossils. Mm-hmm.

And our fun fact is that paleobiologist Zofia Keelan-Javaroski not only found the fighting dinosaurs, but she also discovered Deinokyris and Gallimimus. It took two days to excavate Deinokyris and load onto a vehicle. They found those gigantic arms much later than Velociraptor was named. They found them in 1965.

And it presented a mystery because all they knew was the arms. So was it so ferocious it could tear apart prey with its hands? And it took about 50 years to find the answer. And it was an unexpected answer because Deinokirus was almost goofy. I think we've put it before, Garrett. Its giant arms were more like salad tongs to scoop up food, both plants and fish.

The year before that, in 1964, Zofia found the largest skeleton and holotype of Gallimimus, the chicken mimic theropod. It was large with a small head, it had a beak and feathers, it could run really fast. The skeleton was found lying on its back and the skull was under its pelvis. Zofia was a Polish paleobiologist. She led a series of expeditions to the Gobi Desert.

Her work didn't just include dinosaurs, though. She had a big influence on the origins and early evolution of mammals. And she also studied trilobites, and she published a ton of scientific articles and books. She was born in Poland in 1925. She lived through World War II, and she accomplished a lot. Among her many achievements, she was the first woman to serve on the Committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences.

We will be doing a whole episode on her coming up in a few weeks. So I don't want to give away too many details just yet, but it was impressive reading about her. Yes. Yeah, her and Hulska-Osmolska, I think, are two of the earlier female paleontologists who had the most impressive discoveries. Also, Teresa Marianska. Oh, yeah. They worked together. There are a lot of cool women paleontologists. Mm-hmm.

responsible for some of our favorite dinosaur discoveries. I mean, Sophia found two of our favorites with Deinokyrus and the fighting dinosaurs. Yeah. Gallimimus is also cool. Oh, she found a lot of cool stuff. I'll tell you about that later. Okay.

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