By Lucas Garcia
The Jurassic Park franchise is hands down the most popular piece of dinosaur media ever. Based on the 1990 novel by Michael Crichton, the first Jurassic Park movie cemented dinosaurs as pop-culture icons.
One of the most prominently featured dinosaurs in the franchise is the Velociraptor. However, its portrayal in that series is much different than real life. So much so that most people wouldn’t even recognize a true Velociraptor if they saw one.
The real Velociraptor was actually about the size of a turkey, approximately 1.5 feet tall. The Velociraptor more closely resembled a bird than a lizard, as it had feathers covering most of its body and even large, wing-like feathers on its forearms. In the Jurassic Park movies, the Velociraptor is shown to exhibit near-human intelligence. However, judging by the size of its brain cavity, the Velociraptor probably wasn’t even as smart as a parrot.
When Michael Crichton was writing his book, he based his Velociraptor on a different animal called Deinonychus. He called it Velociraptor because he decided its name needed to be “More dramatic.” While Crichton used the physical characteristics of Deinonychus almost exactly, he chose to depict them significantly larger. Although, at that time, there were no known raptors even close to that size.
After the Velociraptor for the first Jurassic Park movie had been designed, the discovery of a new massive raptor was made public, called Utahraptor. Interestingly, Utahraptor matched the Jurassic Park Velociraptor’s appearance in almost all respects, the exceptions being that it was feathered and thought to be slightly larger.
Usually, art imitates life, but in this case, it seems to have been the other way around. To quote the Jurassic Park character Ian Malcolm, “Life uh… finds a way.”
The Lighthouse 