Velociraptors were not the lizard-like beasts we all thought. Researchers have discovered they were actually just “unusual looking birds”, even to the point of having feathers. ‘Those dinosaurs from Jurassic Park’, as the world’s press has determined they must be called, were actually just killer turkeys according to the Guardian, free-paper Metro, and others. (Only Reuters’s coverage doesn’t mention Jurassic Park in the first line.)

“The velociraptor might have looked like a big chicken with a long tail, claws and teeth,” according to lead researcher Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History in New York (Bloomberg). “There is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors. If animals such as velociraptor were alive today our first impression would be they were very unusual-looking birds.” he added (various).

Norell and colleagues found ‘quill knobs’ on a raptor fossil unearthed in Mongolia in 1998 (Science: abstract, full text). These knobs are fixing points where feathers meet bone and are found on many modern birds. “A lack of quill knobs does not necessarily mean that a dinosaur did not have feathers. Finding quill knobs on velociraptor, though, means that it definitely had feathers. This is something we’d long suspected but no one had been able to prove,” said co-author Alan Turner (in The Times, AFP, BBC and others).

Kudos to The Sun for their imagining of what the dinosaur looks like (if only in their art editors mind).

Image: (A) Dorsal view of right ulna of Velociraptor (B) Detail of red box with arrows showing six evenly spaced feather quill knobs / Science