Rethinking Velociraptor: new study finds they had feathers

Remember those rapacious Velociraptors stalking children in the film Jurassic Park? It appears now that these prehistoric predators could use a costume change: they weren't leathery-skinned toughs after all!

Scientists have known for years that many dinosaurs had feathers. Now, after a new look at some old bones, paleontologists at the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum have documented the presence of feathers in Veiociraptor, one of the most iconic of dinosaurs and a close relative of birds.

The fossil specimen the group examined was a Velociraptor forearm unearthed in Mongolia in 1998. They found on it clear indications of quill knobs--places where the quills of secondary feathers, the flight or wing feathers of modern birds, were anchored to the bone with ligaments. Quill knobs are also found in many living bird species and are most evident in birds that are strong flyers. Those that primarily soar or that have lost the ability to fly entirely, however, were shown in the study to typically lack signs of quill knobs.

"A lack of quill knobs does not necessarily mean that a dinosaur did not have feathers," said Alan Turner, lead author on the study and a graduate student of paleontology at the AMNH and at Columbia University in New York. "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."

The Velociraptor in the current study stood about three feet tall, was about five feet long, and weighed about 30 pounds. These dimensions, coupled with relatively short forelimbs compared to a modern bird, indicate this creature could not fly. The authors suggest that perhaps an ancestor of Velociraptor lost the ability to fly, but retained its feathers. In Velociraptor, the feathers may have been useful for display, to shield nests, for temperature control, or to help it maneuver while running.

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"The more we learn about these animals, the more we find that there is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors like Velociraptor," said Mark Norell, Curator in the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History and coauthor on the study. "Both have wishbones, brooded their nests, possess hollow bones, and were covered in feathers. If animals like Velociraptor were alive today our first impression would be that they were just very unusual-looking birds."

The research team also included Peter Makovicky from the Field Museum in Chicago. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the American Museum of Natural History, and a paper describing the discovery appeared in the September 21, 2007, issue of the journal Science.