Jurassic Park velociraptors were feathered fearsomes

A new study by palaeontologists from the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum of Natural History has shown that velociraptor, the meat eating dinosaur made famous in the movie Jurassic Park, had feathers.

Washington, Sept 21 : A new study by palaeontologists from the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum of Natural History has shown that velociraptor, the meat eating dinosaur made famous in the movie Jurassic Park, had feathers.

Scientists have known for years that many dinosaurs had feathers.

Now, for the first time, they have documented the presence of feathers in velociraptors, one of the most iconic of dinosaurs and a close relative of birds.

For their study, the research team examined a velociraptor fossil forearm unearthed in Mongolia in 1998.

The researchers found clear indications of quill knobs - places where the quills of secondary feathers, the flight or wing feathers of modern birds, are anchored to the bone with ligaments.

Quill knobs are found in many living bird species and are most evident in birds that are strong flyers. Those that primarily soar or have lost the ability to fly entirely, typically lack signs of quill knobs.

Alan Turner, lead author on the study and a graduate student of palaeontology at the American Museum of Natural History and at Columbia University in New York, said while "a lack of quill knobs did not necessarily mean that a dinosaur did not have feathers, finding quill knobs on velociraptor, though, meant that it definitely had feathers.

"This is something we'd long suspected, but no one had been able to prove," he said.

Previous signs of feathers on dinosaurs had been restricted to fossils found in a particular kind of lake sediment that favoured preservation of small-bodied animals.

The velociraptor in the current study stood about three feet tall, was about five feet long, and weighed about 30 pounds.

Combined with its relatively short forelimbs compared to a modern bird, this indicated it lacked flight, abilities.

The authors suspect that perhaps an ancestor of velociraptor lost the ability to fly, but retained its feathers.

They said, in velociraptor, the feathers might have been useful for display, to shield nests, for temperature control, or to help it manoeuvre while running.

"The more that 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, a Curator in the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History and co-author 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," Norell added.

The study appears in the Sept. 21 issue of the journal Science.

ANI