Word: velociraptor
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...they took a little artistic license. Velociraptor, as described in the literature and in Crichton's novel, was a creature no more than five or six feet tall. But because the speedy, ferocious raptors are the story's star villains, the Spielberg team decided to make them half again as large. The choice was scientifically defensible, since so few specimens had been found that generalizations were hard to come by. Anyway, what did books know? Then a surprising thing happened. In Utah, paleontologists found bones of a real raptor, and it was the size of the movie's beast...
...canal running through them varies in size according to the number of nerve fibers it contains, and that in turn depends on how much the muscles controlled by these nerves are used. Giffin is trying to determine whether theropods -- the dinosaurian suborder that includes fierce predators like Oviraptor, Deinonychus, Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus rex -- could have used their undersize forelimbs for grasping or whether the arms were purely vestigial...
...fell short of full-fledged endothermy. "The problem," notes Michael Brett- Surman of the Smithsonian Institution, "is that there is no such thing as 'the dinosaur.' There were seven groups living 150 million years ago that started out as one thing and perhaps evolved into something else." Although Deinonychus, Velociraptor and other small, meat-eating bipeds may have been warm-blooded, Brett-Surman believes large predators like Tyrannosaurus rex, which went through three vastly different growth stages, may have been equipped with a variable metabolism...
...point to a dinosaur that, while smaller than Tyrannosaurus, was probably a whole lot nastier. Labeled the "Utahraptor" until a more suitable scientific name can be found, the 7-m (20-ft.), one-ton beast is the largest specimen ever seen of a variety of dinosaur known as the Velociraptor, an upright, fast-moving carnivore that sported an enormous claw on the back of each foot for slashing at prey. It was, according to one researcher, "the wolverine of the Cretaceous...
Until the latest discovery, the largest velociraptor ever found was about the size of a human. But that did not stop Steven Spielberg from featuring supersize velociraptors in his upcoming movie Jurassic Park, based on the Michael Crichton novel of the same name. In it, real dinosaurs, grown from bits of ancient DNA to populate a theme park, go on a rampage and terrorize humans trapped there. Until the Utah find, Spielberg's creatures would have been just another Hollywood exaggeration; now, they will seem even more monstrously real...