![]() ![]() “Both have wishbones, brooded their nests, possess hollow bones, and were covered in feathers. “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,” Mark told reporters when the discovery was announced. On the arm bones of modern birds, such as pigeons, these knobs are the attachment point for large flight feathers. We know that Velociraptor had large feathers on its forearms because in 2007 a team of scientists, including Dr Mark Norell at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, showed that a specimen excavated in Mongolia in 1998 had clear ‘quill knobs’ pitted into its forearms. ![]() What would a feathered Velociraptor look like? Watch a clip of Australian Geographic editor John Pickrell talking to ABC News 24 about feathered dinosaurs and the links between dinosaurs and birds: ![]() The photo above is a life-size reconstruction of Deinonychus created by Stephen Czerkas for the Vienna Museum of Natural History, in Austria, and reveals the animal to have been fully feathered, very much as experts now believe this species and Velociraptor would have looked in life. These may have helped them work as a pack to bring down larger herbivores these proto-wings would have provided a bit of lift as the animals ran and leapt into the air, vicious sickle claws outstretched. ![]() Though Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton could have had no idea when he penned the book in 1990, we now know that Velociraptor, and its North American counterparts Deinonychus and Dromaeosaurus, may have had long feathers on their forearms – in effect small wings. Golden age of dinosaur discoveryĬurrently around one species of dinosaur is discovered every week – most in China, Mongolia, South America and Africa, revealing that we really are in the golden age of dinosaur science. More than 40 species of feathered dinosaur have now been discovered in China, and they’ve shown us that carnivorous dinosaurs from all over the world were very probably feathered, even if their fossils retain no traces of them. ![]()
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