Wht.Rbt.Obj

Couple of catch up things...
I'm going to stop with the silly codes before each post for a start... I've forgotten what my plan for those was..
Also prepping is coming along well for the orthocone blocks, the sandpaper arrived and I spent half an hour on one block last night and it's starting to look good

Ok then..


I thought I'd do a big thing explaining all of the various inaccuracies, errors and misconceptions surrounding the best three films ever made.
(I won't go into the continuity errors and such-like.. probably..

Seeing as this Wednesday is Velociraptor Awareness Day, there's only one logical place to start..

Velociraptor
Everyone knows the problems with these.. Too big, no feathers etc.. But there is more!
The 'raptors' in the films are around "6 feet tall and around about 9 feet long" (Grant, in JP1 & Burke in TLW) when they would have been 2-3 feet tall and 6 feet long tops. This is partly due to the discovery of Deinonychus, which was just before Michael Crichton wrote the original novel. One of the palaeontologists working on the Deinonychus discovery considered it a species of Velociraptor, and in the novel Grant says "Deinonychus is now considered one of the Velociraptors". Also, the shape of the snout in the films is much more akin the Deinonychus, whilst the snout of Velociraptor would have been much more gracile, and not as bulky.

Deinonychus would have grown up to 11 feet long, while the larger raptor sometimes blamed for the mistakes, Utahraptor, which was discovered in the year the first film was released, would have been 21 feet long!

On the subject of feathers, Velociraptor would have been largely covered (the underbelly and lower regions of the hindlimbs may not have been) with a downy covering of feathers, whilst the forelimbs would have had wing-like structures, with longer feathers around the elbow region and may have been used for display. Whether or not it had a JP III-style headcrest is unknown, but other feathered therapods are known to have one. It may also have had feathers that fanned out at the end of the tail.

There are other problems with the forelimbs of the films' 'raptors' as well, firstly, the orientation of the hand is wrong. The palms of all therapods would have faced each other, not facing backwards as is the case in almost every therapod reconstruction. The digits them selves are slightly wrong as well. Instead of having three equally sized fingers, the middle digit would have been longer than the others, with the 1st slightly shorter than the 3rd.


The tails in the film are also too short relative to body length and too flexible as well.

So... After all that, this is what a Velociraptor would have looked more like...


Next time... Brachiosaurus & Dilophosaurus