Large fossil footprints point to discovery of new ‘megaraptor’ dinosaur: study

Although the velociraptors from “Jurassic Park” are well known, they don’t look much like their historical counterparts.

The movie velociraptors are portrayed as 6 feet tall with scaly skin and incredibly fast, but the real velociraptors were almost as big as a medium-sized dog, standing about 1.6 feet tall and between 4.8 and 6 feet tall. .8 feet wide, scientists say. They also moved slower and may have had feathers.

However, scientists believe they may have discovered a relative of the velociraptor that was two or three times larger, a “megaraptor,” which is closer in size to the movie depiction, according to a new study published this week.

“When (Steven) Spielberg made ‘Jurassic Park,’ he blew up velociraptors to make them scary. Real velociraptors are, let’s say, the size of coyotes,” said Dr. W. Scott Persons, a paleontologist at the College of Charleston and Natural History Museum curator Mace Brown and one of the study’s authors told ABC News. “Yes, our animal lives up to the way Hollywood depicts birds of prey.”

A large group of dinosaur footprints, about 240, were discovered in the winter of 2020 on the outskirts of Longyan, in southeast China’s Fujian province, according to a study published Wednesday in Elsevier’s iScience journal.

“The giant raptor tracks were found as part of a much larger excavation at the site of the tracks,” Persons said. “In this locality, we have this huge mudstone deposit that is littered with all kinds of different dinosaur footprints, including many large herbivorous dinosaurs, many small herbivorous dinosaurs, several normal-sized birds of prey, and then there are the real big ones that coincidentally they were preserved there as well.”

The team found well-preserved footprints, about 14 inches long, which was unusual because the footprint featured only two toes.

People said it is unusual to find a dinosaur footprint with one of the toes missing because the preservation of the footprints is often incomplete.

“But having a complete set of footprints left, right, left, right, left, right, always missing the same toe on each foot is really unusual. And that’s the telltale marker of a dinosaur or dinosaur footprint. a predatory dinosaur,” he said.

The tracks are unique to birds of prey because their well-known curved talons stayed off the ground.

The team determined that the footprint was likely made by a relative of the velociraptor, which they named Fujianipus yingliangi.

Based on the tracks, the team was able to estimate that Fujianipus was about 15 feet in total length, about two to three times the total length of the velociraptor.

The team hopes to continue working in the area to uncover some skeletal material from the “megaraptor” and identify when it may have lived and what other animals may have existed during that time.

People said there’s another way the new raptor looks more like the velociraptors from “Jurassic Park” than real-life velociraptors.

“The velociraptors in ‘Jurassic Park’ are credited with being really fast, and it’s true: the velociraptor is not an animal you can escape from,” he said. “But the real Adonis is the group to which our animal belongs, they are the fastest birds of prey. They have the longest shins and feet that exist. That equates to them covering more ground with each step. These are the true speedsters of the tree genealogy of birds of prey”.