Velociraptor Awareness Day

Dinosaur appreciation days are few and far between -- but the Velociraptor is a special case. Listen in as Allison and Robert explore the amazing abilities and physiology of the Velociraptor in this podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. Wow, hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
This is Alison I don't know what, the science editor
how stuff works dot com. And this is Robert Lamb,
science writer at how stuff works dot com. Alison, do

(00:23):
you know what April eighth is? I have a sneaking
suspicion it is Velociraptor Awareness Day, or at least that's
what the Internet tells us. It's kind of picking up
as like an Internet sensation, kind of a deal, kind
one of those mean things. It's all over Facebook that
a few pages up about it, and lots and lots
of followers. People are getting excited about it, defriending it.

(00:45):
They're saying they like it, and other people were liking that,
you know, all the stuff that goes on. People are
pretty into the raptors now. I don't think they have
any other dinosaur appreciation days. Do you know not that
I know this is special because of loco Raptor is
a special dinosaur. This is a this is a hip dinosaur,
or this is not a Diplodocus or anything. Stegasaurus and
a lot of people think velociraptors are pretty special. So

(01:07):
we've decided to vote this podcast to said dinosaur. Yeah,
we're just gonna talk about some of the awesome things
about the velociraptor that you should be aware of for
your awareness day. Um, most people are familiar with velociraptors
pretty much from Jurassic Park. I think that's really what
set it off, Michael Crichton's novel and the subsequent three
for at least three films more on the way, But basically,

(01:30):
this is the smaller dinosaur in the Jurassic Park, not
the tiny one, but the the smaller villainous dinosaur they're about.
They would tend to be like five ft long, uh
stand depending on how they're stooping, like three ft tall
or up to like five you know, um, you know,
sort of a longish neck, uh, long tail, long tail,

(01:52):
kind of an evil birdish head. Um. Not super tiny
front arms, but you know, some smaller front arms, and
then their feet terminating these three point five inch retractable
clause like huge talents. Uh. And that's where really all
the fun is because they're like carrying into things with
those right to the whole movie and also in the movie,

(02:13):
they they're they're super smart right there, they're they're opening
doors and uh and sam Neils talking about how they're
smartest chimpanzees. And then there's that awesome scene where like
the really um um like cool Hunter is gonna gonna
shoot one, right, he's not because what he thinks he's
gonna walk into right into into arrange and then something

(02:36):
wrestles in the bushes by him and when what does
he say? Girl? Right? And then he gets eaten because
he's so cool that the moment before he's eating alive
by a dinosaur, he's like, oh, she's pretty smart, you know,
Like who does that? Who has that moment of clarity
before they're eating alive? Nobody? But but anyway, it's at
that moment especially has has really taken off among velociraptor fans.

(02:57):
You can get a shirt that says clever girl, that's
a velociraptor head on it. Yeah, so are they that clever?
I'm not sure that they are. And that's our first
cool awareness fact for the Raptor Awareness Day. How smart
are they? Well? Paleontologists and some other folks like to
use a measurement called the encephalization quotient, and and incephilization

(03:17):
quotation is a way to tell an animals intelligence from
the size of its brain roughly, And why would we
use this technique, Well, because, I mean, we can't really
test the intelligence of dinosaurs, now, can we. We can't
put them in a cage and give them color blocks
or anything. Yeah, so the EQ tends to compensate for
the fact that large animals tend to have proportionately smaller

(03:38):
brands and small animals regardless of intelligence, And the velociraptor
had an EQ of less than zero point too. So
what does this mean to you? Probably not much. I mean,
I'm not sure that you're talking about eques on a
regular basis at the dinner table. So to give you
some some guidelines for that humans, roughly, I have an
EQ of about seven. Your dolphins pretty smart teachers. They

(04:00):
have an EQ of about four or five, and chimps
maybe about two. And once again, velociraptor point to, yes,
point to, But in their favor, I will say that
the velociraptor may have been roughly comparable to the intelligence
of an ostrich and I have immense respect for the ostrich. Yeah,
we read a bunch of about them recently. Um for

(04:20):
the Life TV show that's gonna be airing or is
airing Undiscovery, So clever girl, maybe not so much. Al right. Well,
and our second awareness fact is the idea of a
feathered raptor. Now in the Jurassic Park, they do not
have feathers. They're very leathery looking. You know, you're kind
of that greenish brown. Yeah, you're more typical typical dinosaur

(04:43):
color scheme. Well Um paleontologist at the American Museum of
Natural History and the Field Museum of Natural History, UM
documented the presence of feathers in velociraptors in two thousand seven. Uh.
In my backup for a second need a stress that
the first velociraptor was found in in Mongolia, all right,

(05:03):
Uh And in two thousands of two thousand seven, studies
looking at one that they had unearthed in Mongolian and
they found clear indications of quill knobs. And these are
places where the quills of secondary feathers, the flight or
or wing feathers of modern birds were anchored to the
bones with ligaments. All right. Cool knobs are also found

(05:25):
in many living bird species and are most evident in
birds that are strong flyers. UM, so nobody's saying that
the velociraptor could fly. Basically, the idea here is that
they definitely had some feathers, and they were probably they'd
probably just evolved from a a wing flying form a
dinosaur and then eventually became more dependent on hunting on

(05:48):
the land. But they likely kept the feathers around for
other reasons. Yeah, like you know, maybe they at truck
some ladies, right, always going to have some colorful plumage
for that. UM also temperature control UM. The road runner,
the actual road runner, not the cartoon road runner, actually
uses its feathers to regulate temperature by using them to
determine how much uh heat it absorbs from the sun.

(06:11):
UM also could have used them while running. The Ostrich Actually,
you know, the ostrich has these little bitty uh seemingly
pointless wings uh and these enormous legs. What actually uses
those little um those little wings to steer and sort
of balance itself while usch running at high speeds? And
they think that might have been a possibility with the
velociraptor as well. I wonder if we should call us

(06:32):
the Ostrich Awareness Podcast instead. I think Ostrich Awareness Days
it's it's in the future. Yeah, it's it's a little
a little early for that, but one day, one day.
So let me give you awareness fact number three. Velociraptors
perhaps were warm blooded. And why might we think they
were warm blooded? Well, because they were high energy hunters

(06:54):
and they also have the presence of feathers that Robert
just talked us through. But another key thing is that
they may have these high powered oxygen pumps. Right, because
if you're going to go on, as you know, super
intense hunting expedition, what are you gonna need If you're
gonna chase down your prey, You're gonna need oxygen, right,
You're gonna need to have an excellent respiratory system. So
there are a bunch of researchers out of Ohio University
who published a study in Nature, and there are theorizing

(07:17):
that these high powered oxygen pumps and raptors could have
boosted dinosaur metabolism, enabling me eators like you know, your
t rax, your raptor and others to be you know,
these very effective and active hunters. And all of this
comes down to air sacks and the bones, and they
were able to they observe these air sex systems and
like two hundred different modern birds and then saw some

(07:37):
of the same patterns with loss of raptors. That's pretty cool. Yeah,
So for awareness fact number four, we're gonna come back
to those three point five inch retractable clause. Previously, panatologists
thought that this you mean, because you look at a
giant claw and you think like gashing. It just looks
like something you would just gash into something with and
like like just rip in three foot abdominal gash, you know,

(07:58):
blood gushing out right. Well, some researchers at the University
of Manchester in the UK, led by Phil Manning, actually
built a robotic claw based on the fossil of a velociraptor. Yeah,
like a robotic velociraptor arm with the claws. Another group
um did this very similar thing with a saber tooth tiger.

(08:20):
I think they did like a whole there's like a
whole special about this, a TV special where they built
like this robot thing on the end of a crane
with saber tooth teeth and they would take it up
to a dead cow and like just ram it in
and tell me, yeah they did. You went for sharks, Yeah,
where they simulate the sharks bite to try and figure
out how it works, and there's a scary amount of

(08:41):
research going into how to build like robot killer animals.
But the whole purpose of this course is to actually
test out this claw on an actual I think in
this case it was a pig, dead pig, all right,
So they would use hydraulics to drive it into the
side of the pig, trying you know, trying different velocities,
mimicking kick um, and they found that the claw would

(09:03):
only really result in the puncture. So this led to
this theory that the velociraptor actually use these things to
grip onto the prey. They would jump onto its back
like you know some sort of weird dinosaur cowboy I guess,
or or like cheat is actually do when running down
an Austria. So they would just they would just jump on,
dig those those retractable claws into its side to hold

(09:25):
on and then just start biting and just and flick
a large number of wounds and at this point um
either they bring the animal down or another theory is
that they just wounded enough and then they jump off
and then they just follow the animal until it bleeds
to death and or it bleeds out so much that
they can just pick it off. It's like the Komodo dragon.
The follow its follows its prey for weeks and beta.

(09:47):
We podcasted about that a few weeks back. Yeah, we
love Komotos and velociraptors. Yeah, velocity veloco raptors pretty awesome.
I mean, I love the komotos, but these guys really
have them late. So Phil man the same guy who
was working on that robotic claw, evidently had a lot
of time on his hand and he evidently is a
lover of velociraptors too, because he took the trouble to

(10:10):
find out if this hand claw that he made um
could support the dinosaur's weight when it was climbing. And
this is wareness fat number five. Yeah, awareness fact number five,
Thank you. Robert and Manning suggested that the velociraptor used
its climbing ability to kind of lurk in the trees
and perch in the trees and then you know, along
come some unsuspecting prey and whammo, just leaped right out

(10:33):
of the trees. I'm thinking we're going to see that
in Jurassic Park four. They're just gonna be seene where
a guys out there hunting the tree hunting, not hunting
the trees, hunting the velociraptors. And he's looking around, where
are they right? And then he looks up and then
what is it? Nothing but velociraptors just crowded in the
trees like pigeons, girl, and then they come down on him. Yes,
and Manning got the idea for velociraptors hanging out up

(10:54):
in the trees, um thanks to the microraptor, which is
a tiny dinosaur in the same Emily but which lived
fifty million years before. And um, it also had four
feathered limbs to help it glide down from trees. But
not everyone is really sold on this climbing ability, right, Yeah.
Basically the counter argument um made by some paleontologists is

(11:15):
that is that there weren't going to be as many
trees around that the velociraptor would be able to climb,
and that while it then it may have had some
ancestors that climb trees and jump down on things, that
um that it was really just using these more to
anchor itself on its prey and bite like we were
talking about in fact number four. So the trees couldn't
support its weight, So I mean maybe like a sequoia,

(11:35):
maybe if it climbs, I'm guessing like maybe the other
thicker trees. Either way, it's a fantastic mental image. So
April eighteenth, UM, if you go to the Facebook page
for you know, just do a Facebook search for the
Philosciraptor Awareness Day, you'll find that they have a number
of different recommendations for ways to celebrate UM. Some of

(11:56):
the ones we particularly like. There's one where you to
read up on the latest info and be prepared to
hold and PROMPTU seminars on the streets. And I would
just modify that to UM your break room, if necessary,
your elevator, or maybe while you're driving, you know, to work,
you troll out your window and talk to the guy
next to you stopped at the stop, fling the facts
that we mentioned here, do a little independent research on

(12:18):
the net. UM you didn't start, you know, whipping out
your dinosaur facts on on the train. People will love you.
There also was another favorite that that Robert and I liked,
and this one was dress up. Dress up as a
looser raptor, you know, hold some mock attacks throughout the
day to to really, especially in the workplace. Yeah, feel
free to test out that climbing ability thing and tell
us how that works out for you. And maybe that

(12:39):
can add to a film film Manning's body of research.
Perch up in the trees, because really we're unprepared for it,
like he'd like. Here at work, we do regular like
fire drills and all. But whence the last time we
had a losser raptor drill? Never never had it. One
could just come in here and just have the pick
of us. It sure could, sure could, which is why
Alasser Raptor Awareness Day is such a good idea. It's

(13:02):
an excellent idea. So, uh, if you're gonna if you're
planning to celebrate in some way, shape or form on
April eighteenth, um, tell us about it. Did you have it?
Are you're gonna have a lost Raptor party? Great? Take
some photos, shoot them our way. We'd love to see him. Yeah,
if you're gonna dress up as alost Raptor, please be
send us the photos definitely, and of course you know
how to do that. Send us any emol at science

(13:23):
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