Velociraptors: Feathered Beasts?

From Bloomberg News: This really does not surprise me. I grew up in Manila, but spent a lot of time in the provinces, and I've gone to a few cockfights during a town's fiesta or what not. If you've ever seen a cockfight, it would not shock you to imagine a velociraptor being a vicious prehistoric rooster.

Here's the article:

Sept. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Velociraptors, the carnivorous dinosaurs featured in the ``Jurassic Park'' movie, probably looked different from their big-screen portrayal. Think chickens on steroids, three feet tall and adorned with feathers.

A fossil of the animal discovered in 1998 in Mongolia displays ``quill knobs,'' or places where flight and wing feathers in modern birds are lashed to the bone by ligaments, according to scientists from the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum in Chicago.

The dinosaur probably couldn't fly, because its forelimbs were too short, the scientists wrote in a report in the journal Science. The animal, which weighed about 30 pounds, probably used its feathers to signal mates, build nests, or control its movements while running, the scientists wrote.

``The velociraptor might have looked like a big chicken with a long tail, claws and teeth,'' said Mark Norell, head researcher on the study and a curator of paleontology at the New York museum, in a telephone interview today.

When scientists found feathers preserved with dinosaurs in China that were related to velociraptors, Norell and his team began looking at the predator to see if it, too, had feathers, he said. The evidence found wasn't for downy feathers, which regulate body temperature, rather than flight feathers.

``We're trying to understand this in the context of all the different feathered dinosaurs we've found,'' Norell said. ``And then we can try to understand them as a whole in relationship to modern birds.''

The shift from cold-blooded dinosaurs to warm-blooded birds took place gradually, over a long period of time, Norell said. Dinosaurs like the velociraptor might have used their feathers as modern birds do, to make themselves ``appear bigger and meaner,'' attract a mate, or line their nests, he said.

``A lot of people thought feathers in dinosaurs might be lost when dinosaurs got larger, but the dinosaurs retained them as ostriches do,'' he said.