Raptor Attack

"Try to imagine yourself in the Cretaceous Period. You get your first look at this "six foot turkey" as you enter a clearing. He moves like a bird, lightly, bobbing his head. And you keep still because you think that maybe his visual acuity is based on movement like T. rex - he'll lose you if you don't move. But no, not Velociraptor. You stare at him, and he just stares right back. And that's when the attack comes. Not from the front, but from the side, from the other two 'raptors you didn't even know were there. Because Velociraptor's a pack hunter, you see, he uses coordinated attack patterns and he is out in force today. And he slashes at you with this... a six-inch retractable claw, like a razor, on the the middle toe. He doesn't bother to bite your jugular like a lion, say... no no. He slashes at you here... or here... or maybe across the belly, spilling your intestines. The point is...you are alive when they start to eat you."
—Dr. Alan Grant, Jurassic Park

Ever since Jurassic Park made Velociraptor a household name, its iconic image - a man-sized, intelligent, vicious, scaly killer - has appeared countless times in popular culture, usually as a Shout-Out to, well, Jurassic Park. In Real Life, Velociraptor were about the size of turkeys, though there was another "raptor", Utahraptor, that more closely matches Jurassic Park's depiction in terms of size. As you can imagine, it causes paleontologists an unending amount of sweet, tasty tears.

Besides Velociraptor itself, this trope potentially encompasses all portrayals of other deinonychosaurian dinosaurs in media as well: the dromaeosaurids and troodonts. Interestingly, some recent[when?] analyses suggest that the so-called "first bird" Archaeopteryx may either be a deinonychosaur as well (in other words, closer to Velociraptor than to modern birds), or less close to modern birds than deinonychosaurs are. In any case, it's worthy to note that in spite of its iconic status, there is very little anatomical difference between Archaeopteryx and small deinonychosaurs, and, potential color patterns aside, you'd probably have no luck telling them apart in life. This has even led to speculation that traditional deinonychosaurs may have had ancestors who became flightless.

For a more thorough listing of the inaccuracies that tend to show up in various works, see the folder below. For good examples of accurate deinonychosaur portrayals, see this website.

Basically a deinonychosaurian equivalent of Ptero-Soarer.

Subtrope of Everything's Better with Dinosaurs, Stock Dinosaurs, and Somewhere a Palaeontologist Is Crying. Related to Somewhere an Ornithologist Is Crying and Tyrannosaurus Rex.

For the other kind of raptor, see Big Badass Bird of Prey.

Common Inaccuracies in Media

  • Being covered in scales instead of feathers. If present in older works this is a victim of Science Marches On, but we've known since 1999 that deinonychosaurs had feathers.[1] On real deinonychosaurs, scales were only present on the lower legs and feet, if at all (some had completely feathered feet).
  • In the event that deinonychosaurs are portrayed with feathers, it is very, very unlikely that the feather distribution and structure will be portrayed accurately. One of the most common mistakes on this front is to have the wing feathers end at the wrist, even though we know that deinonychosaurs actually had wing feathers attached to the second finger as well. Only partially feathering deinonychosaurs is also generally incorrect. It is common for many depictions of feathered deinonychosaurs to portray them as a weird hybrid between a bird and a lizard, probably to highlight their "missing link" iconism. However, we know that deinonychosaurs were almost entirely feathered other than the tip of the snout and sometimes the feet. (Though it is not unreasonable to suggest that the largest deinonychosaurs may have had some naked patches similar to ostriches today.) For a long time it was thought that deinonychosaurs only had pennaceous (modern-style) feathers on the wings and tail (and sometimes the legs), with the rest of the body being covered in protofeathers, but a new study has shown that these protofeathers are likely just misinterpreted pennaceous feathers. So, like modern birds, deinonychosaurs actually had pennaceous feathers all over the body. Incidentally, the pennaceous feathers of many modern flightless birds (such as kiwis) are degraded and hair like, so it's possible that flightless deinonychosaurs were similar.
  • The hands will be twisted around so that the palms point backwards towards the body, kind of like a zombie. In reality, deinonychosaurs (in fact, most dinosaurs) have palms that naturally face one another, and twisting them around like that would break the wrists. Biomechanical studies have shown that deinonychosaur palms would actually rotate upwards when the wrists were extended, which would have helped them clutch objects to the chest.
  • Deinonychosaurs will often be depicted as Lightning Bruisers, among the speediest of all dinosaurs. While troodonts and basal dromaeosaurids were well built for running, the larger, more derived dromaeosaurids (including Velociraptor and Deinonychus) were not. In fact, going by leg proportions alone, derived dromaeosaurids were among the worst runners among all theropods (meat-eating dinosaurs). As early as the 1960s, scientific analyses have concluded that advanced dromaeosaurids were built for short-range acceleration and low-speed endurance running instead of high-speed sprinting, and even the bone walls of Utahraptor are around twice as proportionally thick as those of Allosaurus. However, the leg structure does indicate that they do appear to have been very agile and had a good sense of balance, which sort of makes up for it. In sum, advanced dromaeosaurs were more akin to Jacks of All Stats than what the movies say, in that they stressed more emphasis on claw-to-claw dogfighting than fleetness of foot.
  • Animal Eyes, combined with Rule of Scary and, to some extent, Reptiles Are Abhorrent. Cat-like eyes with slits for pupils are the most common, which MIGHT be reasonable considering that the other closest relatives of dinosaurs, crocodilians, have slit pupils as well. However, given the fact that raptors are more closely related to birds, their eyes may well be more bird-like with round, fixed pupils. On the other claw, however, the typical raptor skull does not have a supraorbital ridge, so it would be rather unrealistic to give your raptor the same "eagle scowl" as that of the other type of raptor, the Big Badass Bird of Prey.
  • Bigger Is Better combined with Taxonomic Term Confusion, where works depict "Velociraptor" as being more similar to Deinonychus and sometimes nearing the size of Utahraptor, the Trope Maker being Jurassic Park, due to Michael Crichton using paleo artist Gregory Paul's book (which considered Deinonychus a species of Velociraptor) as a source for his novel. This is typically a result of Follow the Leader when present in other works.
  • Overly flexible or overly stiff tails. Due to their tails being surrounded by ossified tendons, deinonychosaur tails were probably not sinuous and whip-like as shown in Jurassic Park. At the same time, it is a common meme among paleo artists to draw deinonychosaur tails as being stiff rods almost incapable of bending except at the base. Though true to a degree, fossils of sleeping deinonychosaurs such as Mei show that their tails were flexible enough to curl around the body.
  • Extreme intelligence. Prior to the discovery that modern birds are dinosaurs, deinonychosaurs were widely considered "the most intelligent dinosaurs". (Just look at the door-opening raptors from Jurassic Park.) Based on brain-to-body ratio and brain structure, deinonychosaurs do appear to have been quite intelligent among Mesozoic dinosaurs. In fact, their encephalization quotient is actually much higher than that of modern-day crocodilians, (which may not sound like that much of a compliment, at first, until you remember that, according to a recent study, crocodilians are actually as intelligent as dogs), and comparable to those of some modern birds. However, they were almost certainly not as intelligent as the most intelligent birds alive today. A common paleo meme that arose in the 1980s was the idea that if dinosaurs never became extinct, the most intelligent species (i.e.: deinonychosaurs) would develop into humanoid forms. This, of course, overlooks the fact that the most intelligent dinosaurs (modern-type birds) were the ones that survived to begin with, as well as demonstrates something of a Humans Are Special attitude. After all, there isn't any good reason why hypothetical highly intelligent dinosaurs would necessarily develop a human-like body plan.
  • Being capable of taking on impossibly large prey. Due to their reputation as pack hunters (which is in itself debatable), deinonychosaurs are popularly shown killing prey much, much larger than themselves with ease. Although we know that some dromaeosaurids potentially preyed on larger prey (for example, one famous fossil preserves a Velociraptor fighting a Protoceratops, a herbivore that could have been up to twelve times its size in mass), many of these depictions show coyote-sized dromaeosaurids killing prey not just ten times their size, but several hundred times their size, such as adult hadrosaurs or even sauropods. This paleo-meme may have originated from John Ostrom's description of Deinonychus as a big-game hunter, using its claws to slash at its prey, but it is now known that its claws did not have the sharp lower edges required for this purpose. Instead, the more advanced dromaeosaurs would have used the hooked claws as piercing implements, hooking onto moderately sized targets such as juvenile hadrosaurs or small ceratopsians, and skewering their vitals (the Velociraptor vs. Protoceratops fossil, for example, shows that the raptor's killing claw is embedded in the ceratopsian's throat, where the jugular would be IRL). Furthermore, many other deinonychosaurs (such as troodonts and basal dromaeosaurids) likely specialized in small prey, not large ones. (Check out how comparatively small those teeth and claws are in Troodon.)
  • Overly useful hands. Many deinonychosaurs had long arms and big hands, and it is therefore tempting to think that they were actually used like human hands. It is not uncommon to see deinonychosaurs (again, especially Troodon) shown with opposable thumbs, even though the only deinonychosaur that has so far been biomechanically demonstrated to have had opposable thumbs is Bambiraptor, so most deinonychosaurs could only hold objects two-handed (or clutched them towards the chest). In reality, long as their arms were, deinonychosaurs couldn't reach further with their hands than they could with their mouths, and the large feathers known to have been present on the arms and hands of deinonychosaurs would have prevented their use in picking up food from the ground or digging (known traces of digging deinonychosaurs show they dug with their feet, as modern ground birds do). The hand claws were useful as grappling hooks and for holding food that couldn't be eaten in one gulp, but they likely weren't as dexterous as often portrayed.
  • Arms lifting above the back. As we now know that deinonychosaurs were very closely related to birds, artists often use modern birds as references for deinonychosaurs (as well as other basal birds). This normally isn't a bad thing (most deinonychosaur portrayals aren't birdlike enough), but it can still be misleading. Many small deinonychosaurs may have had some flying or gliding ability, so they are often shown with their arms lifted above the back in a flight stroke. However, biomechanical studies of deinonychosaurs and basal birds show that they could only lift their arms to the sides at most, and powered flight as in modern birds evolved in more derived birds.
  • Pseudobeaks. In the same vein as the previous, another common way artists attempt to make their deinonychosaurs more birdlike is to add a beak-like sheath on the snout of deinonychosaurs. In fact, we know that deinonychosaurs actually had feathers covering most of the snout, and as they had a full complement of teeth, they didn't really need a beak as well. (Even in prehistoric birds with both beaks and teeth, the beak doesn't occupy the same space as the teeth.) Deinonychosaurs that preserve facial integument show a featherless region at the very tip of the snout, but even then there's no evidence for a keratinous sheath there.
  • Inaccurate family life. Possibly due to extrapolation from modern predatory birds, it is popular to portray dromaeosaurids as living in mated pairs with the female brooding the eggs, feeding their young, and sometimes nesting in trees. Based on body to clutch size ratio, however, it was probably the males that brooded the eggs, and the sheer number of eggs in known deinonychosaur nests means that the males probably had multiple mates (as, frankly, there are too many eggs per nest to fit in one female). Young deinonychosaurs were capable of running around after hatching, so it's not unlikely that they hunted at least some of their food on their own instead of being fed. Although deinonychosaurs (especially the smaller ones) may have climbed trees, ground nesting appears to be basal among birds, even flying ones,[2] so deinonychosaurs probably mostly nested on the ground as well (and, indeed, are known to have done so).


Examples of Raptor Attack include:

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  • This Gatorade commercial from the 90s featuring velociraptors from Jurassic Park taking on Vince Carter of the Toronto Raptors . . . in a basketball game.


Comic Books

  • Old Lace from the comic book series Runaways is a genetically engineered Deinonychus. Interestingly enough, she looks just like the Jurassic Park-style Velociraptors and has been mistaken for one as well.

Documentaries

  • Three episodes of the Discovery Channel miniseries Dinosaur Planet featured "raptors". The first one was about a female Velociraptor named "White Tip" (due to her white feathers) trying to find a new pack. The second was about a male Pyroraptor named "Pod" who ends up on an island inhabited by dinosaurs much smaller than he is including a pack of mini troodonts. In a third episode, Troodon proper shows up. They were commendably portrayed with feathers, but not quite extensively enough (for example, they lacked pennaceous feathers).
  • In the Speculative Documentary / parody Prehistoric Park, a Troodon, later named Rascal, causes trouble by attempting to steal the bait truck. This sets off a chain reaction of accidents in the park, culminating in the climactic T-Rex escape scene. This one lacked feathers. Another episode also featured the troodont Mei and the dromaeosaurid Microraptor, the former of which also lacked feathers, and the latter of which suffered some mild Anachronism Stew and splayed its legs while gliding, something that has since been debunked.
  • Walking with Dinosaurs had scaly raptors and in one episode, Utahraptor was shown living in Europe.
  • Clash of the Dinosaurs had feathered Deinonychus, though again not quite extensively feathered enough. Two Deinonychus also kill a subadult Sauroposeidon with a few superficial scratches. Its sort-of sequel Last Day of the Dinosaurs has something similar: two Saurornithoides (which used the same model as the Deinonychus) kill an adult Charonosaurus.
  • Jurassic Fight Club featured Deinonychus, Dromaeosaurus, and Utahraptor, all of which either lacked feathers altogether or had only a tiny crest of them.
  • March of the Dinosaurs had Troodon as one of the main characters. They also aren't feathered properly (though they have feathers), but behaviour—wise are mostly plausible.
  • Monsters Resurrected briefly featured Deinonychus in one episode (sans feathers).
  • The Truth About Killer Dinosaurs focused on Velociraptor in one of the two episodes, discussing how Velociraptor may have used its killing claw in predation. The fact that dromaeosaurids had feathers is given some attention, though (as usual) the feathering given to the animated Velociraptor isn't entirely accurate.
  • When Dinosaurs Roamed America was one of the first documentaries to feature feathered dromaeosaurids. The scientific consultants pointed out that the feathers should've been more pennaceous, but they reportedly didn't have enough of a budget to do realistic-looking pennaceous feathers.
  • Animal Armageddon featured half-arsed Velociraptor with the wrong skull shape and a pair of naked Troodon that take down a subadult hadrosaur.
  • Dinosaur Revolution heavily averts this trope and the deinonychosaur portrayals are the most accurate in any media so far, with raptors with clawed wings, male deinonychosaurs sitting on the nests and omnivorous Troodons.
  • Planet Dinosaur went both ways by producing some of the most well-feathered dromaeosaurid television reconstructions to date, but the modelers still attached the wing feathers to the wrong finger, and their troodontids are no more than old-fashioned, lizard-like critters outfitted with a very thin feather coating, and have no wings, nor a tail fan.
    • They also made Sinornithosaurus venomous, which was a theory that was panned some months before it was released (even though they included research that was more recent than the rebuttal to the venomous Sinornithosaurus hypothesis).


Films -- Animated

  • The third The Land Before Time movie features JP-style raptors as the main sharptooth opponents.
  • Disney's Dinosaur provides a rather... interesting handling of this. The Velociraptors that attack Aladar and the lemurs just right before they are all rescued by the Herd are the first of their kind to be drawn anatomically correct in film history - small, weedy, and with properly oriented wrists - but unfortunately they still don't have feathers. In fact, they may even avert this trope if it weren't for the fact that they were scaly. This may probably have been due to Executive Meddling, since the higher-ups apparently thought it was cheaper and creepier that way, although Science Marches On may have also seeped in a bit.


Films -- Live-Action

  • Jurassic Park, naturally, is the Trope Maker and Trope Codifier.
    • By the end of the 3rd movie, they have proven to be fully sapient. The only reason they are not as smart as us is because they are smarter. They are even observed to OPEN DOORS! (Not by breaking mind you, they open it like a human normally would.)
    • And when they can't, they throw themselves desperately through the window to reach the food!
    • The third film gave them some color - to the male raptors. Somewhat justified, in that the first and second film's raptors were female or changed to males.
    • It also gave their adversaries the skull-phlebotinum, the new handy dictionnary for Raptorese.
  • The 2005 remake of King Kong introduces the Venatosaurus, a fictional genus of dromeosaurid. For starters, they have scaly skin, prognated hands, and slit pupils. They are shown posessing great speed and strength, and make the examples involving deinonychosaurs bringing down adult hadrosaurs seem plausible, because they are shown hunting a large herd of adult sauropods.
  • Raptors appear as the antagonists in the found footage film Tape 407.


Live-Action TV

  • Primeval features raptors in some episodes, Jurassic Park-styled. All of them have head plumage, in the style of the raptors in Jurassic Park 3.
    • A Super Persistent, time-traveling, Raptor is even used to deliver some Laser-Guided Karma to one of the Big Bads, tracking them through multiple temporal leaps.
    • Tree Creepers resemble muscular, long-armed raptors.
  • In the BBC show My Pet Dinosaur, speculating on human's relationships with dinosaurs had the meteor not hit, had scaly Troodons as the equivalent of raccoons and foxes.


Literature

  • Raptor Red, a novel by paleontologist Bob Bakker, is told from the POV of a female Utahraptor. Deinonychus and troodonts also show up in the story. Speculation aside, the deinonychosaurs are portrayed accurately for their time, but are illustrated without feathers. Also, Deinonychus and Utahraptor weren't actually contemporaneous, though both lived in North America in the Early Cretaceous.
  • The protagonist of Anonymous Rex, Vincent Rubio, actually is a velociraptor (and a Private Detective in modern Los Angeles). He describes his hide as green and scaly, claiming that his species allegedly having had feathers, and in fact the entire K-T extinction, are part of an elaborate hoax designed to keep humans in the dark about the continuing survival of the dinosaurs. (Of course, he also mentions his external ears and the very lizardy Healing Factor of a group of ornithomimids, so... yeah.) For the most part, he acts human, but can jump and fight like a true dino if there's a need for it.
  • In Dinotopia, it is almost a given that some deinonychosaurs crop up from time to time, due to the Loads And Loads Of Dinosaurs in this work. Two examples are Malik the Stenonychosaurus (today believed to be a synonym of Troodon) and Enit the Deinonychus, who both work in Waterfall City as the Time-Keeper and the Chief Librarian respectively. Both of these are victims of Science Marches On and lack feathers, which probably explains why they don't show up in the fourth book (which is filled with feathered depictions of deinonychosaurs and other dinosaurs, including Emperor Hugo Khan the Microraptor).


Tabletop Games

  • Absolutely parodied with Mortasheen's Bucbuclaw, an ugly chicken-looking thing, whose main attack involves parasitic poop-eggs.
  • Forgotten Realms even before Jurassic Park had "Riding Lizard" as the Drow cavalry mount of choice. Riding lizard is a sleek reptile, about camel-sized (but with long tail), that walks on all four, but can run on hind legs; it's mostly carnivorous and as such rather bold. On top of that, it can leap and got sticky pads that allow clinging to the walls, so it may climb like a spider or move along the ceiling by jumping between non-slippery stalactites, with rider on the back.


Toys

  • The Dino Riders toy line had not one, but two different sets with a Deinonychus. Until the introduction of a Rulon Quetzalcoatlus, it was therefore the only species that was ridden both by the heroes as well as by the evil guys.
  • The Jurassic Park toy line had of course a dozen different variations of the franchise's "trademark" dinosaur, the Velociraptor, ranging from simple repaints to completely different molds. Oh, and two Utahraptors.
  • There was a Meanie (Gross-out parodies of Beanie Babies) named Velocicrapper.
  • Dinobot from the Beast Wars line of Transformers toys, as well as his various repaints and retools. Hailing from the '90s, he was naturally a scaly, very robust looking Velociraptor, who strangely had six toes on each feet. In the animated show, he had only three (four would have been correct), and an incredibly bendy tail -- Justified in that he was really a robot. In the 2008 Universe 2.0 toy-line, he received an entirely new mold, up to modern engineering standards but sadly not to modern dino-science: instead, they went for a more show-accurate look, and even gave the toy a wavy tail where the original had a stiff one.
    • Grimlock form the comics was a step in the right direction: though his toy form was just a recolored, scaly Dinobot, he was illustrated with a thin covering of fuzz.
  • Two of the LEGO Dino sets have a giant, JP-styled, striped raptor.
    • The twin LEGO-lines Dino Attack and Dino2010 also had a figure called "raptor", but it was more like a random, generic theropod dinosaur with horns and a tailfin, in keeping with the mutant theme of the set-line.
      • In the same line, there were the "Mutant Lizards" which were rather raptor-like in appearance, and were the same size as most raptors in pop culture.


Videogames

  • Dino Crisis had Jurassic Park style "Raptors". And for its next trick, it had Super Persistent Predatory... Therizinosaurs. (To be fair, that particular group of animals was very poorly understood at the time. For Therizinosaurus itself, all we had were a pair of terrifyingly huge claws—it has since turned out that their owner looked less like a giant murderbeast and more like Big Bird.)
  • The game Off-Road Velociraptor Safari! is a work that features Velociraptors with feathers for once, if only because raptors getting hit by a car driven by a velociraptor wearing a pith helmet looks cooler with Perpetual Molt.
  • Pokémon Black and White has Archen and Archeops, who appear to based on deinonychosaurs/archaeopterygids and are (thankfully) covered in feathers. It must be noted that they lack the killing claws on their feet, however...
    • Grovyle and Sceptile, the evolutions of the 3rd gen Grass starter Treeko, have some raptor elements to them, such as inward-facing hands and leaves as "feathers". While they may be inaccurate, the line is mostly based on lizards.
  • Dead Space 2 features Necromorphs called Stalkers, whose shape, mannerisms and attack patterns are clearly influenced by JP-style raptors. In a Shout-Out, the console version features a trophy/achievement (earned by surviving the first encounter with them) called "Clever Girls".
  • The Monster Hunter series started with the Velociprey type enemies, which were actually more Velociraptor sized, but it turns out they were just immature versions. The larger Velocidrome Alphas were the first "large" monster most players fought. Tri replaced these with the Jaggi family, which lacked the "beak" of the Prey/Drome family.
  • Primal Carnage has typical scaly raptors, though the developers actually un-pronated their hands.
  • Fossil Fighters has several vivosaurs revived from fossils of deinonychosaurs like Velociraptor (V-Raptor), Bradycneme (Breme), Trodon (Tro), etc that play this trope straight. To be fair, none of the vivosaurs are realistic.


Web Originals

  • Philosoraptor: Seen here getting all chemistry nerdy.
  • The Tyrannosaur Chronicles: Subverted by a naked Deinonychus character, who is said to have shaved all her feathers off in order to star in Jurassic Park. The other deinonychosaurs are portrayed with feathers, though mostly not pennaceous ones, probably due to massive work load. More properly feathered deinonychosaurs have been shown to be in the works, but the Series Hiatus on this project has prevented them from yet making an appearance in the story.
  • Spec World: More or less completely averted, a little bit of Science Marches On aside,[3] to the point that the creators decided to kill off nearly all troodonts as a stealth Take That to humanoid dinosauroids (and indeed, no dinosauroids at all are allowed for the project).
    • Among the different kinds of dromaeosaur families that DO appear, only three are labeled as "raptors" per se. Other families include mattiraptors, hesperonychids, draks, ninjas, and arbros.
  • This Deviant ART group was created specifically to avert this trope.


Webcomics

  • Xkcd references this numerous times as an Author Phobia, like here.
  • Utahraptor from Dinosaur Comics.
  • Yoshi from Dr McNinja is a "classic" Jurassic Park Velociraptor (unfeathered, Deinonychus-sized). The authors admit that they do care more for Rule of Cool rather than scientific accuracy.
  • Marvin, Libby's pet dinosaur from Bloody Urban is a complete aversion- he's only about as big as a medium-sized dog with feathery tufts on his head and tail.
  • Some of the earlier pages in Dawn of Time (intentionally) depict Jurassic Park style dromaeosaurids. However, a feathered Velociraptor does show up in a flashback later on, and the dinosauroids that also feature in one of the story arcs refreshingly avert the "Lizard Folk dinosauroid" trope.
  • Skull and the Eumaniraptor Trio from Raptormaniacs avert this.


Western Animation

  • The Land Before Time television series had a pair of villainous Velociraptors named Screech and Thud who were often seen with the Big Bad Redclaw.
  • The villain of Dino Squad is a humanoid Velociraptor named Victor Veloci. Curiously, the mentor figure of the titular Squad is also a velociraptor-person.
  • Averted by the Velociraptor, Archaeopteryx, and Microraptor in Dinosaur Train. The Troodon and Deinonychus really lack plumage, however.
  • In an episode of the French animated Edutainment show Once Upon A Time, the characters watch as a group of '80-styled, kangaroo-Deinonychus attack a large Sauropod dinosaur. What makes them so "kangaroo" is that not only are they shown standing fully erect, they move around by hopping. Raptors can hardly get more retro than this!
  • The Velociraptor that gets locked into Jimmy's closet in a Jimmy Neutron episode is the standard JP-styled fare.
  • In Extreme Dinosaurs, three anthropomorphic raptors are the main villains.
  • Dinosaucers may or may not have one deinonychosaur with Teryx the Archaeopteryx, depending on the issue if her genus belongs into this clade or not. (See the paragraph in the introduction.)
  • The small carnivorous dinosaurs that attack our heroes in Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs are vaguely reminiscent of raptors, including the killing claws, but they are Guanlong, a genus of primitive tyrannosaur. In fairness to the movie, there ARE deinonychosaurs, but the Troodons (identified as such in the game) are depicted as naked vegetarians, while in reality they would have technically been omnivorous.
  • Averted in "The Rite of Spring" segment of Fantasia where no raptors are to be seen anywhere, as they all weren't even discovered at the time of that film's release (Fantasia was released in 1940, the first raptor skeleton wasn't discovered until the 1950s). However, there was an Archaeopteryx that flapped its wings like a bird, real Archaeopteryx most likely could only fly as well as a modern pheasant, peacock, or roadrunner.
  • I'm A Dinosaur had a very sparsely feathered Velociraptor with too broad a skull, a Troodon that might as well be a Coelophysis (yeah, have fun in the Arctic without feathers), a Sinornithoides that can't pronounce its own name[4] and a deinonychosaurian Megaraptor (which wasn't even considered a coelurosaur, let alone a deinonychosaur, at the time).
  • The Magic School Bus episode "The Busasaurus" featured a Troodon pack. Amusingly, they're sized accurately if you pay close attention, but they sort of tried to hide this using Forced Perspective. Being outright inaccurate wouldn't do on a science show, after all. They're also scaled, but the episode is from 1995.


Real Life

  • The NBA Basketball team the Toronto Raptors' imagery was directly inspired by the Jurassic Park craze of the mid-90's (the team was founded in 1995).
  1. ↑ Indeed, some possible deinonychosaurs such as Archaeopteryx and Rahonavis already showed evidence of feathers before then, but had not been recognized as deinonychosaurs when first discovered.
  2. ↑ Even basal birds that have evolved tree nesting, such as wood ducks, tend to nest in tree hollows instead of building a nest in the branches.
  3. ↑ Most acutely, some of Spec's dromaeosaurids being descended from Megaraptor, now known to have been a carnosaur rather than a giant dromaeosaurid
  4. ↑ Actually sine-OR-nih-THOY-deez, suh-NOR-nith-oyds in the show
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