I understand that Gregory S. Paul was the one that began the incorrect sizing of Velociraptor with the book "Predatory Dinosaurs of the World," as it should have been Deinonychus depicted in the Jurassic films, not Velociraptor. But a recent paper (Parsons & Parsons, 2015: Morphological variations within the ontogeny of Deinonychus antirrhopus (theropoda, dromaeosauridae)) indicate Deinonychus was only 1.09 meters tall, about 60 – 80 cm shorter than an average person, with other papers showing around the same height.
I stumbled upon this picture when trying to figure out the size of Utahraptor (attached). There was only one specimen of Utahraptor ever found, which described it as 7 m long and 500 kg in weight (Kirkland et al., 1993: A large dromaeosaur (theropoda) from the Lower Cretaceous of Eastern Utah)) and 1.8 m at the hip (Levitt, 2012: Utahraptor ostrommaysorum, from NHMU website). The image I found doesn't look like Utahraptor is 2 meters at the hip, and I was wondering if there were other references that described the size of Utahraptor rather than the one by Kirkland et al. (1993).
Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs gives the following values:
Utahraptor ostrommaysi
5.5 m (18 ft) TL, 300 kg (600 lb)
Deinonychus antirrhopus
3.3 m (11 ft) TL, 60 kg (130 lb)
Greetings,
Juliane
Juliane's answer is correct in regards to comparative sizes and I will leave it to the theropod specialists to provide any details that have been updated since the printing of the PFGD. On a taxonomic note...the species name for Utahraptor is variable and should be looked into carefully. The original species name given by Kirkland et al was ostrommaysi, but that was grammatically incorrect. The more recent and commonly used species name is ostrommaysorum (grammatically correct for recognition of more than one individual) and was, I believe, proposed by Olshevsky in 2000, but I do not have the exact citation.
Hi Rushan bin Abdul Rahman,
I think you misunderstood the subject and contant of Parsons, W.L., Parsons, K.M. 2015, Morphological variations within the ontogeny of Deinonychus antirrhopus (theropoda, dromaeosauridae. PLoS ONE 10(4): e0121476. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0121476
It is a study of the juvenile speciman MCZ 8791. They explicitly state in the Part about Skelettal Reconstruction of teh discussion that: "With some consideration for the position of the cervical vertebrae, the approximate body length of MCZ 8791 is 133.5 cm. This is compared to the length of the YPM/AMNH reconstruction [mind these are the adults used for comparision throughout the stdy] which is in “normal posture” approximately 2.5 meters."
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0121476
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Biological Science
- Zoology
- Ornithology