Velociraptor ancestor was 'winged dragon' And according to the short video in the link, that means velociraptor also had feathers and wings. They need to remake Jurassic Park again.
I've read they were very colorful too! But I think a giant bird with teeth is a lot less frightening than a reptile-like creature. lol
You think? I reckon a 'raptor could do a mean fan-dance with feathers like that, distracting prey long enough to get close enough to eat it/us!
I can buy that Velociraptor may have had some feathers. But I can’t imagine that it would have been brightly coloured. A bright yellow dinosaur wouldn’t be easily camouflaged. Still, perhaps everything we know about dinosaurs is wrong. Maybe Velociraptor wasn’t a hunter at all. Imagine how many books, written over the past hundred years, are going to need an update... Someone should go back and add add feathers to all the dinos in 'Jurassic World'. It might actually make it a good film!
I have this dilemma in my world building where life evolves on another planet. Birds have colorful plumage and they sing, so what kind of creatures would fill those niches and would feathers evolve twice. Locomotion, sight, hearing and so on will all evolve in any world. Creatures have to move about the cabin and they need to detect their surroundings. But do they need to sing? They need to find mates, so I am adding singing creatures. That leaves feathers. Bats fly without them. Were they an evolutionary fluke or something that would evolve more than once?
Feathers aren't necessary for flight. Insects fly too, and they don't have feathers. Feathers offer many benefits, such as waterproofing or protection from the elements, as well as allowing for displays, such as mating displays or warning displays. You use bats as an example; they can't see. They're use of echolocation, as well as the fact that they spend most of their lives in the dark, makes sight unnecessary.
It seems plausible to me that -- like fur and scales -- they could evolve as one variant of a layer of protection first. The way they overlap, mesh, flex, it all reminds me of armour.
Bats can see... They don't only fly in the dark, I've been sitting watching them hunting around my garden in the twilight over the last few weeks, and listened to their squeaks. I've also watched martins and swallows hunting insects...they also squeak whilst hunting, leading me to wonder whether they, too, use some form of echo-location. That gives an evolutionary benefit to get the singing process started. And it's only logical that, once an animal has developed hearing, it will find a way to fill the silence. It's likely that feathers didn't evolve in order to fly, but as a means of keeping warm - or as @Woof suggests, for protection.
I was trying to not get too specific with it, but, yes, you are right; all bats can see. Some have better eyesight than other. However, most species have terrible eyesight. They're eyes are not as well developed as other mammals. It's generally thought that they only use their eyes to detect changes in light level, to tell between day and night. They rely on their echolocation for the majority of their movement and all of their hunting, even when they are active at dusk. The squeaks you are hearing, I expect, aren't a part of their echolocation. If you can hear it, it's not being reflected fast enough for it to be of any use to a bat. There are blind animals out there; the majority of mole species are blind. It's believed that those with sight are being phased out by natural selection. It really does depend on the environment, as to whether an animal needs certain senses.
"Many people think bats are blind, but in fact they can see almost as well as humans. " http://www.bats.org.uk/pages/all_about_bats.html The squeaks will be travelling at the same speed as the noise my typing makes on the keyboard, or the warning horn of a car; the speed of sound. I suspect that what you mean is that their echo-locating squeaks are of such a high frequency that it should be outside my range of hearing. Maybe so. But I have heard high-pitched squeaks when I've watched bats (and martins) flying around. And I can't see any reason why echo-locating squeaks NEED to be particularly high-pitched. Perhaps to be easily distinguished - by the bat - from the lower-pitched noises of larger animals, so that the individual bat will know that it's his own echo he's locating upon.
Higher pitches would give better resolution. Basically, lower frequencies (= larger wavelengths) spread out more, so the bat would get echoes back from not just its target moth, but everything around it (thus be less able to tell exactly where the moth is). That's my assumption anyway; I figure a bat is basically a flying ultrasound machine (a pity that only it can see the screen). Having said that, there's no reason the audible (to us) pitches couldn't be used - I've heard them do that too. Perhaps that's when they're 'looking' further away (lower frequencies travel and penetrate better than high). Some blind people have learnt rudimentary echolocation, and for obvious reasons that involves audible clicks.
So, you'd expect that what I can hear is when it's looking for some prey, any prey, and it's looking at distance. Then, the closer it gets, and the more accurately it needs to locate its prey, the higher the pitch...a bit like turning up the magnification.
Be it echolocation, infrared sensitivity or whatever, the idea is some means of perceiving one's surroundings and locomotion are both going to be found regardless of which path evolution takes. And perceiving light is a logical route for evolution to take. But would feathers or hair or something else evolve as a covering?
What never fails to crack me up in the first JP film is how much of a gap there is between the t-rex's footsteps, if it is THAT close to the damn jeep, why on earth is it still striding as if it hops on one foot that is springloaded to ensure it lands about fifty feet farther along, I understand the dramatic license of using the thudding but it's still amusing. I really rate Crichton's first book, perfect balance but the second is disappointing as hell.
Wrong. Birds are them If you look out the window right now, you will see flying dinosaurs outside. As a great man once said on the subject, "... the fastest animal alive today is a small carnivorous dinosaur, Falco peregrinus. It preys mainly on other dinosaurs, which it strikes and kills in midair with it's claws. This is a good world."
It's true if you subscribe to the cladistic approach to taxonomy (I do!). Taxonomy is the science of classifying life into (usually hierarchical) groups: traditionally Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species and all that. There wasn't originally a consistent rule for what got grouped with what. In early days it would often be based on shared physical features or similar. The advent of DNA allowed for more detailed analysis of evolutionary patterns (phylogenetics), based on Occam's razor (the simplest explanation is most likely to be correct, statistically). Phylogenetics revealed that many of the traditional groups don't really reflect evolutionary patterns (e.g. a traditional group may include some-but-not-all descendents of each of two separate evolutionary lines). This raised the idea of cladistics - that a group should contain all the descendents of a common ancestor and no others (= a clade = monophyletic). So dinosaurs are a clade within reptiles, and birds are a clade within dinosaurs: as well as being dinosaurs, birds are reptiles too Cladistics hasn't been uniformly adopted by taxonomists though - if you care more about shared features than evolution, you might prefer the traditional groupings. And there's no reason you can't refer to both schemes, so the terminology can get confusing (e.g. "reptile" traditionally excludes birds, but if mentioned as a clade would include them). Palaeontologists have it tough because DNA is seldom available, so they have to come up with other ingenious ways to figure out evolutionary patterns!
Another little-known fact is that velociraptors were only about a foot and a half high at the hip: In fact, the "velociraptors" in Jurassic Park are cinematic reconstructions from the skeleton of Deinonychus: The author of the novel chose to call them velociraptors instead of (deinonychi? deinonychuses?) because "velociraptor" sounds cooler.
Grr. I'd planned to do some writing this morning. Instead I seemed to have surfed Wikipedia pages about the taxonomy of birds and dinosaurs.
