Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff Lauren Vogelbaum. Here,
Speaker 1: Utah is prime dino hunting country. Of fossils representing more
Speaker 1: than one hundred and fifteen dinosaur species have been unearthed
Speaker 1: inside the state's borders. Most of these species weren't identified
Speaker 1: until recently, as in within the past twenty nine years. Truly,
Speaker 1: this is a golden age for paleontology in the Rocky
Speaker 1: Mountain West. One of the beasts found there, indeed, one
Speaker 1: that seems to be totally unique to Grand County, Utah,
Speaker 1: is the Utah raptor, a carnivorous dinosaur with frightful claws.
Speaker 1: It lived around one hundred and thirty five million years
Speaker 1: ago and boasts a few Jurassic Park connections, as the
Speaker 1: name raptor suggests. Yet, by various estimates, Utah Raptor could
Speaker 1: grow to be fifteen, eighteen, or perhaps even twenty three
Speaker 1: feet long. That's from about four and a half to
Speaker 1: seven meters. That could make this dino a whole lot
Speaker 1: bigger than any raptor in Steven Spielberg's filmography. The Utah
Speaker 1: Raptor was named the state's official dinosaur in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1: But this eventual home of the Utah Jazz basketball team
Speaker 1: and the Great Salt Lake looked very different. When Utah
Speaker 1: Raptor reigned about one hundred and thirty five million years ago,
Speaker 1: the Jurassic period of Earth's geologic history was coming to
Speaker 1: a close. It was followed by the Cretaceous period, which
Speaker 1: lasted until a mass extinction event about sixty six million
Speaker 1: years ago that killed off the last of the dinosaurs
Speaker 1: except for birds. Utah Raptor lived early in the Cretaceous.
Speaker 1: At that time, the face of Utah was transforming, thanks
Speaker 1: in no small part to everyone's favorite pretzel topping salt.
Speaker 1: Without it, we might not know that utah Raptor ever existed. Okay, along,
Speaker 1: before even the first dinosaurs showed up, there was a
Speaker 1: deep basin along what's now the Utah Colorado Border. Seawater
Speaker 1: flowed in and as it evaporated, it left behind giant
Speaker 1: piles of salt that were literally thousands of feet tall
Speaker 1: that is hundreds and hundreds of meters. A rocky debris
Speaker 1: later covered up those salt beds. As time passed, the
Speaker 1: now underground cache of salt started getting deformed by this
Speaker 1: heavy overlying material. Parts of Utah's terrain were raised up
Speaker 1: by the shifting salt, other spots dipped down. Grand County
Speaker 1: was one of those places where this movement or salt
Speaker 1: tectonics created big depressions across the landscape, and in the
Speaker 1: early Cretaceous these became the home of vibrant ponds and lakes.
Speaker 1: It was a perfect environment for future fossils. A North
Speaker 1: America was a fairly dry place in those days, an
Speaker 1: erosion was rampant, but here the inflow of water and
Speaker 1: sediment to these low elevation lakes did a good job
Speaker 1: of covering up and preserving the bodies of the animals
Speaker 1: that died there, animals like the Utah raptor. The two
Speaker 1: oldest assemblages of Cretaceous dinosaurs in the entire North American
Speaker 1: fossil record are both preserved in Grand County rocks. For
Speaker 1: the article this episode is based on How Stuff Works,
Speaker 1: spoke via email with Jim Kirkland, Utah's official state paleontologist.
Speaker 1: He explained about one hundred and thirty five million years ago,
Speaker 1: local subsidence in Grand County uniquely preserved a series of
Speaker 1: lakes and ponds teeming with lungfish, chain mail covered bony fish,
Speaker 1: and spiny sharks. Utah raptor stocked iguanodonts and young sauropods,
Speaker 1: while the heavily spined and armored gastonia looked on. Iguanodonts
Speaker 1: were beaked animals, Sauropods were long necked giants, and Gastonia
Speaker 1: was a type of armor plated dinosaur built like a
Speaker 1: living tank. All of them had vegetarian diets, though flowering
Speaker 1: plants hadn't developed yet. Most of the vegetation there consisted
Speaker 1: of conifers and ferns. A utah raptor was the biggest
Speaker 1: type of raptor, with an estimated weight of about six
Speaker 1: hundred to eight hundred pounds or two hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: to three fifty kilos. They would have been about the
Speaker 1: size of a large black bear or a small grizzly.
Speaker 1: As for the infamous velociraptor, it likely weighed in at
Speaker 1: just eighty five pounds or so about forty kilos. A
Speaker 1: native of Late Cretaceous Asia, the real velociraptor was a
Speaker 1: small bodied predator far removed from its Hollywood name sake.
Speaker 1: The raptors in the Jurassic Park franchise were inspired by
Speaker 1: larger species, but like all of these relatives, utah raptor
Speaker 1: had an outsized, sickle shaped claw on each foot. The
Speaker 1: animals held these claws upright as they walked. The claws
Speaker 1: had a core of bone measuring up to eight point
Speaker 1: seven inches that's twenty two centimeters long, and that's just
Speaker 1: the tip of the iceberg. Like modern eagles, utah raptor
Speaker 1: must have had keratin sheets covering its clawbones, which would
Speaker 1: have made these weapons even bigger than their naked skeletons
Speaker 1: suggest a utah raptor's arsenal was rounded out with long
Speaker 1: claw tipped arms and a mouthful of serrated teeth, all
Speaker 1: the better for tearing flesh technically. The first utah raptor
Speaker 1: fossils on record were discovered by paleontologist Jim Jensen of
Speaker 1: Brigham Young University in nineteen seventy five. However, and nobody
Speaker 1: knew quite what to make of these until a team
Speaker 1: led by Kirkland dug up another set of raptor bones
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety one. A utah raptor got its official
Speaker 1: name when Kirkland and his colleagues published a paper introducing
Speaker 1: the animal in nineteen ninety three, which fittingly is the
Speaker 1: same year that Jurassic Park was stomped into theaters. The
Speaker 1: creature's full scientific name utah Raptor Ostrom Mazie salutes raptor
Speaker 1: expert John Ostrom and animatronics creator Chris Mays, who helped
Speaker 1: the research effort. The scientists did consider calling the dino
Speaker 1: utah Raptor Spielbergey after a certain movie director, but that
Speaker 1: never came to pass. Utah Raptor remains are known from
Speaker 1: four different localities across Grant County. One of these sites
Speaker 1: has yielded a nine ton sandstone megablock filled with assorted
Speaker 1: dinosaur bones. According to researchers, that's probably what's left of
Speaker 1: a Cretaceous quicksand type pit. Some iguanadont bones are included
Speaker 1: in the mix, but the real highlight is the raptor material.
Speaker 1: Kirkland says that the block has yielded fossils from dozens
Speaker 1: of individual utah raptor, and in a stroke of luck,
Speaker 1: many of those were babies or juveniles when they died.
Speaker 1: That could bring us a few steps closer to understanding
Speaker 1: how this fearsome predator grew up. Today's episode is based
Speaker 1: on the article utah Raptor the Salty Saga of a
Speaker 1: Killer Dinosaur on how stuffworks dot Com, written by Mark Mancini.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how
Speaker 1: stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. For
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