Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. Wow, hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: This is Alison I don't know what, the science editor
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. And this is Robert Lamb,
Speaker 1: science writer at how stuff works dot com. Alison, do
Speaker 1: you know what April eighth is? I have a sneaking
Speaker 1: suspicion it is Velociraptor Awareness Day, or at least that's
Speaker 1: what the Internet tells us. It's kind of picking up
Speaker 1: as like an Internet sensation, kind of a deal, kind
Speaker 1: one of those mean things. It's all over Facebook that
Speaker 1: a few pages up about it, and lots and lots
Speaker 1: of followers. People are getting excited about it, defriending it.
Speaker 1: They're saying they like it, and other people were liking that,
Speaker 1: you know, all the stuff that goes on. People are
Speaker 1: pretty into the raptors now. I don't think they have
Speaker 1: any other dinosaur appreciation days. Do you know not that
Speaker 1: I know this is special because of loco Raptor is
Speaker 1: a special dinosaur. This is a this is a hip dinosaur,
Speaker 1: or this is not a Diplodocus or anything. Stegasaurus and
Speaker 1: a lot of people think velociraptors are pretty special. So
Speaker 1: we've decided to vote this podcast to said dinosaur. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're just gonna talk about some of the awesome things
Speaker 1: about the velociraptor that you should be aware of for
Speaker 1: your awareness day. Um, most people are familiar with velociraptors
Speaker 1: pretty much from Jurassic Park. I think that's really what
Speaker 1: set it off, Michael Crichton's novel and the subsequent three
Speaker 1: for at least three films more on the way, But basically,
Speaker 1: this is the smaller dinosaur in the Jurassic Park, not
Speaker 1: the tiny one, but the the smaller villainous dinosaur they're about.
Speaker 1: They would tend to be like five ft long, uh
Speaker 1: stand depending on how they're stooping, like three ft tall
Speaker 1: or up to like five you know, um, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of a longish neck, uh, long tail, long tail,
Speaker 1: kind of an evil birdish head. Um. Not super tiny
Speaker 1: front arms, but you know, some smaller front arms, and
Speaker 1: then their feet terminating these three point five inch retractable
Speaker 1: clause like huge talents. Uh. And that's where really all
Speaker 1: the fun is because they're like carrying into things with
Speaker 1: those right to the whole movie and also in the movie,
Speaker 1: they they're they're super smart right there, they're they're opening
Speaker 1: doors and uh and sam Neils talking about how they're
Speaker 1: smartest chimpanzees. And then there's that awesome scene where like
Speaker 1: the really um um like cool Hunter is gonna gonna
Speaker 1: shoot one, right, he's not because what he thinks he's
Speaker 1: gonna walk into right into into arrange and then something
Speaker 1: wrestles in the bushes by him and when what does
Speaker 1: he say? Girl? Right? And then he gets eaten because
Speaker 1: he's so cool that the moment before he's eating alive
Speaker 1: by a dinosaur, he's like, oh, she's pretty smart, you know,
Speaker 1: Like who does that? Who has that moment of clarity
Speaker 1: before they're eating alive? Nobody? But but anyway, it's at
Speaker 1: that moment especially has has really taken off among velociraptor fans.
Speaker 1: You can get a shirt that says clever girl, that's
Speaker 1: a velociraptor head on it. Yeah, so are they that clever?
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that they are. And that's our first
Speaker 1: cool awareness fact for the Raptor Awareness Day. How smart
Speaker 1: are they? Well? Paleontologists and some other folks like to
Speaker 1: use a measurement called the encephalization quotient, and and incephilization
Speaker 1: quotation is a way to tell an animals intelligence from
Speaker 1: the size of its brain roughly, And why would we
Speaker 1: use this technique, Well, because, I mean, we can't really
Speaker 1: test the intelligence of dinosaurs, now, can we. We can't
Speaker 1: put them in a cage and give them color blocks
Speaker 1: or anything. Yeah, so the EQ tends to compensate for
Speaker 1: the fact that large animals tend to have proportionately smaller
Speaker 1: brands and small animals regardless of intelligence, And the velociraptor
Speaker 1: had an EQ of less than zero point too. So
Speaker 1: what does this mean to you? Probably not much. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that you're talking about eques on a
Speaker 1: regular basis at the dinner table. So to give you
Speaker 1: some some guidelines for that humans, roughly, I have an
Speaker 1: EQ of about seven. Your dolphins pretty smart teachers. They
Speaker 1: have an EQ of about four or five, and chimps
Speaker 1: maybe about two. And once again, velociraptor point to, yes,
Speaker 1: point to, But in their favor, I will say that
Speaker 1: the velociraptor may have been roughly comparable to the intelligence
Speaker 1: of an ostrich and I have immense respect for the ostrich. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we read a bunch of about them recently. Um for
Speaker 1: the Life TV show that's gonna be airing or is
Speaker 1: airing Undiscovery, So clever girl, maybe not so much. Al right. Well,
Speaker 1: and our second awareness fact is the idea of a
Speaker 1: feathered raptor. Now in the Jurassic Park, they do not
Speaker 1: have feathers. They're very leathery looking. You know, you're kind
Speaker 1: of that greenish brown. Yeah, you're more typical typical dinosaur
Speaker 1: color scheme. Well Um paleontologist at the American Museum of
Speaker 1: Natural History and the Field Museum of Natural History, UM
Speaker 1: documented the presence of feathers in velociraptors in two thousand seven. Uh.
Speaker 1: In my backup for a second need a stress that
Speaker 1: the first velociraptor was found in in Mongolia, all right,
Speaker 1: Uh And in two thousands of two thousand seven, studies
Speaker 1: looking at one that they had unearthed in Mongolian and
Speaker 1: they found clear indications of quill knobs. And these are
Speaker 1: places where the quills of secondary feathers, the flight or
Speaker 1: or wing feathers of modern birds were anchored to the
Speaker 1: bones with ligaments. All right. Cool knobs are also found
Speaker 1: in many living bird species and are most evident in
Speaker 1: birds that are strong flyers. UM, so nobody's saying that
Speaker 1: the velociraptor could fly. Basically, the idea here is that
Speaker 1: they definitely had some feathers, and they were probably they'd
Speaker 1: probably just evolved from a a wing flying form a
Speaker 1: dinosaur and then eventually became more dependent on hunting on
Speaker 1: the land. But they likely kept the feathers around for
Speaker 1: other reasons. Yeah, like you know, maybe they at truck
Speaker 1: some ladies, right, always going to have some colorful plumage
Speaker 1: for that. UM also temperature control UM. The road runner,
Speaker 1: the actual road runner, not the cartoon road runner, actually
Speaker 1: uses its feathers to regulate temperature by using them to
Speaker 1: determine how much uh heat it absorbs from the sun.
Speaker 1: UM also could have used them while running. The Ostrich Actually,
Speaker 1: you know, the ostrich has these little bitty uh seemingly
Speaker 1: pointless wings uh and these enormous legs. What actually uses
Speaker 1: those little um those little wings to steer and sort
Speaker 1: of balance itself while usch running at high speeds? And
Speaker 1: they think that might have been a possibility with the
Speaker 1: velociraptor as well. I wonder if we should call us
Speaker 1: the Ostrich Awareness Podcast instead. I think Ostrich Awareness Days
Speaker 1: it's it's in the future. Yeah, it's it's a little
Speaker 1: a little early for that, but one day, one day.
Speaker 1: So let me give you awareness fact number three. Velociraptors
Speaker 1: perhaps were warm blooded. And why might we think they
Speaker 1: were warm blooded? Well, because they were high energy hunters
Speaker 1: and they also have the presence of feathers that Robert
Speaker 1: just talked us through. But another key thing is that
Speaker 1: they may have these high powered oxygen pumps. Right, because
Speaker 1: if you're going to go on, as you know, super
Speaker 1: intense hunting expedition, what are you gonna need If you're
Speaker 1: gonna chase down your prey, You're gonna need oxygen, right,
Speaker 1: You're gonna need to have an excellent respiratory system. So
Speaker 1: there are a bunch of researchers out of Ohio University
Speaker 1: who published a study in Nature, and there are theorizing
Speaker 1: that these high powered oxygen pumps and raptors could have
Speaker 1: boosted dinosaur metabolism, enabling me eators like you know, your
Speaker 1: t rax, your raptor and others to be you know,
Speaker 1: these very effective and active hunters. And all of this
Speaker 1: comes down to air sacks and the bones, and they
Speaker 1: were able to they observe these air sex systems and
Speaker 1: like two hundred different modern birds and then saw some
Speaker 1: of the same patterns with loss of raptors. That's pretty cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So for awareness fact number four, we're gonna come back
Speaker 1: to those three point five inch retractable clause. Previously, panatologists
Speaker 1: thought that this you mean, because you look at a
Speaker 1: giant claw and you think like gashing. It just looks
Speaker 1: like something you would just gash into something with and
Speaker 1: like like just rip in three foot abdominal gash, you know,
Speaker 1: blood gushing out right. Well, some researchers at the University
Speaker 1: of Manchester in the UK, led by Phil Manning, actually
Speaker 1: built a robotic claw based on the fossil of a velociraptor. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like a robotic velociraptor arm with the claws. Another group
Speaker 1: um did this very similar thing with a saber tooth tiger.
Speaker 1: I think they did like a whole there's like a
Speaker 1: whole special about this, a TV special where they built
Speaker 1: like this robot thing on the end of a crane
Speaker 1: with saber tooth teeth and they would take it up
Speaker 1: to a dead cow and like just ram it in
Speaker 1: and tell me, yeah they did. You went for sharks, Yeah,
Speaker 1: where they simulate the sharks bite to try and figure
Speaker 1: out how it works, and there's a scary amount of
Speaker 1: research going into how to build like robot killer animals.
Speaker 1: But the whole purpose of this course is to actually
Speaker 1: test out this claw on an actual I think in
Speaker 1: this case it was a pig, dead pig, all right,
Speaker 1: So they would use hydraulics to drive it into the
Speaker 1: side of the pig, trying you know, trying different velocities,
Speaker 1: mimicking kick um, and they found that the claw would
Speaker 1: only really result in the puncture. So this led to
Speaker 1: this theory that the velociraptor actually use these things to
Speaker 1: grip onto the prey. They would jump onto its back
Speaker 1: like you know some sort of weird dinosaur cowboy I guess,
Speaker 1: or or like cheat is actually do when running down
Speaker 1: an Austria. So they would just they would just jump on,
Speaker 1: dig those those retractable claws into its side to hold
Speaker 1: on and then just start biting and just and flick
Speaker 1: a large number of wounds and at this point um
Speaker 1: either they bring the animal down or another theory is
Speaker 1: that they just wounded enough and then they jump off
Speaker 1: and then they just follow the animal until it bleeds
Speaker 1: to death and or it bleeds out so much that
Speaker 1: they can just pick it off. It's like the Komodo dragon.
Speaker 1: The follow its follows its prey for weeks and beta.
Speaker 1: We podcasted about that a few weeks back. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: love Komotos and velociraptors. Yeah, velocity veloco raptors pretty awesome.
Speaker 1: I mean, I love the komotos, but these guys really
Speaker 1: have them late. So Phil man the same guy who
Speaker 1: was working on that robotic claw, evidently had a lot
Speaker 1: of time on his hand and he evidently is a
Speaker 1: lover of velociraptors too, because he took the trouble to
Speaker 1: find out if this hand claw that he made um
Speaker 1: could support the dinosaur's weight when it was climbing. And
Speaker 1: this is wareness fat number five. Yeah, awareness fact number five,
Speaker 1: Thank you. Robert and Manning suggested that the velociraptor used
Speaker 1: its climbing ability to kind of lurk in the trees
Speaker 1: and perch in the trees and then you know, along
Speaker 1: come some unsuspecting prey and whammo, just leaped right out
Speaker 1: of the trees. I'm thinking we're going to see that
Speaker 1: in Jurassic Park four. They're just gonna be seene where
Speaker 1: a guys out there hunting the tree hunting, not hunting
Speaker 1: the trees, hunting the velociraptors. And he's looking around, where
Speaker 1: are they right? And then he looks up and then
Speaker 1: what is it? Nothing but velociraptors just crowded in the
Speaker 1: trees like pigeons, girl, and then they come down on him. Yes,
Speaker 1: and Manning got the idea for velociraptors hanging out up
Speaker 1: in the trees, um thanks to the microraptor, which is
Speaker 1: a tiny dinosaur in the same Emily but which lived
Speaker 1: fifty million years before. And um, it also had four
Speaker 1: feathered limbs to help it glide down from trees. But
Speaker 1: not everyone is really sold on this climbing ability, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Basically the counter argument um made by some paleontologists is
Speaker 1: that is that there weren't going to be as many
Speaker 1: trees around that the velociraptor would be able to climb,
Speaker 1: and that while it then it may have had some
Speaker 1: ancestors that climb trees and jump down on things, that
Speaker 1: um that it was really just using these more to
Speaker 1: anchor itself on its prey and bite like we were
Speaker 1: talking about in fact number four. So the trees couldn't
Speaker 1: support its weight, So I mean maybe like a sequoia,
Speaker 1: maybe if it climbs, I'm guessing like maybe the other
Speaker 1: thicker trees. Either way, it's a fantastic mental image. So
Speaker 1: April eighteenth, UM, if you go to the Facebook page
Speaker 1: for you know, just do a Facebook search for the
Speaker 1: Philosciraptor Awareness Day, you'll find that they have a number
Speaker 1: of different recommendations for ways to celebrate UM. Some of
Speaker 1: the ones we particularly like. There's one where you to
Speaker 1: read up on the latest info and be prepared to
Speaker 1: hold and PROMPTU seminars on the streets. And I would
Speaker 1: just modify that to UM your break room, if necessary,
Speaker 1: your elevator, or maybe while you're driving, you know, to work,
Speaker 1: you troll out your window and talk to the guy
Speaker 1: next to you stopped at the stop, fling the facts
Speaker 1: that we mentioned here, do a little independent research on
Speaker 1: the net. UM you didn't start, you know, whipping out
Speaker 1: your dinosaur facts on on the train. People will love you.
Speaker 1: There also was another favorite that that Robert and I liked,
Speaker 1: and this one was dress up. Dress up as a
Speaker 1: looser raptor, you know, hold some mock attacks throughout the
Speaker 1: day to to really, especially in the workplace. Yeah, feel
Speaker 1: free to test out that climbing ability thing and tell
Speaker 1: us how that works out for you. And maybe that
Speaker 1: can add to a film film Manning's body of research.
Speaker 1: Perch up in the trees, because really we're unprepared for it,
Speaker 1: like he'd like. Here at work, we do regular like
Speaker 1: fire drills and all. But whence the last time we
Speaker 1: had a losser raptor drill? Never never had it. One
Speaker 1: could just come in here and just have the pick
Speaker 1: of us. It sure could, sure could, which is why
Speaker 1: Alasser Raptor Awareness Day is such a good idea. It's
Speaker 1: an excellent idea. So, uh, if you're gonna if you're
Speaker 1: planning to celebrate in some way, shape or form on
Speaker 1: April eighteenth, um, tell us about it. Did you have it?
Speaker 1: Are you're gonna have a lost Raptor party? Great? Take
Speaker 1: some photos, shoot them our way. We'd love to see him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're gonna dress up as alost Raptor, please be
Speaker 1: send us the photos definitely, and of course you know
Speaker 1: how to do that. Send us any emol at science
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