Underneath
Trampled Under Foot series: #Utahraptor
The Brigham Young University Museum of Paleontology in Provo, Utah has this great stompy first gen cast.
What an experience to be lying underneath the largest known #dromaeosaurid (the term #paleontologists use for #raptors), though there are a few challengers known from one to a few bones. It is a big, bulky massive beast that might have weighed 1,000+ lbs, exceeding the largest #tigers.
Pound for pound this has to be one of the most terrifyingly efficient predators ever to have walked on land. Not only does it have a massive killing claw on each foot, but each strong long arm ends in three meat hooks, the other toe claws were sharp, and it has quite the powerful skull for a “raptor”.
#Seriema use killing claws to pin prey down, they don’t slash or stab with them, we suspect small “raptors” did the same. Underneath that big foot it sure felt like the same thing was happening, it would easily pin me down, letting those received hand claws and sharp teeth rip me to shreds!
Utahraptor is known from mostly disarticulated bones from numerous size classes. The famous Utahraptor megablock contains babies and an adult while material collected from two quarries very close to one another have adults of various sizes. This disarticulation means that every skeleton of Utahraptor you see is a best guess. Cooler still? A new juvenile description is going to hit soon!!!
This particular mount has error in common with many. Those wicked hand claws are actually toe claws! We now know the hand clause are substantially smaller and strongly recurved. That wasn’t known in the original description. It’s hard to argue how impressive looking this Freddy Krueger style hand looks even with the error!
We know it has the traditional tail that acts as a stabilizer but those huge legs suggest this is not an animal that runs fast for long periods of time. It was likely an ambush predator, surprising animals as they drank at the watering hole by emerging from the woods nearby or possibly laying in wait along a trail, maybe camouflaged with the background.
#FossilCrates #theropodThursday