![]() ![]() And there was more.īy chipping off smaller pieces of the block, Kirkland and his team uncovered bones from a 16-foot-long adult Utahraptor, four juveniles, and a baby that would have been only about three feet long from snout to tail. All the Utahraptor fossils are contained within a large blob of sandstone that appears to have once been what geologists call a "dewatering feature," or in common terms, "quicksand," Kirkland says.Īfter relocating the site, Kirkland found that the hollow bone was actually part of a dinosaur foot. Kirkland was tipped off to the site in 2001 by a geology student who had found what first looked like a human arm bone while scouting eastern Utah's early Cretaceous rocks. Part of the emerging picture is that while young Utahraptor dinosaurs were lightly built and turkey size, Kirkland explains, the adults were heavily muscled, "Arnold Schwarzenegger" versions. "We're really going to have a different view of this guy," Kirkland says. The recent finds include never-before-seen bones that are already changing scientific views of the Utahraptor anatomy. (See video above for more on the excavation effort.) The remains were excavated in a massive effort that has spanned more than a decade, led by Utah state paleontologist James Kirkland. The densely packed dinosaurs (in some places, fossils are stacked three feet thick) may have died at different times as they blundered into quicksand, or perhaps they died together in a social supper gone horribly wrong. If the dinosaurs died together, they might provide some long-sought evidence of group hunting. Scientists have found the remains of six Utahraptor dinosaurs in the rock so far, and more may be trapped there. (See also: "Jurassic World Dinosaurs Stuck in the 1980s, Experts Grumble.") The new fossils may help confirm whether the silver screen got it right. ![]() In the Jurassic Park films, velociraptors were shown cooperating to chase down prey, an idea based at the time on several predators that had been found alongside an herbivore. The fossils might help resolve a long-standing debate about whether these predators hunted in groups. Covered in feathers, with a huge sickle claw on each second toe, Utahraptor looked like a pumped-up version of the Jurassic Park star Velociraptor. A nine-ton block of sandstone that was pulled from a Utah mountain late last year holds the biggest fossil trove ever found of the giant predatory dinosaur known as Utahraptor.
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